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By:

Rashmi Kulkarni

23 March 2025 at 2:58:52 pm

Making a New Normal Feel Obvious

Normal is not what’s written. Normal is what repeats. The temple bell rings at the same time every day. Not everyone prays. Not everyone even walks in. Some people don’t care at all. And yet when that bell rings, the whole neighborhood syncs. Shops open, chores move, calls pause. The bell doesn’t convince anyone. It simply creates rhythm. That’s how “normal” is built inside a legacy MSME too. Not by speeches. By repetition. Quick recap: Week 1: You inherited an equilibrium. Week 2: People...

Making a New Normal Feel Obvious

Normal is not what’s written. Normal is what repeats. The temple bell rings at the same time every day. Not everyone prays. Not everyone even walks in. Some people don’t care at all. And yet when that bell rings, the whole neighborhood syncs. Shops open, chores move, calls pause. The bell doesn’t convince anyone. It simply creates rhythm. That’s how “normal” is built inside a legacy MSME too. Not by speeches. By repetition. Quick recap: Week 1: You inherited an equilibrium. Week 2: People resist loss, not improvement. Week 3: Status quo wins when your new way is harder. Week 4 is the next problem: even when your idea is good and even when it is easy, it can still fail because people don’t move together. One team starts. Another team waits. One person follows. Another person quietly returns to the old way. So, the old normal comes back … not because your idea was wrong, but because your new normal never became normal. Which Seat? • Inherited : people expect direction, but they only shift when they see what you consistently protect. • Hired : people wait for proof “Is this just a corporate habit you’ll drop in a month?” • Promoted : people watch whether you stay consistent under pressure. Now here’s the useful idea from Thomas Schelling: a “focal point”. Don’t worry about the term. In simple words, it means: you don’t need everyone convinced. You need one clear anchor that everyone can align around. In a legacy MSME, that anchor is rarely a policy document. It’s not a rollout email. It’s a ritual. Why Rituals? These firms run on informal rules, relationships, memory, and quick calls. That flexibility keeps work moving, but it also makes change socially risky. Even supportive people hesitate because they’re thinking: “If I follow this and others don’t, I’ll look foolish.” “If I share real numbers, will I become the target?” “If I push this new flow, will I upset a senior person?” “If I do it properly, will it slow me down?” When people feel that risk, they wait. And waiting is how the status quo survives. A focal ritual breaks the waiting. It sends one clean signal: “This is real. This is how we work now.” Focal Ritual It’s a short, fixed review that repeats with the same format. For example: a weekly scoreboard review (15 minutes) a daily dispatch huddle (10 minutes) a fixed purchase-approval window (cutoff + queue) The meeting isn’t the magic. The repetition is. When it repeats without drama, it becomes believable. When it becomes believable, people start syncing to it, even the ones who were unsure. Common Mistake New leaders enter with energy and pressure: “show impact”. So they try to fix reporting, planning, quality, procurement, digitization … everything. The result is predictable. People don’t know what is truly “must follow”. So everything becomes “optional”. They do a little of each, and nothing holds. If you want change to stick, pick one focal ritual and make it sacred. Not forever. Just long enough for the bell to become the bell. Field Test Step 1 : Pick one pain area that creates daily chaos: delayed dispatch, pending purchase approvals, rework, overdue collections. Step 2 : Set the ritual: Fixed time, fixed duration (15 minutes). One scoreboard (one page, one screen). Same three questions every time: – What moved since last time? – What is stuck and why? – What decision is needed today? One owner who closes the loop (decisions + due dates). Step 3 : Protect it for 8 weeks. Don’t cancel because you’re busy. Don’t skip because a VIP came. Don’t “postpone once” because someone complained. I’ve seen a simple weekly dispatch scoreboard die this exact way. Week one was sharp. By week three, it got pushed “just this once” because someone had a client visit. Week four, it moved again for “urgent work”. After that, nobody took it seriously. The old follow-ups returned, and the leader was back to chasing people daily. The first casual cancellation tells the system: “This was a phase”. And the old normal returns fast. One Warning Don’t turn the ritual into policing. If it becomes humiliation, people will hide information. If it becomes shouting, people will stop speaking. If it becomes a lecture, people will mentally leave. Keep it calm. Keep it consistent. Keep it useful. A bell doesn’t shout. It just rings. (The author is Co-founder at PPS Consulting and a business operations advisor. She helps businesses across sectors and geographies improve execution through global best practices. She could be reached at rashmi@ppsconsulting.biz)

Chanakya Redux

Nitish Kumar’s tenth ascent to power marks not just personal endurance but the remaking of Bihar’s political economy.


Patna: Chief Minister Nitish Kumar embodies the peculiar mix of durability and opportunism that defines much of Indian state politics. Admirers cast him as a ‘modern Chanakya’ while critics deride him as a relentless shape-shifter. Both readings miss the more telling point which is that Kumar has become the architect of Bihar’s long, hesitant transition from a basket case to a state with the rudiments of order and growth.


A product of the JP Movement of the 1970s, he lost more elections than he won in his early years, but outlasted most of his contemporaries. His break with Lalu Prasad Yadav in the mid-1990s and his partnership with George Fernandes and the BJP gave him his first coherent platform. When he first took charge in 2005, Bihar was a byword for criminality, broken roads, and a state apparatus hollowed out by patronage. His initial years in office, unusually stable by Bihar’s standards, brought sharp improvements in law and order, modest economic recovery, and a technocratic seriousness rare in the state’s politics.


His social policies were equally calculated. His wager on women through reservation in panchayats, bicycle schemes for schoolgirls and the strengthening of self-help groups shifted Bihar’s political arithmetic. Prohibition, whatever its distortions, cemented his grip on female voters. Incremental attention to extremely backward classes, Dalits and Mahadalits helped him build a coalition broad enough to survive repeated realignments.


Those realignments have been many. He has aligned with the BJP, broken with it, allied with the RJD, abandoned it, and returned to the BJP fold more than once. Ideology has rarely been the driving force; staying in office to push what he sees as necessary administrative reform has. The 2025 mandate, delivered under the NDA banner, underscores his continuing relevance in a state still marked by demographic pressure, chronic underinvestment and fragile institutions.


His achievement is neither mythical nor miraculous. The gap between Bihar and faster-growing states remains wide; the state’s dependence on central transfers is acute; and outmigration continues unabated. Yet the Bihar he governs today is not the one he inherited. Schools function more predictably, roads have multiplied, and welfare delivery, though still patchy, is less capricious.


A tenth term offers a moment to judge his legacy less by hagiography than by hard outcomes. If he is to earn the Chanakyan comparisons, it will be by using his unmatched longevity to push Bihar beyond incrementalism and towards serious investment, institutional strengthening and a labour market that does not send its young to distant cities in search of dignity.

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