PERSONAL SPECIAL ......Three ways to be more self-aware at work

Three ways to be more self-aware at work

The more self-aware you are, the more effective you can be.

We like to think of the workplace as strictly for business. Though most CEOs wouldn’t admit it, companies can sometimes feel like playgrounds, with emotion dictating the way employees interact with colleagues, managers, and clients.

Emotions come in when we get stressed about a deadline, and when we get excited about an area we’re passionate about. They play a part when we bond with our team, and when we feel someone has broken our trust.

We all have triggers: a phrase, an assumption, or a behavior that makes us absolutely crazy. Generally, triggers tap deep into our core, revealing our insecurities and frustrations all at once. The reality is that we’re all human, which means we’re all feeling emotions at work–at least until the robots arrive.

It’s good to feel a broad spectrum of emotions, even the uncomfortable ones. But this can get in the way of work. So if the workday is filled with emotions but no one really talks about them, how do we strike a balance and continue to get the job done?

The key is building self-awareness of what sets you off. Here are three steps to take to build self-awareness of how you’re feeling, and what’s tapping those emotions on the job.

KNOW WHAT TRIGGERS YOU

What makes you irrationally defensive? What gets you out of your rational thinking brain and into your gut and heart? It’s important to understand what triggers an emotional response so that you can be intentional about how you want to respond.

For me, hearing gendered feedback (critical subjective feedback that relies on vague, negative words typically reserved to describe women, such as “abrasive,” “too strong,” or “emotional”) really gets my goat.
For others, it’s hearing they’ve been passed up for a promotion, or a phrase from their boss that suggests they don’t trust them to get the job done. Often, such a slight is unintentional, but the outcome is the same. We let our emotional response run the show.

To tackle this head on, think back to your most tense moments at work: What made your blood boil? When have you regretted how you’ve behaved or let emotions get the best of you? Was it something someone did or said? Call upon the feeling and see if you can unpack its root cause.

SLOW DOWN TO CHOOSE YOUR RESPONSE

If you can begin to recognize your triggers, you can choose your response to them, as opposed to simply reacting. To do this, you need to slow your system down. Take deep breaths, remind yourself this is not a true fight-or-flight scenario, and break eye contact if you need to. Go for a walk if you can, and if you can’t, then look out the window. Even if you’re in the middle of a meeting, there’s no harm in taking a quick bathroom break to calm yourself down.

COMMUNICATE WHAT’S HAPPENING TO OTHERS

Remember my trigger of hearing potentially gendered feedback? When I hear it, I can feel steam coming out of my ears. I get frustrated by what feels to me to be lazy language, and I get angry on behalf of all the women in the workplace who’ve ever had to deal with it. Especially early in my career, it was really hard for me to hear feedback of this kind. My pulse would quicken, my inner monologue would race, and I couldn’t hear anything the feedback giver was saying anymore.

Now that I know this about myself, I can recognize it when it happens and then choose how I want to respond. This doesn’t mean that these words no longer affect me; they still make my pulse quicken, and I still dislike gendered feedback with the fire of 1,000 suns. But now I can be honest about what’s happening and clue the other person in to my experience so they’re not surprised by my response.

For me, that means pausing and saying, “That language is actually triggering to me and I’m afraid it’s taking me somewhere else. Can we take a break and come back to this? I want our discussion to be productive, and I’m not able to do that at the moment. Mind if we return to this tomorrow, when I’ve had a little more time to process?”

With practice, you’ll be able to recognize your triggers, begin to take ownership of them, and have a constructive conversation that allows you to get your work done effectively and professionally.

BY XIMENA VENGOECHEA

https://www.fastcompany.com/90265756/three-ways-to-be-more-self-aware-at-work?utm_source=postup&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Fast%20Company%20Daily&position=3&partner=newsletter&campaign_date=11192018

LIFE SPECIAL ....How to Make Your Life Worth Reading About

How to Make Your Life Worth Reading About

“If you’re going to have a story, have a big story, or none at all.” — Joseph Campbell

Usually, anything heard on mainstream radio isn’t worth listening to, but today they posed a thought-provoking question I liked.

