Keep Engaging Your Will Power And The Means.
An Article By Vijay Michihito Batra
Ms. Ruth Porat is a celebrity among the finance professionals. She was the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) at Morgan Stanley, a leading investment bank in America, she played a crucial role in advising the American government in handling the financial crisis of 2008. In the year 2015 she moved to Google as its CFO and continues to guide not only Google but all the related entities as she now is the CFO for Alphabet. She is sixty-three years old, and it is encouraging how when many are retiring, she moved to a new and a progressive industry.
In many forums she shares her learning and insights which she gained during the 2008 financial crisis. Please click the link below to watch her interview.
She shares that when facing challenges, often many commit the mistake of postponing making the tough decisions and taking appropriate action to overcome the challenges. She encourages us to exercise our willpower to make the changes while the means are still there before it becomes too late and the means cease to exist.
अब पछताए होत क्या जब चिड़िया चुग गई खेत is the famous Indian proverb, “what is the point of regretting when you did nothing while the birds were destroying your crops…”
I have witnessed in many cases where businesses who could have solved their financial issues of over leveraging by consolidating their assets and paying off the loans, but because of not engaging their will power to take tough corrective actions, the wrath of the compounding of interests on the borrowed loans became a tsunami, washing away all the asset the business had at one time, leaving the entity insolvent.
Ms. Porat mentioned that often she asks the candidates she interviews to discuss their battle scars, which is to share with her their painful experiences of correcting the mistakes of the past, instead of ignoring them and the lessons that they have learnt in the process.
She alludes to the fact that those of us who indulge in false hopes end up in hopeless situation. She emphasizes that both the individuals and the organizations should pay keen attention to the health indicators and the culture should be open and transparent where the dashboard of indicators are visible and not hidden. She mentioned that the financial institutions like the Lehman brothers which went bankrupt and many others who were rescued from the brink of bankruptcy was because they had stopped paying attention to their dashboards, and were hiding it. She uses an anomaly that many of these institutions were like driving an automobile at high speed with muddy windshields, which results in fatal accidents.
Let’s keep watching the indicators which tell us the current state and direction of our lives, and the moment we see that certain indicators showing adverse signals, we should engage our will power to take the corrective action, thereby limiting the damage…by doing this we may experience the scars, but the scars will be a testimony of taking timely corrective actions, and by practicing this we will promote and perpetuate a culture of transparency and sustaining the clarity to continue functioning effectively.