LIVE FROM LIFE - The Yoke

Many of my readers have commented to me, directly, that my entries are too long. I take notice of it, and hence am trying to be short. Short articles benefit me too – need not ruminate for so long that the idea originally being ruminated on is lost! Today, I will tell you about an interesting phenomenon. Imagine a whole lot of students, weary from a loaded work week, pulled out on some week-end morning, early, on the threat of hefty fines and other sanctions at the extreme and strong social disapproval at the minimum.
Imagine a bunch of wise guys, who are probably more weary from a more loaded work week, pulled out on the same weekend morning, a bit late than the students – on the pain of constant badgering on the phone and the cyberspace, so that putting the whole badgering to rest by acceding to the request for company becomes a necessity. Both groups are sleepy, both groups are weary – neither wanted this to happen, but both are really ‘happy’ – as one group thanks the other for ‘gracing the occasion’ while the other is pleased for the ‘invitation’. Both have a distorted view of each other – the wise guys thinks the students, of a renowned school, must be really learned, and may feel a bit scared. So they try to salvage their pride by speaking stuff which is intelligible neither to themselves nor to the students. The students, meanwhile have to show that they belong to this ‘renowned institution’ and hence, they nod as if they are understanding all of it – and when their turn comes, ask questions that are not in anyway connected with all the proceedings going on – but now it is the turn of the wise guys to nod, as if they understand it all – and such exchanges go on till the week end is wasted. The end result – institution-corporate relationship!
What exactly does the institution corporate relationship achieve? No idea. Some say it increases the job prospects of the student. Well, let’s examine that statement critically. Looking from the business perspective, the students in the job market are trying to sell their services to the businesses – who are ‘business customers’ – hence, a flashy ad campaign will not do much to increase the chance of the sale – corporate buyers want value for money – sadly the value that has to be created in the students is normally lost in the excessive focus on relationship. Agreed it is a marketing driven scenario, but even then operations cannot be ignored totally. Yet, the hard selling of half baked cookies to the new ‘relatives’ might get one or two batches off the roster, but in the end, all has to get back to the basics.
Another problem with this trend is the fact that it starts a round of competitive relations building – if one college goes for wasted weekends, another might try to top it with wasted weeks! I have seen people trying to squeeze three wasted weekends in one month, so that the relationship edge is not lost! So, it starts following the vicious competitive circle that I have talked about at length in the previous post. In the end, all the time of the academic session might be put to relationship building, whereas the building of knowledge and intellect is ignored.
As I have always said, such edifices would not survive for long – built on unbacked promises, unverified claims and pretense. Sadly that is going on across the country – it is one of the worst kept secrets of the Indian education system – ask anybody individually to speak truly, be it student or wise man, and they will tell that it is all a charade. Yet, collectively, we are unable to throw off this yoke of our own making, and it keeps on getting more and more loaded. When is this going to end? I cannot say that, but it is important that somebody high up in the system calls the bluff. For now, it is good bye from a fugitive from the yoke.

LIVE FROM LIFE - The Rat Olympics

In the beginning, there was just the primordial soup bubbling in the prehistoric oceans, in which a few big molecules, in an entirely chance event (or a couple of chance events) combined together to form the first living cells – then came the primaeval eukaryotes and later multicellular plants and animals. The animals had it tough (and so do they do still today) – fighting for survival – for the resources for living and growing – life in the wild was and is an existential struggle. Then, some furry little upstarts took the opportunity given by the death of the rampaging dinosaurs and started developing bigger and bigger brains – compared to their body size. From tiny lemurs, they went to the giant gorilla. One off shoot of this family started walking on two legs, developing a straight, far looking posture, and utilized the opposable thumb to shape the primitive tools, to tame fire, to hunt instead of being hunted. Yes, life kept on becoming more than a struggle for existence – humans (as the members of this off shoot were known as, eventually) found leisure, a meaning to life, a sense of enjoyment. The uncertainty of the next meal was countered by agriculture and husbandry, the uncertainty of the weather was nullified in effect by the dwellings built. In this way, the many uncertainties of life were done way with, and human life was made distinct from the general animal life. The life was now meant for enjoyment.