It was this, and I’m paraphrasing here:

If you picked up a book and discovered it was your biography from birth to death. Knowing that you can’t rewrite the narrative, would you read past your current point in life?

That’s a great question! And when put to the public, the general response was “no,” people didn’t want to read how their lives played out.

But for me, perhaps oddly enough I’d happily read it.

What is it that’s gotten me to this point?

What do I think is essential to living out a life you’d happily read about?

These are the questions I will answer in this article and provide you with a guide you can shape to write your own personal bestseller.

Here we go.

---

Be the Author of Your Life, Not the Victim of it

“When life happens, you can be either the author of your life or the victim of it. Those are your only two choices — accountable or unaccountable. This may sound harsh, but it’s true. Every day we choose one approach or the other, and the consequences follow us forever.” -Gary Keller

The truth is, most people are not choosing to be the author of their life.

Rather, life is just happening to them. Their daily choices — both consciously and unconsciously, have them acting as a mere character in a story with no idea as to how it will unfold.

As Darren Hardy wrote in his book, The Compound Effect,

“Most people drift through life without devoting much conscious energy to figuring out specifically what they want and what they need to do to take themselves there.”

This is why most people do not want to read the story of their life. Without any real direction behind their daily activities, every new page beyond their current point would simply be a complete and utter shock to them.

In short, it probably wouldn’t make for very good reading.

Getting away from this starts by asking 3 simple questions:

1. Where am I now?

2. Where do I want to be?

3. How am I getting there?

Once you know where you’re going and how you’re getting there, you’ll be bringing a purpose to your everyday actions, you’ll be heading where you want to go, and you’ll have more certainty in your future.

Live a Life of No Regrets

“A life worth living might be measured in many ways, but the ONE way that stands above all others is living a life of no regrets” -Gary Keller

A while ago I spoke to a friend of mine who was on the fence about taking a year off Med school to travel the world. I gave him one piece of advice,

“Whatever decision you make, ensure that it’s one you can live with for the rest of your life.”

When I spoke to him again, he told me he’d taken the leap and was going to do it. I asked what pushed him over the edge:

“If not now, when?” he said, “I’m not going to be young forever, I can’t put a guarantee on the future. If I don’t do it now, I might never do it and I couldn’t live with that regret.”

To me, that’s a great reason to do anything. I’ve said in the past, “A good decision is one that leaves you saying, “I’m glad I did,” not “I wish I had.”

But too often, people don’t live with this mindset. People would rather do what’s easy, or feels good in the moment, even sometimes they’ll do something because it’s what other people expect of them.

But these are all terrible reasons to do something and will likely lead to regret later on down the line.

A lot of the pages will be read asking, “what if?” “Why didn’t I take a chance?” “Why did I make that decision?”

Keep the end in mind. Make the present count for a well-lived future.

Establish Habits that Take You Where You Want to Go

“People do not decide their futures, they decide their habits and their habits decide their futures.” -F. Matthias Alexander

A sure-fire way to write the pages how you want and achieve your ambitions is to build habits around what’s important to the core areas of your life.

Why? Habits take out most of the work.

If you regularly do something until it becomes a habit (And the science says it takes an average of 66 days to acquire a new habit). The payoff from developing that habit is great.

1. It keeps you on track of where you’re going.

2. It simplifies your life.

As David Kadavy has said,

“When you build a habit, you don’t have to waste mental energy deciding what to do.”

Lock in habits so they become part of your life and you can basically ride your routines to where you want to go.

In Conclusion

Don’t worry about writing your life story for anyone else; make it a book you’re proud to read.

Be the author of your story, not the victim of it. Deliberately do the things that take you where you want to go; don’t just let life happen to you.

