Kishore Borra

Mr Kishore Borra holds dual Masters in Physics and Energy Systems with gold medals. He is a father of two boys, husband to a superwoman. A lecturer turned software Engineer, now Managing Director of a successful and fast-growing IT company. He is also a Leadership Evangelist and a certified member of John Maxwell Team (JMT) of Coaches, Speakers and Trainers.

The Ant Philosophy

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We tend to look for big people for lessons on how to get better. We are always keen to learn the secrets of success. But we forget that sometimes the biggest life lessons come from the smallest things around.  Take ants, for instance. Jim Rohn – the great motivational guru – developed what he called the ‘Ant Philosophy.’ He identified four key lessons from ants’ behavior that can help us lead better lives & improve daily.

# Be an Ant

One of the core values of EnergyTech Global is “Be an Ant.” Like ants, we never stop; we always go the extra mile to show an “all-you-can” attitude.

Ants never quit. (Never give up)

If ants are headed somewhere and try to stop them, they’ll look for another way. They’ll climb over, they’ll climb under, and they’ll climb around. They keep looking for another way. No matter how many times you squish their little ant hill, they build it again. No matter how many times you flick them away from your food, they come back. Ants can lift 20x their body weight.

Ants think winter all summer. (Look ahead)

You can’t be so naive as to think summer will last forever. So ants are gathering their winter food in the middle of summer.

Ants think summer all winter. (Stay Positive)

During winter, ants remind themselves, “This won’t last long; we’ll soon be out of here.” If it turns cold again, they’ll dive back down, but they come out the first warm day.

Every day, the objective is to become a better version of ourselves this year than last year.

Ants think, “all-you-possibly-can.” (Do all you can)

How much will an ant gather during the summer to prepare for the winter? All he possibly can. They don’t gather a certain amount and then head back to the hole to hang out. If an ant can do more, it does.

Ants thrive at teamwork (Experience the collective power)

Ants have two stomachs, one to hold food for themselves and one to share with others. How cool is that? If a worker ant has found a good food source, it leaves a scent trail to find the other ants in the colony. A team is not a group of people who work together. A team is a group of people who trust and help each other.

They do whatever needs to be done to get the job done! Just like the ants at EnergyTech Global!

Before you go…

If you enjoyed this post, you would love my book, “Don’t Coast: Accelerate Your Personal and Professional Growth.”

Grab your copy from the below links:

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Leaders & Remote Work

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As a leader what are you expected to do to establish good remote work culture within your teams & organization? 

It seems there are more than 10,000 books available on Amazon on remote working. No wonder why remote working is considered difficult. Here are some of the things leaders can do to create a good remote work culture.

1/ Ensure that your staff has the right infrastructure, which includes but is not limited to laptops, network connectivity, and software to dial into audio and video conference calls, remote access to everything that they need to carry out their day to day work, etc.
2/ Develop routines and help teams to have a disciplined way of managing the day. For example, in our company, all teams will have a brief stand-up meeting at the beginning of the day and end their day with an evening daily scrum meeting. Have a rhythm. Things will be much more fluid in remote working, and managers should trust that employees will do their best to get their work done.
3/ Make sure that team members constantly feel like they know what’s going on. You need to communicate what’s happening at the organizational level because they feel like they’ve been extracted from the mothership when working from home. They wonder what’s happening at the company, with clients, and with common objectives. The communication around those is extremely important. So you should email more, share more.
4/ Ensure that no staff member will feel like they have less access to you than others. At home, people’s imaginations begin to go wild. So you have to be available to everyone equally. Finally, when you run your group meetings, aim for inclusion, and balance the airtime, everyone feels seen and heard.
5/ You need to be much more visible right now — through video conferencing or taped recordings — to give people confidence, calm them down, and be healers- or hope-givers-in-chief.

#leadtip #remotework #HBR #TsedalNeeley

The danger of being goal focused

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In the Bible, Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan in the Gospel of Luke. It is about a traveler who is stripped of clothing, beaten, and left half dead alongside the road. First, a Jewish priest and then a Levite comes by, but both avoid the man. Finally, a Samaritan happens upon the traveler. Samaritans and Jews despised each other, but the Samaritan helps the injured man. Jesus is described as telling the parable in response to a lawyer’s question, “And who is my neighbor?”. The conclusion is that the neighbor figure in the parable is the one who shows mercy to the injured fellow man—that is, the Samaritan.

 

Inspired by the Good Samaritan parable, Princeton University Theological school experimented in the 1970s. They divided students into various groups and given them the assignment to prepare a sermon on the Good Samaritan. Once the assignment was completed, the students were told to go to different campus building rooms to present their sermons.  

On the day of the presentations, all the groups were asked to meet in one big hall. For the first group, the professor gave them the details of their presentation room and asked them to deliver the presentation to the audience waiting in the room. For the next few batches, they did something interesting; they apologized and told them that they are running late, and each batch was expected to start the presentation a few minutes ago. They asked them to hurry and told them that it shouldn’t take long to reach the room, and hence the remaining batches of students rushed to their respective rooms. 

