Tag: wisdom

The Leadership Quotient.

~ Parimal Aluri ~ Leave a comment

You may be the best and there may be no doubt about that bit, but all that greatness and being the best will go in vain, unless you have a progressive and well defined “Leadership Quotient” to bank upon at your foundation! Join me here as we explore around this concept and try to embrace a singular fact that leadership has nothing to with what your business card says, but has everything to do with you!

The biggest fallacy about leadership is that people tend to wait for someone to ask them to lead and more importantly all that managerial direction is often and always mis-interpreted to be leadership! Like many of the great masters who have been advocates on Leadership has said time and again, leadership is all about – being a leader and no matter who you are, what you can do and not do, the fact is that leadership can be practiced and furthered even in the smallest way- that may seem trivial for a someone else, but that same act can be empowering and encouraging for the other person! This is the essence of leadership- it always start from you and unless you don’t take charge for yourself and decide to lead your life, why would anyone else ever want to collaborate and walk alongside you, forget about having followers and people being drawn to you by inspiration!

People have always argued and debated about leadership being in the blood or whether it can be developed- well, if you ask, me like anything and everything else, you can embrace and develop leadership as a trait- but if you are also blessed by a natural affinity for it- then the chances of one being a success story at leadership are far more amplified! (or should I say instances of errors of judgement for practicing leadership are reduced!). So, now, on to the million dollar question, how do you know, if you are a leader or how much of leadership you have with you? How do you go about deciphering the leadership quotient? How do you deploy and how do you ensure it doesn’t get lost? Well, let’s go!

Unlike, enrolling for that costly weekend seminar or that workshop, or that psychometric test (sure they do play a role, but I will come to all of that later), revisit your childhood- yes, childhood, I mean when you were still malleable and ductile enough to be stretched by imagination and flexible enough to adjust (especially when you thought it was uncomfortable!) If you spend good enough time reminiscing your childhood memories (unless you too have a lost memory problem- like the one I do!), you will come across multiple instances of that fabled “first time” and when you begin to sieve through those “first times” you will start to see a pattern emerge- this pattern is about what your natural behaviour is and what is that you are comfortable- leading (to what extent and when and for what) and comfortable following or collaborating (again to what extent , when and for what). This proportion and frequency is what determines what is that triggers you to stand up and lead and what is that triggers you to collaborate or follow others. The in-depth deciphering around this fundamental aspect will further begin to throw light about what parts of your life you want to lead more over the others! People often feel leadership, is about taking all the decisions all the time and the fact is that nothing could be more away from the truth! Leadership is about taking those decisive stances when that moment arrives, it is about leading what matters and leading when only you can and you have to- because only your way of leadership is the answer to resolve that challenge at hand! This is the space where iconic stories about leaders get built and a whole new cult of followership is born- aligned to this unique new style or practise of leadership which has is nothing more or nothing less than the personification of who you are! Effective Leadership is always the Leader in Action- It is the personification of who you are in action!

So, to drive the point here, your leadership is about the choices that you make with regards to when you want to lead and when you want to be by the sides! It is about making those meaningful choices which then go on to define you- through your practise of leadership and this is what is the essence of the “Leadership Quotient”. The Leadership Quotient, if you ask me is not about a specific metric that can be measured rather it is an observation and assessment in terms of what makes your leadership practise great and when does it fail! You see, as you you choose what to lead and what not to lead, if you end up erring by making some weird choices, you will start to see your leadership decline and falter, this faltering will not be because you aren’t a leader or you aren’t capable of leading, but rather, because you made a choice to lead something that you aren’t great at leading! let me explain!

Let me take you back to your childhood, identify that one instance when leading gave you an immense high! It could be leading that debate competition, that sports team, or acing that quiz, it could be that rattling off numbers and wining a competition or it could be acing the class and leading your way to win the annual award- and now zoom back into your now and just run through the recent examples of when you think you lead well, really well! Do you see a connection, you possibly will! Leaders always lead exceptionally well on matters that they are intrinsically hardwired into- who they are, that is when leadership personifies and that is when magic happens, simply because you are playing to your natural strength of who you are, when you lead on aspects that are acquired and not natural to you, is when your ability to lead will drop from being great to good and this is where you will find majority of the corporate managers- who are actually good and perhaps great at directing- but average when it comes to the ability to lead!