Write your life in a way that leaves you with no regrets. Do the things that make you say, “I’m glad I did,” not “I wish I had.”

Finally, establish habits that align with the plot you desire. You are what you do repeatably.

Now, lets go make our lives worth reading about it!

https://theascent.pub/how-to-make-your-life-worth-reading-about-68ddfd257a3b

DIGITAL SPECIAL ....The next horizon for industrial manufacturing: Adopting disruptive digital technologies in making and delivering PART I

The next horizon for industrial manufacturing: Adopting disruptive digital technologies in making and delivering PART I

The key to continued performance and productivity improvement for advanced industrial companies is the use of disruptive technology in the manufacturing value chain.

In the past few years, advanced industrial companies have made solid progress in improving productivity along the manufacturing value chain. In the US, for instance, the productivity of industrial workers has increased by 47 percent over the past 20 years. But the traditional levers that have driven these gains, such as lean operations, Six Sigma, and total quality management, are starting to run out of steam, and the incremental benefits they deliver are declining.

As a result, leading companies are now looking to disruptive technologies for their next horizon of performance improvement. Many are starting to experiment with technologies such as machine-to-machine digital connectivity (the Industrial Internet of Things, or IIoT), artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, advanced automation, robotics, and additive manufacturing. The impact of this shift is expected to be so transformative that it is commonly referred to as the fourth industrial revolution, or Industry 4.0.

This new wave of technology and innovation offers companies opportunities not only to drive a step-change in productivity and efficiency, but also to capture strategic business value by establishing competitive advantage in the way they operate their entire “make to deliver” value chain. The nature and scale of the opportunities will vary from sector to sector and company to company, depending on factors such as value drivers, market dynamics, and operational maturity. However, we routinely see successful technology-enabled transformations dramatically shifting individual value drivers. For example, an aerospace manufacturer with a reputation for high quality but suffering from high labor costs and slow production implemented augmented-reality work instructions for complex assemblies to decrease error rates from 3 percent to nearly 0 percent while increasing productivity by 2530 percent. Similarly, an auto manufacturer that needed to maximize its already highly automated process began analyzing available data for micro-losses in capacity to unlock an additional 3 percent of overall equipment effectiveness. Finally, an electronics manufacturer operating in a high-cost country virtually eliminated material handling labor using automated vehicles for material delivery and robots for palletizing.

For companies that aim well and execute effectively, the resulting cost reductions could be transformational. We estimate that productivity gains and cost savings alone could deliver near-term impact of 200 to 600 basis points of margin expansion across advanced industries, worth $200 billion to $500 billion (Exhibit 1). In the mid- to long-term, even more value could be unlocked through greenfield plants, network reconfiguration, and upgrades to core IT and operating-technology (OT) architecture.

Exhibit 1 SEE THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Substantial though these cost reductions are, we expect them to be overshadowed by new revenue opportunities arising from increased speed to market, product customization, and new services. How much strategic business value they will generate remains to be seen, but we can expect the lion’s share of it to go to first movers.

Unlocking the value

To capture the value of digital in manufacturing and throughout the supply chain, leading industrial companies are developing use cases in three main areas: connectivity, intelligence, and automation (Exhibit 2).

Exhibit 2 SEE THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Connectivity

After rapidly expanding through the Internet of Things, connectivity has reached global scale, extending to some 8.4 billion connected devices. The ability to link digital devices—shop-floor monitors, remote computers, smartphones, tablets, and so on—to IT platforms and systems enables decision makers to access a flow of relevant information in real time. In production environments, only 15 percent of assets are connected as yet, but change is taking off. Advanced applications now being introduced in industrial manufacturing include digital performance management and the use of augmented-reality smart glasses to communicate instructions and standard operating procedures. In the supply chain, parts are being tracked digitally across supplier networks, and trucks are providing real-time data to enable just-in-time delivery, optimize work planning, and minimize inventory. The technology industry is working on more than 700 IoT platforms for industrial use, and major tech companies are investing heavily in platforms that extend beyond individual companies to whole industries.