Or so it was, until some smart Alecs hijacked the whole agenda – and management literature became replete with ‘competitiveness’ – and competitiveness was made the ‘buzzword’ – how to make your organization competitive, how to out compete your competitors and all that. Well, they started by slashing prices, so that they, along with their ‘competitors’ bleed – which was good, as long as the competitor bled more gushingly. They started on a noble venture of giving customers what they asked for, then went for giving them what they had in mind, but did not ask for, and soon, they started pre-empting customer wants! Of course, they had to stay ahead of competition. And, thus through our own smart thinking, in the late twentieth century, we squandered one great thing our forefathers had achieved gradually from the time when they had toiled over flint stones to build the first fire, or shaped the first spear – peace of mind and exclusion from a struggle for existence.

Is competition a good thing – that is a question that should vary with the degree of competition involved – of course, it is good if the aim is to weed out the lethargic and useless. But sadly, once started, competition does not stop on its own, once the unworthy have been weeded out – as is said, everything is fair in love and war – so when you arouse competition, be prepared for anything. So if one starts working for 10 hours a day ( to weed out those useless 9 to 5 good for nothings), one’s competitor might start doing 11 hours a day. Third may respond with 12 hours – soon the hours start piling – you hire two or three sets of employees and start working 24 hours. When all are working 24 hours, and there are no more hours to put in, it may get down to setting up two shops, then three and so on. All very good – but we can see that the original purpose was to maintain a 10 hour working day – the norms might have been achieved in that much – the rest is the price of competition – it is like a fire you lit up to warm your room in the winter, and it ends up consuming your house – not a very good bargain. It becomes what my professor likes to call the ‘Red Queen Effect’ – you have to run very fast to stay at the same place! Is it good? Yeah, some power drunk corporate boss might say – we like to smash the unworthies to smithereens, and to win like a good sport. I object. I object seriously. This is not some bloody sport – this is a question of livelihood for people – and it is not about winning or losing, it is about living with dignity and pleasure. Rampant competition is different from back yard play – there, those incapable of playing generally stay away from play, and let the jocks struggle in the play. But there is no such thing in the business world – if they start the stampede, the small ones will get crushed, whether they like it or not. Human life is a journey, with death as a destination – so in the end, the destination is not what we are after, but the quality of journey. When your company, after all of scheming and aggressive techniques, do put a ‘competitor’ out of business, you are not scoring some Wayne Rooney goal on some cosmic scoreboard, but putting a few people away from their source of income – and do not for once think that you have done the customers a great service by the offering that proved to be the final nail in the coffin. The customer was satisfied (in most cases) good enough with the previous offers made by you and the slain. And do not give me that ‘just good ain’t good enough’. Of course, what do you think; can you rest of your laurels now? No, the others are behind you – ready to kick you out as you did to the dead. Where will it stop – God knows – and do not worry about the customer – his appetite is being whetted continuously, worry about yourself – you started off feeding a poodle and turned it into a rottweiler. If you stop feeding him, he might bite.

Well you might say that competition is good for the society at large – after all, where ever there is innovation, there is competition – well, again this is based on the implicit assumption that innovation is good – well let me clear the air here – airplane was an invention, and ‘Sensational’ journalism is an innovation – are both really good. I doubt so – spreading spicy misinformation does nobody except the owners of India TV any good. And does this innovation start competition – yes, it does – a previously respected news channel Aaj Tak is now giving India TV a run for its money, if not winning. Similarly we have many such ‘design’ innovations, and ‘pricing’ innovations and such many business innovations, accounts of which fill libraries of respected business schools. Well, they do not make life good for anybody – but do make our life more ‘competitive’.

What else can competition do – well, it can make us, and our organizations evolve into mean ‘competing’ machines – so that the prime task is not anything else but competition – in the perfect competitive scenario – we would first compete, then breathe, drink, eat and live in that order. Maruti will specialize in competition and making cars. The local barber would specialize in competition and mushroom cuts. You find that funny – well, if you do not believe me – just go to the Rajasthani city of Kota – here people are schooling in competition – at a time when half of them should be doing their High School education – they are doing that, but that is after they are done schooling in competition – and the result is good enough – kids who know how to solve the most complex numerical problem in thermodynamics, but have absolutely no physical idea of what enthalpy is! They know little, but can compete in the toughest engineering entrance examination. That is the result of a competitive evolution.