On the way, they planted an actor on the campus who is just like the wounded traveler in the Good Samaritan parable. The actor was lying on the ground, hurt and moaning in pain, screaming and crying out. An interesting thing was observed. Every batch went right past the person in need to give the presentation on helping a person in need without paying attention to the person in need. Some of them stepped over the person in pain and went running towards their allocated presentation rooms. 

It is what I call the danger of being goal focussed and goal-oriented.  All the students had a goal to deliver a presentation as per their allocated schedule. Therefore they are so one-sided and narrow-minded and so focused on their goal that they missed the bigger picture and perspective of what they should have been doing in the first place. It is often a danger of goals.

Call to action …

Therefore think about focussing more on our systems than on our goals. 

  • If you are a writer, your goal is to write a book. Your system is the writing schedule that you follow each week.
  • If you’re a coach, your goal might be to win a championship. Your system is what your team does at practice every day. 
  • If you’re a musician, your goal might be to play a new piece. Your system is how often you practice and your method for receiving feedback from your instructor.
  • If you’re a software engineer, your goal might be to spend 30 minutes every day to keep you up to date and master the technologies that you are associated with.
  • If you’re a personal development trainer, your goal is every day to read, file, think, and write for your future presentations.

I am not advocating that goals are useless. I am simply saying that goals are about the results we want to achieve, and systems are about the processes that lead us to those results. 

Goals are certainly good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress. 

Before you go…

If you enjoyed this post, you would love my new book, “Don’t Coast: Accelerate Your Personal and Professional Growth.”

Grab your copy from the below links:

Please subscribe to my social media channels:

We are much more powerful than we think we are !!

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During this weekend, I have come across a great insight illustrated through a simple story. I highly recommend you to read this story till the end and understand that our real strength lies not in independence but in interdependence, and seeking support is not a sign of weakness, you will make your life easy at work no matter how difficult your task is.
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A young boy and his father were walking along a forest path. At some point, they came across a large tree branch on the ground in front of them.

The boy asked his father, “If I try, do you think I could move that branch?” His father replied, “I am sure you can if you use all your strength.”

The boy tried his best to lift or push the branch, but he was not strong enough, and he couldn’t move it.

He said, with disappointment, “You were wrong, dad. I can’t move it.”

“Try again,” replied his father.

Again, the boy tried hard to push the branch. He struggled, but it did not move.

“Dad, I cannot do it,” said the boy.

Finally, his father said, “Son, I advised you to use all your strength. You didn’t. You didn’t ask for my help.”

Team Work

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Some reflections on this story…

We haven’t used all our strength until we have recognized, appreciated, and galvanized the strength and support of those who love and surround us and those who care about our purpose.

  Our real strength lies not in independence but in interdependence. No individual person has all the strengths, resources, and stamina required for the complete blossoming of their vision. That requires the inspired collaboration of many like-hearted beings.

  To ask for help and support when we need it is not a sign of weakness; it is a sign of wisdom. It is a call for the greater strength that lives in our togetherness.

When by yourself,

You cannot manage,

To complete any task,

Use ALL your strength,

Turn around and ASK!

The Power of Process & Culture

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Mumbai Dabbawala

As a leader, I am always a process improvement enthusiast. I strongly believe that leaders must continuously look for ways and means to improve the organization’s processes. Leadership commitment and support are critical for successful process improvement initiatives in any company. I also strongly believe that organizations don’t need extraordinary talent to achieve extraordinary performance when the right system is in place.

For some time, I am researching a quintessential and ingenious Indian jugaad called Mumbai Dabbawalas and the leadership lessons that one can learn from them for one of the chapter in my next book. The wonders created by a semiliterate 130-year old Indian team of 5000 members called Mumbai Dabbawalas, backed up by a well-defined process and work culture of service excellence mindset, is mind-boggling and fascinates the world.

With the popularity of mobile apps such as Swiggy, Zomato and Uber Eats, many cities in India and the rest of the world now started enjoying the privilege of ordering specially prepared food being delivered either directly at their home doorstep or the work desk.  But dabbawalas have been doing it for 130 years – and the newcomers have much to learn. Also, the new-age digital rivals couldn’t match the low-cost and high-performance service provided by dabbawalas. By far, the Mumbai Dabbawala Association is one of the best case studies of Six Sigma and ISO 9001:2000 certified, process-driven, error-free, low-investment business from India.

Their mastery of supply chain management in the world’s 4th most populous city with a jaw-dropping accuracy level without using technology and the complexity of the process by which 200,000 plus tiffin boxes (800000 transactions) were sorted, transported, delivered, and returned each day by people who were mostly illiterate in a white outfit and traditional Gandhi cap with a zero percent error rate are mind-blowing. I am looking forward to sharing my leadership learnings from this team with you all soon.