top of page

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)

White Hat

Few umpires are remembered as warmly as the players they judged. Harold ‘Dickie’ Bird, who has aged 92, was the rare exception who commanded universal respect. His name became shorthand for fairness; his white cap was a symbol of cricket’s vanished age of trust. In a sport today mediated by slow-motion replays and predictive graphics, Bird relied only on his eye, his nerve and a mischievous Yorkshire wit.


Born in the English town of Barnsley, South Yorkshire in 1933, Bird was once a promising opening batsman until a knee injury curtailed his career. County obscurity might have beckoned, but he found his true calling in umpiring. Making his first-class debut in 1970, he quickly rose to international ranks. By the time he retired in 1996, he had stood in 66 Tests and 69 one-day internationals, a record that spanned cricket’s transformation from stately pastime to global entertainment.


Bird’s autobiography, published in 1997, revealed both his anxieties and his eccentricities. He confessed to sleepless nights before big matches and fretting over whether he would get every decision right. Yet on the field, he was the very epitome of calm.


Importantly, batsmen and bowlers alike believed him. In the pre-technological decision review system (DRS) era, Dickie Bird’s raised finger was beyond appeal.


Bird’s nervous tics like tugging his cap, hopping away from the popping crease, shooing bowlers like an impatient schoolmaster became part of the spectacle. At Lord’s, when a pigeon repeatedly interrupted play, Bird theatrically paused proceedings until the bird had fluttered away. He later quipped that it was the only time he gave a bird not out. The great Viv Richards had once warned him that if he gave him lbw, he would never stand again. Bird promptly raised his finger; Richards left with a smile. In a World Cup match at Headingley in 1975, Bird quietly reminded an overzealous bowler that the crowd had come to watch cricket, not him shouting for lbw every ball. His authority came not from bluster, but from the unshakable sense that he was incorruptibly fair.


Bird’s Yorkshire plain-speaking, laced with gentle humour, reassured even those on the wrong side of his decisions.


Bird presided over cricket’s great theatres. He was in charge at Eden Gardens in 1980, when India and Pakistan met before a hundred thousand restive fans. He stood through West Indies’ dominance of the 1980s, when fast bowlers terrorised batsmen and appeals echoed like artillery. He oversaw matches at Old Trafford and Headingley where tempers frayed but order was preserved.


When he retired in 1996, he walked away with perfect timing. The game was already experimenting with third umpires and replay technology. Bird belonged to an era where authority depended not on cameras or algorithms, but on integrity.


His career was not simply about decisions given correctly or wrongly. It was about upholding the game’s ‘spirit’ - that elusive quality which administrators so often invoke but which he lived daily.

Comments

bottom of page