Still worse, competition can make us wiling to do anything to survive – be it fudging our resumes – or at least filling it with complete unadulterated ‘bull-business’ like – ‘I have done a certificate course on six sigma’ – which means nothing but what it says – still, that might be better than not having done a certificate course in six-sigma. And the less I say about six-sigma, the better. It can lead to leading business schools fudging the placement data, to inflate the average salary offered on campus placements, to a Ramalinga Raju inflating Satyam profit figures, to boost share prices. Survival is important for all, and if we, as a society make the legitimate survival too ‘competitive’ – we might push some people into doing the illegal.

And after all, this is not for free. Well, one might argue that the per capita income of the world has increased very high in the recent times. Well, are the people more happy today for it – I am not being philosophical here. Old timers may argue they were happier in the time of Auld Lang Syne, while youngster may not imagine a life without the modern day comforts of electronics and service industry. So, we can safely conclude that people are in general as happy now, as they were in the, say, 17^th century. What has changed – the per capita consumption – we are eating our planet out – we are not getting anything from outside, for all our innovations, but simply getting ways to squander all we have got, at an increasing pace. The Earth might have enough for everybody’s need, but not everybody’s greed.

So what is the solution – the way out of this rat race – this rat ‘Olympiad’ if I must say? Well, in the USSR, they stifled it completely – to oversee the ultimate collapse of the economy. So, we cannot so away with competition altogether. Let me take the playground analogy again – we have hard boiled footballers tackling each other hard, and we have badminton novices trying to keep a rally on. The former try hard to defeat the other, the latter get the joy out of effortless play, their joy emanating from the length of the rally – the former try by all means to knock down others, but the latter do not make any attempt to score a point on the other. Well, that is what we need to recreate in the economy – a sort of ‘cartel of the willing lazy’. This cartel has to be large enough to encompass most possible goods and services being offered. The basic idea behind this cartel is that – Look, I want to live my live, in pursuit of small leisures, and so do you. Let’s promise that we will not kill ourselves in a bid to ‘satisfy’ each other – I will work 8 hours a day, at peace, and make enough pots for us both, and you work 8 hours a day, at peace, and make enough bread for us both. It is a sort of Communist economy, with an important difference, the option to opt out and go into competitive world, if you so desire, and under obligation, if you defy the cartel. Let the novices rally, and let the big ones tackle and slide. And what better time to get to this, than the current recession.

