I'm madly in love with my motorbike

Shoaib Akhtar has announced his retirement from International Cricket (not IPL?) and this saddens many fans like me. The frames of picture roll over before my eyes - the 160Kmph balls, the airplane action and yes, the motorbike ride inside the stadium!

Read this piece from cricinfo.
http://www.espncricinfo.com/page2/content/story/506724.html

Not just in cricket but in organizations, we will find some Shoaibs occassionally and it is important that such performers are covered under organizational management strategies.

What every manager, who manages such mavericks, needs to keep in mind:
- These characters will not appreciae, follow or influence what is 'standard'. Organizations, as they grow bigger, grow more robust on structures, frameworks,definitions etc etc have processes that will help the big organizaion manage predictability, reliability and sustainability in the market. So, a typical assessment of Shoaib-like-mavericks would be towards eliminating them.

- A Good manager lives with a maverick. A Great manager leverages the maverick. As an ode to the maverick - these are the guys and gals, who think out of the box and who provide you orthogonal and lateral ways of working. For them, what matters is how grandly and audaciously the results are produced; how big the impact is and how innovative was the whole solution.

- Bloated egos, unpredictable temperaments, high romanticism are the traits of mavericks. This can cause ruptures within team dynamics, cause impact to an organization that is geared to do only as per copy-book. A great manager looks out for great fitments for these mavericks in such situations and locate the best environments for these romantic geniuses to survive.

- Never ask this highly intelligent Akhtar clones to project manage a project. They just cannot! They are not wired to manage tasks, milestones and risks. Those are for the proces experts.

- What you assign to these big picture thinkers is always wrought with high risk and high returns. There is every possibility that the maverick will abandon his project when it is almost done or completely change the fundamentals just when the project is stabilizing and entering the 'me-too-organized' stage.

- These characters are usually emotional and will be very loyal to you as a manager when you show deep empathy for him or her. They are not bean counters.

So, what do you do with a Shoaib Aktar in a pakistani team? First of all, his captain Afridi is also a maverick. Now this combination rarely works. A maverick has to be managed by an emotionally, structurally stable manager. And as the organizational system (eg. Pak board) is hierarchial, traditional, process managed, the captain will be seen as showing favouritism to his 'buddy' while he is actually shielding the maverick!

So, Shoaib goes and the world loses a great bowler. I do understand how Shoaib could have avoided all those controversies and agreed with the systems. But this article is an ode to the maverick you see.....

Enjoy the world cup!