There is also another bit that plays a vital role in impacting the leadership quotient and that is about the contextual settings! You see as long as the contextual settings are aligned to what your natural strength to lead is, you will see it easy to go further and wide, on the contrary, if you are coerced into leading that isn’t natural to you and if anther layer of competing context is applied by virtue of the settings around you, needless to say, that leadership assignment will seem to be like a boulder around the neck rather being a jewel adorning the crown of your professional achievements! So what is leadership quotient all about actually? What is the path to take and when do you know, something is not going the way it should and that you should pull those brakes!

Well, leadership quotient, as I said earlier is a personification of who you are and all that comes to you naturally to lead and sustain helped by supportive contextual settings! When each of these elements align aptly and you are adequately empowered that is when you get to deploy and utilize your leadership to the maximum potential and thereby your quotient will sail higher than the rest around you! Likewise, when any of these factors falter, they will tend to be a drag, that is when you will experience a drag towards deploying your leadership and eventually will find it more and more complicated to lead yourself, let alone others!

The trick to sail high on leadership quotient, is to play it to your natural fields that you can lead effortlessly, next, if that is not a choice, than make the acquired ones’ as naturally aligned to yourself as much as possible and work towards making the contextual settings fall around in alignment with the purpose of you active leadership! Sure enough, not all leaders get to experience high leadership quotient all through their leadership, but the essence lies in increasing the frequency of all that blends in to enhance your leadership quotient- the ability to deliver, in a sustained manner over a long timelines, playing on your strengths- natural or acquired by ensuring that the contextual settings align and work to further your cause!

So, final words if you ask me, I would say this, Leadership Quotient is all about practicing leadership in a way that personifies who you are and practicing it in an area that is natural to you, if not that than in a field which you can embrace as your own and while doing all of that ensuring that all the other variables around align to empower and further your cause so that your Leadership stands out as a shining example about, “How Leadership must be” and that is what the essence of being high on the Leadership Quotient is all about!

Leadership begins with you and so does it rise and fall with you! Leadership is but a personification of who You are and resonates in action all that you are and all that you stand up for and stand against for! High Leadership Quotient is a recognition of the Leader within you, whether you are busy leading yourself or an organization, how well you do it or will do it, is what the leadership quotient is all about!

I leave you with these thoughts for now, urging you to engage with yourself to begin with and assess, how high you think you are or want to be on the Leadership Quotient and what is that you want to do next to take that to the level- where you can say that- You have arrived as a Leader- that You always wanted to be!

Ciao for now, will be back soon with another article, until then stay safe and stay wise!

The Teacher.

~ Parimal Aluri ~ Leave a comment

As over a billion souls celebrate “Teachers’ Day” in India, what better to write about on this, 5th day of September. If you want to know why and how about this day, click here and get the context! Dr. Radhakrishnan was a great soul, a giant among the giants- it was that time in the history of India, when even within the political class there was space for brilliant geniuses to take centre stage, collaborate, contribute and lead! Well sure enough this piece is not about him, rather giving a context was necessary before we moved ahead to know “THE TEACHER”! What is it to be a teacher? Who can be one? and what does a real teacher do? Join me as we understand, unravel and get a bearing on this subject, which touches us every day of our life!

I had written sometime back on Guru in the workplace- to write about a teacher is a whole new level! India, is as ancient as one can think about and the civilization’s strength were not always the material wealth but more importantly the wealth of knowledge! Wise people, sages, seers and the great philosophical minds across the world have known this singular universal truth, that irrespective of everything and anything, the most potent weapon/ tool as you may like to address it has always been and will ever be the human mind and what goes into this wonder of evolution is what- your teachers nurture you with!

Teachers’ as a term is not limited only to the ones’ you came across in your school or college or your managers and seniors at the workplace, your gym instructor, your yoga or meditation teacher, it is basically everyone and anyone that you have been able to, are and will learn from- learn something that enriches you- your soul- to first uplift you to see a new perspective and than enabling you to share the same with the others around you- who are able to assimilate and sustain that new learning!

