Gurgaon Management Association

12/01/2026

31/12/2022

WISH ALL MANAGERS VERY HAPPY NEW YEAR 2023

31/12/2022

24/01/2022

“HOW TO BE MORE PRODUCTIVE.
If you want to become more productive, you should develop an array of specific habits.
First
- Plan your work based on your top priorities, and then act.
- Revise your daily schedule the night before based on priorities.
- Send out a detailed agenda to all participants in advance of a meeting.
- When embarking on large projects, sketch out preliminary outcome.
- Before reading lengthy material, identify your specific purpose for it.
- Before writing anything, compose an outline with a logical objective
- develop effective techniques for managing overload of information.
- Leave time in daily schedule to deal with junplanned events.
- Check your devices once per hour, instead of every few minutes.
- Skip over the messages by looking at the subject and sender.
- Break large projects into pieces and complete each piece.
- Delegate to others tasks that do not need your top priorities.
- Understand the needs of your colleagues
- Limit the time for any meeting to 90 minutes at most.
- Respond right away to messages from people who are important
- To capture an audience’s attention, speak from a few notes, rather than reading a prepared text.
- Establish clear objectives and success metrics for any team efforts.
- To improve your team’s performance, institute procedures to prevent future mistakes, instead of playing the blame game.”

* Survey Report

23/01/2022

“Women score particularly high when it came to running effective meetings —

women were more likely than men to send out an agenda in advance, keep meetings to less than 90 minutes, and finish meetings with an agreement on next steps.

Women were also more likely to say that they prepared their calendars the night before and responded promptly to important emails.”

“By contrast, men do particularly well when it came to coping with high message volume — not looking at their emails too frequently and skipping over the messages of low value.

Men are also more likely than women to report keeping free slots in their daily schedules, getting quickly to the final product, and composing outlines before writing memos.”

*Survey Report

23/01/2022

“Women score particularly high when it came to running effective meetings —
women are more likely than men to send out an agenda in advance, keep meetings to less than 90 minutes, and finish meetings with an agreement on next steps.

Women are also more likely to say that they prepared their calendars the night before and responded promptly to important emails.”

“By contrast, men do particularly well when it came to coping with high message volume — not looking at their emails too frequently and skipping over the messages of low value.

Men are also more likely than women to report keeping free slots in their daily schedules, getting quickly to the final product, and composing outlines before writing memos”

*Survey Report.

11/01/2022

Applications by MSMEs cross whopping 1-lakh mark; only 12% disposed: Govt data
Credit and Finance for MSMEs: Even as the government has been urging buyers to pay MSMEs on time, Former MoS Finance Anurag Singh Thakur had informed Lok Sabha in February last year that “the Central Government cannot issue any directions to, or force, State Governments or State PSEs to pay the dues.”

25/11/2021

The choice of financing method that countries make exerts a powerful influence on how their health systems evolve. In this context, the question which receives most attention relates to the extent to which countries choose to direct tax resources towards healthcare instead of other welfare tools. However, another perhaps equally important question about healthcare financing, how best to utilise pooled funds for healthcare, receives much less attention. Answering this question involves thinking about how to pay providers for the services they offer. These issues have enormous path-dependence and can set health systems on irreversible pathways that either gradually converge to the best possible health and financing outcomes or diverge further away from them.



One way health systems purchase healthcare is through an indemnity insurance approach in which the patient is compensated for the actual financial costs associated with healthcare, with the insurer/payer playing no role in the provision of services. This allows the patient to direct and control her own healthcare, i.e., choose the level of care; approach healthcare providers of her choice; opt for any service from a range of reimbursable services within an upper limit. This structure has a simplicity in its design and automatically allows for competitive forces to operate. It limits the involvement of the payer (which could be a government trust or a private insurer) to simply paying for whatever care the patient has availed, making such an approach easy to develop and implement. As a result, being unaware of its long-term implications, many national health systems choose this path. For instance, in the United States, the government-led Medicare and Medicaid established in 1965 primarily took an indemnity insurance form. PMJAY has adopted a similar design, following the example set by the Indian commercial insurance industry. By the late 1980s, indemnity insurance accounted for nearly three-fourths of all private health plans in the United States.