LIVE FROM LIFE - Snake Oil

I always used to wonder what sort of losers read the self help books that come out by the dozen every week and are well advertised by the ‘best seller’ columns of newspapers. I am not talking about DIY help books on cookery, gardening, yoga etc. I am talking about the books with names like ‘You can win’, ‘Formulae for success’, ‘Creative thinking’ etc. I mean, don’t people realize that the only winner in question here is the author, who, after being a successful corporate executive and drawing hefty salaries, is adding to his big pile of money through the royalty. The problem does not arise if we read autobiographies or biographies – they are akin to what history is for the civil administration. The problem arises when the retiring luminaries do not write a simple autobiography, but a self help book. To make the common sense truisms presented in their writing marketable, they often write them down in a very abstruse language, and invent new terms. Arguably, their only intention could be just to make their writing lucid and easy to understand – for example, Khushwant Singh’s ‘Operation Colombo’ cut short a lot of writing that would have otherwise been resorted to. However, the management education world makes these plot elements bigger than they were intended to be – these in-book guiding arrows are brought into real life and thrust down people’s throat. I am sure De Bono had thought to tell people to force themselves to think factually, critically, emotionally, positively, creatively and holistically at will – the ‘six hats’ being simply a metaphor to help people visualize adopting a thinking strategy consciously as similar to putting on a different coloured hat at will. Yet, the hats have continued to live beyond the thinking, and have acquired a life of their own. It has become expected of a business student to speak in terms of hats – Hey man, your work is getting monotonous! Time to put on the green hat!!
Not only in these self help books, but in many other management education scenarios we find terms living beyond their utility and hence usurping the space rightfully reserved for a single thing – common sense. Is it that essentially we all realize that management is inherently an un-teachable (new word!) concept, and hence, to justify the two years we spend doing an MBA, we hide behind big words, and reinvent the wheel innumerable times. The management literature is replete with such examples – the whole of organization management, systems thinking, marketing management and all such branches of management in which one finds ‘big words’ are essentially consisting of two things – disguised common sense, or personal opinions being taken as gospel truth. Well, if you do not know how to do a thing to the t, and still, the thing needs to be done – obviously you will go at the work, and learn along as you do the work. Common sense? No, some joker has ‘propounded’ this as a theory of ‘Action Learning’, by masking this very truth behind neat words. If you drive your car and control the wheel, compensating every time the road turns you will reach your destination, and if you simply step on the gas and leave the wheel, you might end up upended in one of the innumerable possible ways. Common sense? No, some leading light has put it as the ‘Law of equifinality of the system in case of negative feedbacks’ in the Systems theory. WTF?? I mean, this ends up being taught in B-schools? Are the people who take some very tough tests and interviews to get in, many after leaving well paying jobs, supposed to be treated to this? Well, this is the ground reality. There are courses on ‘Creative Thinking’ – where people have to cram up the ‘six hats’ and regurgitate in the examination. How creatively are they being made to think? All the flights of fantasy, taken by senile (no doubt great, but definitely senile at the time of writing) managers, are duly taught to people – to emulate their success. Now, do you really think an organization of, say, 100000 employees can be directed like a clockwork to perfection? I do not subscribe to that view. In the end, a good working organization simply is a chance phenomenon, which then survives and outlives competition – much like the first living cells which formed, by sheer coincidence, out of the primordial soup, and then survived well enough to ensure I write this blog today and you read it. Yet, there are innumerable books written by countless CEO’s and MD’s who happened to oversee great working organizations when they retired, all talking about their ‘formulae for success’. I read it once – when in doubt, look intelligent. Is it a manifestation of this dictum? I bet some nosey journalist had gone to, say Jack Welch, and asked him how the hell did he make GE into the behemoth that it is. Trying to look intelligent (I, a mere MBA student, might be committing blasphemy here by commenting on Jack Welch’s intelligence, but then, fair chance he won’t be reading it), Jack might have given an answer, partly coated in high sounding words and lofty ideas. The journalist might have written it all down and put it on the paper the next day, and the academics would have been discussing it the day after – behold, a new theory in management studies was born. Then Jack, and other top level businessmen, seeing what suckers we were for such ‘theories’, and being the shrewd businessmen they are, started giving out more of them, for substantial royalty, of course. I am not speculating here. We have, at our B-School, symposia, where top business leaders are invited, by constant pestering, and an audience of weary students is collected on the pain of hefty fines (remember, it is a Saturday, and no one likes to spend the week end delivering or listening to boring lectures.) Well, they come, deliver something on topics as enigmatic as ‘India poised, but is it? And oh, will InfoTech play a role, or will we melt down before that, and creative ideas to solve this whole thing’. Of course, that is not a real topic, but I have forgotten the real ones, but this one gives a near estimate of what is discussed there. Then some of our classmates ask ‘insightful and intelligent’ questions, to which they gives equally ‘creative’ answers. These answers are duly noted by the faculty and students alike (though I would like to assure you that I am not guilty of this crime), and then, it enters the popular discourse, and ends up being written in term papers, examination scripts and thus legitimized as ‘theory’. I have often asked my very enlightened and intelligent classmates if the things we are studying here are even remotely useful in the field – they give really interesting answers. Some are candid – man, this is BS, and we know it, but still, whatever it takes to get the MBA degree. Some are a bit rebellious, like me, and do not study such things, and concoct their own theories in the examination – if you need BS, it does not matter who the bull was. Interestingly, some do not think it is all BS, and tell me that we need to take our understanding to a higher plane to comprehend it. All I can say, either they are delusional, or they are our future business leaders.
In the end, I repeat the same old question – are we doing the right thing by wasting our time learning made up stuff? Is it a time to call a spade a spade and cut out all this useless stuff from management curriculum? I have no personal grudge against them – after all, writing for ends on systems theory is much easier than trying to solve a capital budgeting numerical, because you cannot go wrong. But, in the end, we end up wasting our time, in the prime of youth, when we would have been better occupied doing actual work. Think again.