One aerospace company struggling with supply issues combined data from purchasing, part tracking, and inventory monitoring in a single platform to enable real-time visibility of each part across the entire supply chain. The results exceeded expectations, with a 20 percent improvement in procurement productivity and a 5 percent improvement in on-time delivery. Another aerospace company took part traceability to the next level by introducing digital tagging. Parts were automatically scanned for minute differences in surface texture at key points in the supply chain, virtually eliminating counterfeiting and ensuring regulatory adherence.

Intelligence

Advanced analytics and artificial intelligence can be applied to large data sets to generate new insights and enable better decision making in predictive maintenance, quality management, demand forecasting, and other areas. Machine-learning algorithms are growing more powerful as computing power advances and big data proliferates. However, the full potential of artificial intelligence has yet to be captured in production environments, which at present use only a small fraction of data for decision making.

One auto manufacturer had difficulty managing growing complexity in its product variants, and sought to improve and automate its decision making. To do so, it installed an enterprise manufacturing intelligence (EMI) system that ingested data from more than 400 IoT sensors, enabling predictive intelligence to be applied to maintenance, quality, and parts supply. Introducing the new system improved overall equipment effectiveness by 10 percent and first-time-right delivery by 15 percentage points.

Flexible automation

Robotics and automation have been commonplace in industrial manufacturing for decades, but we are seeing a new wave of opportunity driven by declining technology costs, growing functionality, and an expanding range of environments in which robotics can be safely and effectively deployed. Introducing new robotic technologies in product assembly, warehousing, and logistics can improve the productivity, quality, and safety of operational processes. Applications include autonomous guided vehicles in distribution centers, automated warehouse management systems, and cobots (collaborative robots) working on assembly processes in conjunction with humans. Estimates suggest that 60 percent of manufacturing tasks could be automated, but industrial robots have yet to achieve widespread penetration even among early adopters. South Korea, for instance, has only 530 robots for every 10,000 production workers.

Deploying automation across the entire product assembly process from material handling to quality testing and packaging enabled one electronics company to reduce direct and indirect labor costs by more than 80 percent. These savings in turn allowed the company to manufacture its product in higher-cost countries located close to attractive markets, thereby reducing shipping costs while increasing customer responsiveness and speed to market.

Examples of what connectivity, intelligence, and automation might look like at an aerospace manufacturer are illustrated in Exhibit 3.

Exhibit 3 SEE THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Overcoming pilot purgatory

McKinsey’s research shows that most advanced industrial companies are conducting pilots in all three of these areas (Exhibit 4). In the aerospace and defense sector, for example, all of the top 10 companies and two-thirds of the top 50 have announced digital initiatives of some kind. Most of the business leaders we spoke to recognize that technology can help them navigate complex risk and regulatory environments, make their operations more efficient, and enhance the customer experience they offer.

Exhibit 4 SEE THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE

However, advancing beyond the pilot phase is still a big challenge for most manufacturing companies. Even among those reporting significant numbers of pilots, most struggled to achieve broader rollout. In fact, the gap between piloting and rollout is considerably larger than that between perceived relevance and piloting, suggesting that scaling is a bigger hurdle than getting the ball rolling in the first place (Exhibit 5).

Exhibit 5 SEE THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE

By Kevin Goering, Richard Kelly, and Nick Mellors

https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/digital-mckinsey/our-insights/the-next-horizon-for-industrial-manufacturing?cid=other-eml-alt-mip-mck-oth-1811&hlkid=4677593a878646529137da15dd8100cb&hctky=1627601&hdpid=40950bab-bdef-4ff9-9eb4-9ea21456999b

CONTINUED IN PART  II

APPS SPECIAL ....Stay on top of your work schedule with these apps

Stay on top of your work schedule with these apps

Check out the best Android workplace apps for collaboration, time and task management, data sharing and more

Asana

$9.99 per member per month (basic version is free)

Asana is an impressive task management tool for teams, dwarfing other popular services. It is all about workflows and checkbox tasks that can be assigned to individuals. The Android app lets you take your tasks on the go and offline, syncing your progress when you are back on the network. It’s a powerful tool with good interface, and new features are added regularly.