The indemnity insurance approach relies on fee-for-service (FFS) contracts and pays providers for each service that they provide. Such an approach creates an incentive for both patients and providers to increase the total quantum of care instead of focusing on keeping patients healthy. FFS fuelled healthcare cost inflation has proven to be the bane of many health systems. For example, in the United States (US), total healthcare spending has risen from 5% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 1960 to nearly 17% in 2018, led principally by the benchmarks set by Medicare and Medicaid. Germany, Japan, Switzerland, and Taiwan are some of the other countries which have taken this route and are facing similar challenges. Changing course is proving to be hard for them because the system has gotten accustomed to this way of operating.

FFS payments reflect a deeper design flaw in indemnity insurance, the separation of financial protection from healthcare andhealth outcomes. Because of this separation, indemnity insurance neither offers any healthcare provision related guarantees nor provides any assurance on the nature of population-level health outcomes for its members. This approach, in effect, offers half a car (financing), with consumers left alone to seek out for themselves the other half (health care) and to make it work for themselves.



Another approach taken by health systems, designed to address some of these problems, is to integrate financial protection and healthcare functions and have providers directly bear the risks associated with the poor health of their covered populations. These are referred to as Managed Care models. In these models, insurers/payers transfer a fixed per-person amount to the owner/manager of a well-integrated network of providers, with no additional charges being paid for any care provided to their members during the coverage period. Such an approach aligns the incentives of payers and providers and forces a shift in providers’ focus from curing illness to keeping members healthy. With the integration of financial protection and healthcare, consumers now have access to a complete product and the onus of searching for healthcare no longer falls on them. For a member of such a scheme, this resembles a free care environment at the point of healthcare delivery. However, the downsides with this approach are that providers, having received payments ahead of time, could deny or provide inadequate care and that consumers may fret at being “forced” to visit the same provider.



Within the public sector in India, the current government-department run health systems (and ESIS) are already very similar in design to Managed Care. However, they suffer seriously from problems of inefficiency and under-provision of care in the absence of any serious accountability measures. Countries such as the United Kingdom and Thailand have shown that in public-sector owned health systems, the integration of care and financial protection must also come with a robust purchaser-provider split for this very reason. These countries have entirely redesigned their health systems to give consumers a measure of choice while also ensuring that even the government-owned providers are exposed to financial risk linked to the health outcomes of covered populations.



As health systems evolve, more countries, recognising the limitations of the indemnity insurance approach, have been moving towards such integrated models of care and insurance, including Colombia, Israel, Thailand, and even the US. Despite these global trends, in India, within the private sector, current regulations, unfortunately, do not allow for such integration for commercial insurance. The government, through PMJAY, is also choosing to offer indemnity insurance and attempting to move away from government-provided integrated care. Such integration is seen as restricting competitive forces and choice instead of as moving competition to another level- now between multiple Managed Care providers instead of separately between insurers and providers. This continues to give customers a choice but now between more complete offerings. The consequences of indemnity insurance led approaches such as rapidly rising healthcare costs, over-provision of surgical procedures, and poor overall health outcomes are already becoming very visible even within India’s tiny health insurance industry and will further be reinforced as schemes like PMJAY grow in size.

09/11/2021

It’s normal to underperform on occasion. After all, everyone has an off quarter — or even an off year — from time to time. But don’t just sit back and wait for that painful performance review. You need to have a conversation with your manager sooner rather than later. How should you position the news? How can you maintain your reputation while being honest? And what sort of explanation — if any — should you give?

