Enigma Solution

Failing to plan, is planning to fail. This article is a sequel to an earlier article  Sir, we might have a problem As owner and head of my own manufacturing organisation, initially I had to face numerous embarrassments because of failed commitments to customers. Commitments made by me or members of my team. We all face this problem. Colleagues, subordinates or even we ourselves fail to deliver on commitments. Monday comes and goes and then another Monday passes by as we fail to deliver. We land up with muck on our face and our reputations. We lose both our money and our sanity along with our reputation. Failure often occurs due to bad or no planning. Here is an approach that I adopted and it worked very well. It seems that one of the most difficult thing for most people is to sit down, think, focus and plan out things in detail. Thinking, analysing, planning are the bane of most humans because, it is intellectually demanding and can be exhausting. Rarel...

In 1993, in pursuit of a large and significant business contract, we travelled to Detroit, to meet with a 5 member team at Visteon. It was a division of Ford motor Company.  Discussions concluded favourably. Both parties were in agreement on everything, except the time frame for development and delivery of samples. They demanded that we deliver in 8 weeks, and we insisted on 14 weeks. It looked like the deal was going to fall through. My export manager took me aside, "Sir we can't afford to lose this order. Please, I implore you to agree to whatever they demand and bag the order. We can always make some excuse and come back later and and ask for a time extension." I knew we could do it in 8 weeks, but past experience taught me that developments projects tend to encounter delays and one should always provide for the unexpected, and in India the variables were simply too many. I decided to shave the safety margin from 6 weeks to 3 weeks.  I said, ...