Bangalore Times

Congratulations to the Indian Shooting Team competing in the South Asian Federation (SAF) Shooting Championships at Bangladesh. It’s literally a clean sweep of the Gold Medals. In the Indian Sub Continent, Indians are far too strong a competition for countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh or Sri Lanka. How ever it’s a good competition to taste victory and then to strive to achieve similar victories in the next higher level of competition. Though one need not follow this pattern; for example, my very first International medal came in the form of Gold after 4 years of very hard struggle and that too in the big league competition like the Commonwealth Games Manchester in 2002.

To take you to an altogether different topic, I was in Bangalore for a day having been invited by a leading corporate company to be part of their in house corporate training/ competition as a judge. It was great fun and very educative for all of us. Apart from the content, it was very similar to some of the war gaming exercises that we do in the Army. Off course, instead of having enemy locations to capture, they had marketing goals to be achieved. Instead of minefields and obstacles laid out by the enemy they had financial and other market related obstacles to be cleared. And here I was to cross question them on their subjects! I have never been more attentive under closed doors.

On numerous occasions I have realized that high performance philosophies that we have applied in the Army, either while training or in active service or mental solutions we have had up our sleeves during high stress levels in competitive sport can all be applied to the corporate world to solve their problems. The more one thinks about it, the more parallels can be found. For example, the biggest issue as of now that the corporate world is facing is that of a financial downturn for the first time in many years. So in layman terms, it’s a difficult time to perform and show results. Ask a top level sportsman, how many times would he have faced such a situation? At the mental level the answers are the same. Once the mind is taken care of, the rest falls into place. Easier said then done. But then when had achieving excellence been easy.