Doodle

Free

The hardest part of scheduling a meeting is getting everyone to agree. Ram is free Monday and Wednesday. Kushal is available Monday, but not Tuesday. And the other dozen people have their own schedules to contend with. Doodle lets you suggest times, and then see what works best for everyone. It’s an invaluable planning tool.

Dropbox

Free

Dropbox pioneered the personal cloud service, where all your stuff is available no matter what device you are using. On Android, it holds its own — even against the highly integrated Google Drive. It can also act as a seamless backup for your images, automatically uploading every photo to the cloud. Dropbox even includes some light image editing tools. If you are the type of person with lots of files already stored in Dropbox, this app is a must-have.

Microsoft Office Lens

Free

Despite the fact that we are well into the 21st century, we still can’t do without papers in offices. But Microsoft Office Lens lets you turn physical documents into digital ones using your smartphone. It can even capture doodles and notes from a whiteboard. If you want portable document scanning, but aren’t keen on getting an Evernote account, this might be the solution for you.

MyFax

$10.00

While fax machines might not be as visible as they used to be, they continue to be a vital part of how companies and governments do business. Enter MyFax, the service that lets you send and receive faxes without the hassle of a fax machine or a dedicated phone line, straight from your handset. You can also use this service to send and receive faxes from your email client of choice.

Nine Email and Calendar

$14.99

Nine is a reliable email client designed to work with all your accounts. The clean interface and the optional conversation view make reading and replying to email intuitive. One of its best features is the ability to customise the notification actions, including a useful ‘Mark as read’ option. It isn’t cheap, but it’s only a one-time $14.99 charge for a much-improved email experience that also integrates calendar, contacts, notes, and tasks functionality.

Slack

Free

With a familiar, instant messenger feel, it is easy to get started with Slack. But the service is popular because of its wealth of advanced features, like customisable alerts and a ‘do not disturb’ function. You can even host VoIP calls through Slack with your co-workers. A free account will get you started, but a monthly fee unlocks even better search tools. Install the Giphy plugin for maximum productivity.

in.pcmag.com

INDUSTRY SPECIAL........ Indian agrochemical industry set for a growth phase

Indian agrochemical industry set for a growth phase

The Indian economy traditionally being an agrarian economy has seen a tectonic shift from an agriculture industry based economy to become a service industry based economy. More than half of its population is dependent on agriculture as its primary occupation.

The Green Revolution in the early 1970s helped India become a food surplus country from a food deficient country and currently ranks amongst the top 15 exporters of agricultural products in the world. However, despite all these achievement the agriculture sector is facing a number of issues which includes reduction of arable land, lower per hectare yield, increase in pest attacks and lower farmer income. This is where agrochemicals have an important role to play.

Agrochemical landscape in India

India is currently the 4th largest manufacturer of agrochemicals after The United States, Japan and China. Currently, its agrochemicals market is valued at $4.1 billion and is expected to grow at a growth rate of 8.3 percent to reach $8.1 billion by 2025.

Exports are expected to fare even better and are expected to grow at a rate of 8.6 percent to reach $4.2 billion by 2025. In spite of these achievements the country lags in terms of usage of agrochemicals. Per hectare consumption of agrochemicals is currently less than 1 kg which when compared to other developed countries, is less in volume terms. Presently, the maximum use of crop protection chemicals is seen in paddy cultivation followed by cotton.

Bifurcation of agrochemicals

Currently agrochemicals are broadly divided into two main types: Soil Nutrients, Crop Protection Chemicals. The further bifurcation of Crop protection chemicals is as mentioned below.

·         Insecticides: These chemicals are used to protect pest attack on the plants.

