Newest Management Buzzword: Jugadu
My friend Peter Agarwal and I were discussing a new word (for me) that came from India: jugaad. Together we figured out that it meant "workaround." You've got a problem but no support whether from personnel or capital, what do you do? Work around the problem. You've acting in a jugaad manner. It ends up that there's a book being written about jugaad. Newest fad? Yes. Useful? Maybe it is intuitive and we all are doing it. Might be useful to think about and see if your team needs a five minute story about it.
Peter sent me this definition from Wikipedia:
Jugaad (Hindi: जुगाड़ Punjabi(gharuka)) are locally made motor vehicles that are used mostly in small villages as a means of low cost transportation in India. Jugaad literally means an arrangement or a work around, which have to be used because of lack of resources. This is a Hindi term also widely used by people speaking other Indian languages, and people of Indian origin around the world. The same term is still used for a type of vehicle, found in rural India. This vehicle is made by carpenters, by fitting a diesel engine on a cart.
"Jugaad" is also colloquial Hindi word that can mean an innovative fix,often pejoratively used for solutions that bend rules, or a resource that can be used as such or a person who can solve a vexatious issue. It is used as much for enterprising street mechanics as for political fixers. In essence, though it is a tribute to native genius, and lateral thinking.
Even though in everyday life, a Jugaad can be a solution, in context of Management, Jugaad is essentially a person who has some special capability or access to a resource or even access to another Jugaad that can be useful under extreme or special circumstances. A Jugaadu person is one who has numerous useful and cashable Jugaads.
Jugaad is also mentioned by Jana. Need to learn how to develop products more cheaply? Maybe you need to do a little research on jugaad methods.