We live in an era now a days, where students get to choose teachers’, unlike the times of the ancient Gurukula system when the student would be fortunate enough to be taught by a much sought after teacher! Anyways, there’s not much that we can do individually around that, but what I am now going to discuss, perhaps will be of much value and interest to you as well! Great Teachers’ don’t always have Great Students and neither do Great Students always have Great Teachers! So what does this tell you something about being a teacher? read on!

The essential connect between the Teacher and the Student (apart from their personalities) is the Quality and Value of the Content! Learning doesn’t take place in vacuum, it needs social space and settings to be practiced, improvised, rejuvenated and deployed. Consider this, if you were to learn to swim- fair enough- you can swim in the swimming tank with a depth of 5 metres, now what if you are asked to swim across the notorious English Channel or in the Sea- what do you think? Will you swim or will you sink? Technically you have learnt what it takes to swim- so by that measure you should be able to swim, isn’t it? But, you too know for a fact that taking an approach route of going from the swimming tank to the Sea- will be nothing more than a shortcut to your grave! So why does the learning not help here? For the simple reason that all teaching and all learning happens in a contextual setting and unless there is improvisation done by the student on their own, applying their discerning mind- that learning will ever be stagnated with no way to go- forward and no place to come back! It’s that uncomfortable feeling of being stuck- plain stuck! So how do people achieve greatness, you may ask? Sure enough people do, but the story there lies not merely in the technical detail about what is been taught, but the real essence lies in who is “THE” teacher and who is “THE” student- what are their goals, aspirations, desires, vision. Unless there is an alignment of vision, desire, aspirations between the Teacher and the Student- no matter how sincere the intent is- how genuine he effort may be- the student’s mind will ever remain a half soaked sponge! Unless and until the contextual settings of their lives, the desires/goals don’t sync-in end-to-end, there will be no magic of greatness created and hence greatness is a rarity by itself and when it comes to evaluating that between a Teacher- Student relation, it’s even more rarer! Think about this bit! There are so many sport coaches around the world- not all are famous- but all are competent to be a sport coach! Sport coach may teach thousands of students, only one among them goes to be the game changer- an icon for the game, not all become world famous- only a few! This happens only when the intent/desire/goals/ aspirations of the students and the teacher align and are favored by contextual settings around. This is the singular secret to achieve greatness by learning from a great master and being able to create magic for everyone by deploying those great learnings!

Another vital aspect of teaching is that, the success/ failure of the teacher is not reflective of the competence/ incompetence of the teacher, rather it is reflective of the student- the student’s ability to remain steadfast, focused, observant and importantly the degree of awareness that the student has acquired! Consider this, if the teacher was the problem, you would have had either equally dumb or equally wise students and likewise the societies would have been too uniformly smart or dumb across, but that never happens ( how I wish!), and the reason for that is the fact that, is the Teacher- Student relationship, even the best teacher and the most vibrant content and quality will be of hardly any use, unless the student allows that to impress upon their hearts and minds! This final veto power- rather how that is used or abused is what goes on to shape the students approach, attitude and altitude that they are able to touch in their lives! As long as this is attuned to the philosophies, guidelines, content quality and has been improvised well, education and learning serves its purpose and individuals are empowered. It is these empowered individuals that go on to create vibrant societies and thats what makes the world a better place- as you see variation in the quality of empowerment- the society too will reflect corresponding variance in its ways of life!

One more final truth- The Teacher can be anyone- for the observant and curious mind- if you remember how you were when you were a toddler and a young kid- you went to everyone (unless you were cranked up) and you observed, studied and grasped what you could from everyone and anyone around- whether that was a human, an animal, a stone or a toy! All of that gave your mind a bossier dose of imagination, which as you grow also helps you to dream and perhaps the ability to dream is the biggest gift that we as humans have (sadly lot of them are forgotten, by the time we wake up and only nightmares keep coming back!). As long as you are able to keep your mind young- vibrant- like that of a baby- ever curious, asking questions, re-visiting the basics and reading that subject again and again just to know perhaps you will find something different now, maybe that sentence did not connect than, but now it does….so on and so forth, once you arrive at this frame of learning- you are a student for life and of life and there can be- rest assured no greater Teacher that you will ever meet than the life that you live and the lives that you are able to influence around you!