·         Fungicides: These are used to control spread of diseases caused by fungus in plants and animals.

·         Herbicides: These are used to control the growth of weeds in the cultivation area.

·         Bio Pesticides: These are generally derived from natural sources like animals, plants, bacteria and other minerals.

·         Others: These includes Plant Growth Regulators, Nemotocides, Rodenticides, fumigants etc.

Reasons for Increased use of  Agrochemicals in Domestic Markets

The current use of agrochemicals in the Indian market is very low and is approx. 0.65 kg per hectare which is far less as compared to The United States where it is 4.58 kg per hectare. This low consumption of agrochemicals in one of the reasons for the low yield per hectare production of agricultural products in India. Also, around 25 percent of the total crops produced in India are destroyed due to pest attack.

Agrochemicals can play an important role in curbing the pest attacks this leading to increased productivity.

Also the world population is growing at a rapid pace. India is currently home to approx. 18 percent of the world population whereas covers only 2 percent of the landmass. There is a surge in demand to meet the dietary needs of this ever increasing population, however the arable land remains constant, hence there is a need to increase the per hectare production which can be done by efficient use of agrochemicals. Currently, India ranks amongst the top 15 manufacturers of agricultural products. With the increase in agricultural production, there will be huge scope for export of these products.

Horticulture and floriculture have also started gaining prominence in India. The Government of India with an eye on increasing the production of agricultural products has been launching various schemes like ‘Mission for Integrated Development of Horticulture’ etc. This has led to increased use of agrochemicals, mainly fungicides.

There has been a lot of awareness amongst the farmers regarding the use of agrochemicals, and the right way for its applications. Also, it has been one of the key objectives of the Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi to “Double farmers income by 2022.’ Thus, there will be a definite increase in consumption of agrochemicals and soil nutrients.

Developing India as an Agrochemical Manufacturing Hub

In the past couple of years there has been a significant reduction in the exports from China. This is owing to the implementation of stringent environmental norms by the Chinese government, crackdown on the polluting chemical industry and impending duties from US on Chinese products. There has been a large scale shutdown of plants which are causing pollution, relocation of chemical plants to far off industrial areas as well as compulsory effluent treatment plants for every chemical plant. As a result China’s exports have been severely dented. On the other hand Indian Chemical

Industry performed extremely well in terms of exports. In the case of manufacturing of agrochemicals, India is being noticed as a manufacturing hub. The Government of India through its ‘Make In India’ initiative has been inviting various national and international companies to manufacture and expand operations in India. Many companies are now looking to source chemicals from India in order to de-risk their sourcing from China. In addition to that, there are numerous other reasons for MNCs investing in India, few among those are low capex, availability of skilled manpower at low cost, infrastructure advancement, to name a few. It is important that the industry takes notice and grabs the opportunity to establish India as a global chemical manufacturing hub and eventually creates a healthy, thriving ecosystem.

Export Markets

As per a report by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), India exported crop protection chemicals worth $2 billion. The country is the 4th largest manufacturer and the 13^th largest exporter of agrochemicals globally. Also, at present the manufacturing capacity utilization is not 100 percent, leaving a huge scope for exporting the surplus production. India has been traditionally exporting agrochemicals to the US, Europe and some Latin American countries. However there tremendous export potential to markets such as Africa, Middle East and East Asia.

Way Forward

The current Indian Agrochemical scenario presents an exciting growth opportunity for chemical manufacturers. The agriculture industry is set for a fast paced growth, which will lead to increased use of agrochemicals. Also with the current manufacturing capacities being under-utilized there is major scope to improve capacity utilization for export production. These increasing volumes will lead to significant increase in employment, exports, new product development, decrease in imports, which will support the ‘Make in India’ campaign and ease of doing business. However while gearing up for this growth phase we must also ensure that the growth is a Sustainable one.

Author: Rajendra Gogri is Chairman and Managing Director of Aarti Industries Ltd.

© Chemical Today magazine