- Indians love committees.
- And more so Governments and politicians.
- Whatever the situations or crisis, a group of people at many level are huddled together to solve this.
- And a committee is the perfect solution. A set of experts who seems to know finer nuances debate together and bring out a best solution after doing a good “brain storming.”
- Seems like that committees are most beautiful product of democracies and there are committees of all type with all fancy names and titles
- There is High empowered group of ministers committees, there is committee of secretaries, there is committee of experts, there is a committee of state ministers, there is committee of assistants, there is committee off mohalla people also
- Interestingly while there might by 100s of committees with variety of people and team, they rarely change the game or able to bring disruptive ideas and reasons may be many
- First and foremost, generally experts or people handing a status quo are not the best people to disrupt it.
- Think of US President forming a committee in 2003 to imagine innovation in mobile
- Which experts would have been natural choices ?
- CEO OF Noika, Palm, Ericsson, Sony, Alcatel, Blackberry- in fact in 2019, it is hard to recall champions of Mobile in 2003
- Would they have invited Steve Jobs from Apple or senior guys from other leading brands of today.
- Or a team to discuss banking reform and ease micropayment in 2010!! Would PayTM be a part of same or top executives from HDFC / ICICI / SBI driven it.
- But that is the not the only flaw of teams / committees that look at rear view mirror and past rather future
- The even worse outcome of a team / committee is the outcome which is always a compromise, a timid agreement or the common minimum program
- An agreement, a consensus is fundamentally flawed as it has already devoid of hope and is more suited to fulfilling agenda, personal relationship or timidity of the room than that of hope and bold new dawn.
- In committees, either the orators win, or the strongmen. History has shown that in fight between phosphor and wrestler, it is always the wrestler which wins but not that the solution by wrestler is the the best solution.
- And one of the biggest flaw is lack of accountability and ownership. It is decision of group, so nobody can be blamed for it as its always the group, and hence there is no skin in the game.
- A decision without skin in the game is like headless chicken and is doomed for failure from day one while protecting its decision makers from any of negative consequences. And hence no soul.
- Hence a committee or group of experts is always a path to backward and leads to nowhere
- No nation , or company or society has been built by a team of experts but by leaders and their core group who can dare to imagine and bend the spoon.
- Remaining societies / teams / companies / nations just form the committees and study the outcome.
- The End