So what does a teacher do? You may want to finally ask this! Well as the Zen masters have said- The Wise Teacher, doesn’t tell you what to see, but rather where to look!, Likewise a wise Teacher doesn’t ever ask you what to think or how to think- the teacher simple presents the knowledge and the context. Applying your mind, researching, seeing the contrasts of narratives and deducing inference and logic is what the student’s mind is supposed to do! We live in an era, where what we hear, is crap, what we see or are shown is perhaps misleading, at a time when every person lives unto their own truth and one person’s reality seems to be another’s fiction, it only makes sense to empower students, by helping them to know the contexts allow their minds to deduce what they seem more appropriate through their research, curiosity and observation! The higher that quality, the higher will be their relative success in the times ahead!

Teachers’ through ancient history have always been and will always remain to be the unsung heros’ of the progress that we as humanity have witnessed across societies! Societies/ Kingdoms / Nations alike have risen and fallen in proportion to the rise and fall of the quality and value that teachers’ have been able to create and share with members of the society. Whenever and wherever Teachers’ have suffered, societies have taken a dive, when they have been empowered, societies have risen and raced ahead!

I leave you here, urging you to reach out to the student and the teacher within you and see who’s playing on your mind and who’s playing with your mind! Stay curious, stay inquisitive and no matter how far or how high you reach- stay grounded and read those lesson again- as your experiences of life get altered, the same things read earlier, begin to mean different!

Ciao for now! Will be back soon with another article, until then keep learning, keep teaching and stay connected! Observe and Think!

Conflict of Values.

~ Parimal Aluri ~ Leave a comment

The title is what we were, are and will ever and always be! Three words but humanity is encapsulated into this frame, try it the way you want to! Join me for a short piece as we try to explore and understand what is this conflict of values all about and why does it play a vital role that it does!

Ever since we are able to make sense and through our formative years, we are always told about values, beliefs and way of life which is supposed to be “the way” and perhaps in a few extreme cases , “the only way” to live and go about our lives! Well so far so good, as long as you see this concept in isolation, one person’s truth remains to be with that person in the confines that the person is going about their lives! The fun really starts as people begin to cross your path and if you are blessed even with an average working brain- you are all set for the proverbial, “conflict of values” and this is where people are formed and destroyed, rise up or are buried into the oblivion, because when it comes to the conflict of values, it is never about whose value is better over the other, rather it is about how well is an individual’s value able to stand the test of time and competing values to keep your persona steady and on the chosen path that you have set out to tread upon! Let me explain this space for you!

You see, as individuals, we are indoctrinated with the values that are handed over to us from our family or the immediate impacting surroundings that may be surrounding us, as we make progress and begin to meet others, we become more and more familiar with what the other person’s values are, we do, what I call is a “value trade off”- remember the school days- something like those play dates, sharing of cup cakes kind of thing- ya, real cute bits like that- we basically start to gravitate to values which make our life easy- easy to manage, progress and maneuver and that’s how it is with each one of us- trust me there is nothing wrong and right about this bit. By now, you may want to ask, if we are all a mixture of traded values in terms of personality- why do we then end up being so different from each other- so much of individuality? Well, the answer is that depends on how you apply the values to what you do as you go about your life! You see values are like the proverbial double edged sword- it can cut the veggies for you and it can cut you as food for someone else! So our individualistic discerning mind, applied to the values that we hold in a context that we god about living our lives, is what we are- as a sum total of all of these variables! Each time either the value, the mind or the contextual settings are altered – you will no longer tend to remain who you are and you will experience a personality shift and that is how we come to the next bit of Value types!