What the Experts Say
When you’re having a bad time at work — your big project isn’t coming together as planned or you’re missing your sales targets by a wide margin — talking to your manager may be the last thing you want to do. But you shouldn’t shy away from the topic, according to Jean-François Manzoni, president of IMD and the author of The Set-Up to Fail Syndrome. “You don’t want your boss annoyed at you and wondering” about what’s going on, he says. It can be a tricky conversation, however. Dick Grote, a management consultant and author of How to Be Good at Performance Appraisals, says you must do two things to preserve your professional standing. First, “come clean” about your underperformance “before your boss has had a chance to discover it another way,” and second, focus on “solutions, not excuses.” Here are some ways to think about — and prepare for — the discussion.

Reflect
The first step in owning up to your underperformance is determining the source of the problem. For starters, says Manzoni, you need to consider “whether you really are underperforming.” Often our efforts don’t “immediately translate into desired organizational outcomes.” In other words, “you could be doing all the right things but, unfortunately, it’s taking a long time for it to lead to positive results.” Look at what both the “leading and lagging indicators” tell you. If both point to underperformance, Grote recommends a period of “soul-searching.” You need to figure out if this “is a one-off situation or more of a trend.” If the missed goals are an anomaly or due to extenuating circumstances that’s one thing, but if they’re indicative of a pattern, they ought to “trigger some career thinking,” he says. This bad stretch might mean that “you are really struggling” and perhaps in “need of more development,” he says. It could also mean that “you’re not in the right job.” (More on this below.)

Prepare
Next, says Grote, you need to think about your underperformance from your boss’s perspective. Ask yourself, how will my boss react to this news? “If you have a boss who has a propensity to blow up, you need to prepare for that,” he says. “You don’t want to go in naïvely thinking ‘I hope my boss is in a good mood today.’” Think especially about how you will explain what happened, says Manzoni. It could be, for instance, that you “took a risk” that didn’t pan out as you’d hoped. “You thought the market would turn. The odds were good. It was a reasonable bet, but it didn’t work out.” Or maybe you’re dealing with an outside distraction — an ailing parent, for instance — that’s the reason you’re “not at your best.” A “reasonable boss will be able to understand that,” he says.

Own up
When the time comes to talk to your boss, be straightforward and direct, says Grote. “Start the conversation by saying, ‘I have some bad news for you.’” Doing so “rivets the person’s attention” and ensures “no mixed messages.” Second, “appropriately express contrition and remorse.” A sincere “I’m sorry” goes a long way. Finally, segue into how you can make it right. “Focus on correction, not blaming, shaming, or fault finding,” he says. It’s natural to get defensive in these situations but do your best to avoid listing excuses. In difficult discussions like these, it’s natural to want to end on an optimistic note. And yet, “there are some conversations that won’t have a positive outcome,” says Grote. For this reason, he advises that you “ought not give too much thought about how to put a happy sheen on things.” The bottom line: “Don’t try to circumnavigate the problem.”

Ask for advice
As you offer ideas and suggestions on how to improve the situation, it’s worthwhile to ask your manager for guidance, according to Manzoni. “Asking your boss for advice shows that you respect your boss’s intellect and that you trust your boss,” he says. Asking for assistance is “flattering to your boss,” but you shouldn’t be obsequious, adds Grote. He suggests saying something like, “Here’s what occurs to me to make sure this doesn’t happen again. Does this make sense to you? How else would you handle this?”

Think long term
If your underperformance is representative of a bigger problem, you need to address it. This will be a separate and “longer conversation” with your manager, says Grote. He recommends saying, “When we get over this hump, I’d like to schedule a time to talk with you about the implications of this and what I can do in the long term to make sure it never happens again.” Possible interventions include more frequent check-ins or some sort of training to boost your skills. Your underperformance might also be a sign that you need to find a position at your company that’s better suited to your strengths. In this case, Manzoni advises talking to your boss about a possible move. “Say, ‘I appreciate your trust and support. I’m trying hard, but I am still struggling,’” he says. If you “establish your good intentions,” hopefully your boss can support you in identifying and transitioning to a more suitable role.