LIVE FROM LIFE - Life, the key factor

How often does one hear the question – ‘Will you give it your hundred percent?” Equally common is the oft repeated ‘strength’ in the bogus HR questions in the interviews – ‘Sir, I give every task my hundred percent.’ Whether actually giving ‘hundred percent’ to ‘all tasks’ is physically possible or not is another question – my point of discussion here is the very idea of giving ‘hundred percent’ to something.

Let us begin with a very general question – what is the thing that is the most valuable and most irreplaceable of all that we own. Moralistic (and politically correct) answers aside, it is our life – we see stories of riches to rags and back to riches, but barring the Easter miracle (I am agnostic tending to atheist, but this example is etched in the thoughts of most of the English understanding populace, so there), there has hardly been any instance of someone losing his her life and then gaining it. One cannot even get back a single second of one’s life to live again – here, as I am typing away on a vacation, I am forgoing precious moments I could spend with family. The old Kansas song is so true – ‘I close my eyes, only for a moment and the moment’s gone.’ Will you give up, say, a month of your life for, say, million bucks? Well, most of you might say yes, but ask that question from a man who is dying – he might be willing to buy for a billion or more! So, we can safely conclude that our life is a valuable resource for us, and a key one at that. What returns do we expect for the investment of our life moments into the economic machinery? All monetary turnovers will go pale in comparison to the basic but essential returns expected – the so call hierarchical needs pyramid, as is often quoted as Maslow’s need hierarchy pyramid. We need to satisfy our physical needs, security needs, affiliation needs and the other learned needs, and later the transcendental needs, in that order. The first two are needs that are being fulfilled by lower life forms too, so an apt return to investment of the human life would comprise only of the other three levels. On the basis of these observations, let us examine some of the common ideas we have about what to do with our lives –

1. Have one aim and dedicate yourself to it. Is this suggestion, often told by the ‘wise’, correct? Now, that you agree that our life moments are resources to be invested, let’s take an analogy – suppose you have a given sum of money. Is it advisable to invest it all in one stock, or one sector? While in some cases this might pay huge dividends, in most cases, it is advisable to ‘diversify the portfolio’. So, if we do that with our money, why not do that with our lives? Some may argue that a minimum level of efforts are required to anything at all in some venture, we are just belittling our potential, thinking that we cannot get to the threshold in more than one front of effort. So, if we view our lives as resource, it is simply a natural follow up that it is wise to diversify as much as possible.
2. Work very hard and diligently, as rewards take time coming in. This is another wise man’s advice – and often shining examples are put up of Abe Lincoln, or Faraday or Lal Bahadur Shastri and similar personalities, who rose from low places to their successful ends by virtue of hard work, which paid in the end. The taught, like us, lap it up and start a grueling struggle for an education, and a career, with eye’s firmly on some future gain, neglecting the comforts of today. Well, for one Abe Lincoln, we have got thousands of name less and faceless people, who work really hard, unmindful of whether actual gains are being made or not – and toil on into obscurity. Coming back to the money analogy, going for a lot of ‘hard work’, without any immediate rewards, is like taking up a project with huge fixed costs, and that with a very long investment turnover period. Both are cardinal sins according to the principles of financial management. So what is the advice from me to those who have lost their way to this article – redesign your effort reward system e.g. if you are studying for some exam you have to take in a couple of years time, it is important to constantly check your progress, and reward yourself, with small things, such as a movie, or an eat out – this gives both a feedback, and a shorter break even period of effort – rewards, both sound investing decisions for the key resource called life.

These were two small ideas on how life decisions could be simplified and objectified if we do not take it for granted, and see it worth what it is. A whole book may be written on how such a model may be applied to more interesting situations – but perhaps that would stifle the libraries full of ideas that could be generated if the discussion was confined to these two hopefully stimulating examples. Invest wisely.