Number of words: 686

Once upon a time the quality of work in India was described in four words: Bekar or Poor, Chalega or OK, Accha or Good and Apratim, Badiya or Excellent.

And the intention has always been to move work quality towards the right, towards excellence. And we know how difficult that is for us in India. On the one hand we are famed for creating exquisite hand-woven sarees; fabrics, that are par excellence. On the other hand, we are also well known for our “chalega” attitude to work. Some would call it acceptance of the mediocre. This reflects in many things that we do. A casual look around us will show our easy-going approach to work. We just have to study the way a typical road is made or the quality of television reporting. It’s more about getting the work done rather than paying attention to quality of work. Moving towards excellence has been an uphill task for decades. Yes, there is ISRO, Maruti, Hero Motors, the Hindi dialogue of Bahubali, essentially a Telegu movie, and of course, the ikat saree. But those are the outliers.

And then around 2005, a terrific word caught the imagination of the management world – jugaad. It was a “Made in India” word. A truly “Made in India” phenomenon. Jugaad was about innovation, about creativity. It was about finding a way. It was about cost consciousness. It was also about beating the system and getting the job done. In fact, Jugaad was the name given to a vehicle, a combo of a motorcycle engine and handcart – it got you from point A to point B. It carried more people/luggage than a motorcycle and travelled faster than a handcart. Who cared about aesthetics!

Finally, we had moved beyond chalega. The world recognised and applauded that. Suddenly HBR, Wharton and others sat up and noticed. Jugaad became a “buzz word”. And what was essentially a small-town, BOP (bottom of the pyramid) desi phenomena became something that “management” got into. Then America reinvented it, made a model out of it and called it “Frugal Innovation”.

Meanwhile, in India we felt good about ourselves. Indian Industry had found a new way of working; a higher plane of work quality and it was something that the world admired us for.

But there is a problem with Jugaad. It jams our efforts to reach for excellence.  Jugaad is about making do. Imperfection is OK as long as the job gets done. This attitude will not get us out there on the world map, and nor will it make us self-reliant. Jugaad cannot be a way of working that we accept and celebrate. We need to create world class products.

Jugaad is at best a stepping-stone to excellence not a replacement for it. Excellence has to become a way of life. We have to move from jugaad to excellence.And for Excellence to happen, our values need to be re-examined. Pride in our work is a value we need to inculcate in a much deeper way. The satisfaction that comes from a job well done. Any job.

In the words of Edward de Bono – If a job is worth doing then it is worth doing well.

It’s a simple value system that has unfortunately been side-lined.Once it’s brought into the forefront, leaders will start looking for and encouraging excellence in everyday jobs. It’s not that hard to do because we all recognise excellence. We appreciate a raga sung well, the excellence of an actor who has delivered a stunning dialogue that brought tears to our eyes or about that cricketer hitting a four with finesse that we remember decades later.
It’s less about achieving targets and more about how they were achieved. By paying attention to the finer points. In the final analysis, excellence is about process and detail. By comparison, Jugaad is rough and ready.

So how do you bring the basic value of excellence – the values of a how a job is done into the mainstream of an organization that swears by MBOs, KRAs and KPIs? Now that’s another story.

Excerpted from a linkedin post by Anil Kulkarni