Principles to Remember

Do:

Try to figure out the source of the problem by engaging in some soul-searching.
Offer ideas on how to improve the situation and ask your manager for guidance.
Resist any overly optimistic impulses. It’s not worth trying to put a positive spin on your underperformance.
Don’t:

Wing it. Prepare what you’ll say and think about how your boss will react.
Mince words. Begin the conversation with “I have some bad news for you.” This ensures no mixed messages.
Ignore red flags. If you’re struggling, it might mean that you need more frequent check-ins with your boss, more development, or a job change.
Case Study #1: Admit your mistakes and generate ideas on how to improve
Matt Lee works at ResumeGo, a resume writing service company. Matt joined the company in 2016 and has consistently been a strong performer — until he recently found himself in an unexpected slump. The company offers money back guarantees for clients who are not satisfied with its products, and a little over 10% of his clients had asked for refunds. “This was the highest percentage of unsatisfied clients I’d ever had,” he says. “I had to explain it to my boss.”

First, he thought about the source of the problem. “A lot of the issues stemmed from a lack of communication with my clients,” he says.

In looking back, he noted that several of his clients said they didn’t like the formatting of their new resume. “I realized that if I had simply showed them the format I was going to use beforehand and explained the reasoning behind why I chose that format, this [trouble] could have been avoided.”

Second, he thought about how his boss would react and prepared what he was going to say. “More refunds requested by customers ultimately means less revenue for the company, so I was definitely nervous [to talk to my boss],” he says.

Matt began the conversation by “openly acknowledging” that there was a problem. “I wanted my supervisor to know that I was very serious about finding ways to improve my performance.”

Matt says he didn’t want to come across as defensive in trying to justify his poor performance, but he also wanted to make sure his manager understood his perspective. “While I acknowledged that there were things I could have done differently, I also defended the specific decisions I made with regards to how I wrote each resume,” he says. “I’m the expert here when it comes to how to write and design resumes, so I can’t simply alter my standards every time a client disagrees with how I approach their resume.”

Ultimately his boss agreed with many of Matt’s points. “It’s important with these kinds of issues to stand your ground and justify your actions — especially when you are confident in the decisions that you made.”

Matt ended the conversation with ideas on how to improve. “I had a list of things I could do that would potentially increase my customer satisfaction numbers,” he says. “These mainly revolved around communicating with clients more extensively at the very start before making certain decisions about their resumes.”

Since the conversation with his boss, Matt has worked on his communication with clients, and his customer satisfaction numbers have improved as a result. “I think that particular quarter was likely just an outlier,” he says.

Case Study #2: Work together with your boss to improve your performance
Each January, Tracy Nguyen, an online media relations associate at Tiny Pulse, a Seattle-based startup that provides technology to assess employee morale, sits down with her boss to outline her goals for the coming year.

“This way I am always able to track my performance,” she says. “As many PR practitioners, my main responsibility is managing brand reputation through generating positive media coverage. Last May, I did not meet a monthly goal of securing seven unique instances of press coverage.”

She reflected on the reasons for her missed goal. “I sat back and looked at all of my approach methods to see what was working, what was not, and what needed to be improved.”

She figured out that her long pitch needed work. “It was not getting the attention of my target journalists,” she says.

Second, she did a lot of research on how to improve her pitching. She also sought advice from her peers on how she could get better at it. Then she prepared what she would say to her boss.

When it came time for the meeting, she told her boss that she missed her objective. She apologized for falling below expectations but then launched into a discussion of what she would do to improve. “I wanted to bring this to my manager’s attention instead of waiting to be asked about what holds me back,” she says. “I was determined to lead with possible solutions.”

Tracy also asked her boss for suggestions on how to enhance her pitching skills. “Together, we came up with a solution to try an 80/20 method, which means spending 80% of the time targeting middle-tier publications and 20% on top-tier ones,” she says.

To measure the effectiveness of this method, they compared the impact of the new practice to the previous one. “As a result, two months later I exceeded my goal,” she says.