If you ask me, knowing that I really like to keep things simple, I see Values only of two types- Negotiable and Non-Negotiable. Primarily negotiable values are those where you are ready to cross that line of social behaviour or approach to ensure something gets done- without inviting collateral damage or harm and whatever that is is manageable. Non-Negotiable Values are basically your personification- you in Action- and these are something that you are not ready under any amount of pressure to give up – even if that were to cause danger to your very existence! Consider this, say you imbibe the value of liberty and security of your nation- would you be ready to die, if asked to? Well, if that’s your non-negotiable value- you would certainly go all the way to be remembered as a fallen hero than rather live like a hopeless and coward member of an enslaved society. Consider another example, you believe that you will not pay bribes if found violating traffic signals and just as you had it, you are racing for that all important meeting and now, you have a choice, either follow the rule, leave your vehicle, miss that million dollar deal meeting, perhaps loose your job and walk your way home, or slide in that dollar, apologize a hundred times (be honest about that!) and get to that meeting and as you end your day, thank the Lord for being kind, you cracked the deal, made your money, still have your job and have your vehicle! You perhaps still feel guilty about paying that bribe- but than you see the entire context around it and settle down promising yourself never to anything like that ever again! So what do you think you would have done- something similar right? Well, sure enough- see as humans we are hardwired to ensure that we survive and in the modern day context our survival is no longer the wild animals and mad race to tame the world- it is about ensuring that we are able to sustain and progress the lifestyle that we have chosen or aspire to have and for doing that we utilize our value system as an internal gyroscope. Every time our values are challenged or end up in a conflict with another person’s (as it will normally be that way- unless you are that crazy scientist or that gifted surgeon- working away individually) we have life changing events and manifestations coming to the fore and these either form us or break us either-ways redefining who we are!

A lot of politics, conflicts and corporate bitching that goes on in this world , is nothing but the cloaked presence of these conflicting values! You see you have a manager that you report into who believes to that Tea is better than Coffee and hence all Tea drinkers are better than Coffee and you just mentioned to him the other day – how much you love your Coffee and how you are ready to even kill someone for that! (well this is just an example!). So, what you have now done is opened up a Pandora’s box to compete and pit values against each other and this is where the funnier part begins to get dangerous! Offices are replete with examples how, conflicts ensues from reasons ranging from email drafting, to picking up the phone in three rings , to wearing the ID in a particular manner and so on and so forth- these are all nothing more but manifestation of Value Conflicts- where the one who can impose their values on to other s always seems to be getting the upper hand! Well there is nothing wrong and right about this, as I said earlier, many organisations have this whole space around storming, norming an forming to being in congruence and alignment among people of a team. That works well only and only if there is enough space allowed for individual non-negotiable values to co-exist alongside non-negotiable values of the team or the organisation as the case may be! Let me explain!

Consider you run a design studio and have a bunch of design geeks with you, as crazy as they would be- not to forget each strong and rooted in their own individual design philosophy- so now if this organisation has to make any progress even for an inch ahead- it has always to remember to value the intrinsic value systems that these strong individuals hold and always work to ensure that these individual values align , co-exist and are applied to meet the organisational value systems that it may have etched itself with as far as design sensibilities and approach to design goes! As long as this is done and every individual gets that freedom around , there will be magic coming through their work, on the contrary if that individual value st system is stiffed and people are made to work to corporate templates and design manuals- in not time- whether you work for a burger company or an automobile company everything will begin to look the same! So should conflict of values be avoided? Certainly not!

In fact conflict of values is something that should be embraced and encouraged (but not intentionally planted or created for the heck of it). As we grow, not all values that we hold remain dear to us with the same intensity! You may have negotiable ones’ becoming non-negotiable, few may fade away, new ones’ would come in, that is what is reflected the way we mature and grow and how much of maturity, sanity and wisdom we bring to life is nothing but the aggregation of the values that we hold within us in that movement of time! We are constantly forming, day in, day out at times consciously and yet at other times unconsciously, we are receiving and giving away our feelers to the universe and everyone around us that’s how we begin to like whom we hate, dislike whom we adored and so on and so forth, that dynamism is the essence of human progress and growth! As long as you are able to create competition among values that individuals bring with them in a manner that helps these values compete and align to a greater cause and eventually either become something else which benefits all, everything is fine and helpful! However when these very values embark upon dangerous ego rides and get hitched on the wrong shoulders, disasters happen and that is when you have organisations folding up, nations going to war and society getting ripped apart! So what’s the final word? Here you go!

All of us, You, and I included are nothing but an act of our values within- how we present ourselves to the world personifies what we have within and who we are, sure enough not everyone will be able to see as we want them to look at us and that is a different challenge of perception (will talk about that some other time!). More importantly we are constantly changing as far as peripheral values are concerned- core perhaps will not change (unless you have really survived something nasty!) and that dynamism of values is vital to keep your presence as vibrant as it should be so that relevance and acceptance go hand in hand wherever you choose to project yourself! When your values get into conflict, You will always be the winner irrespective if your values stay, get altered or you acquire news ones’ for the older ones’ you had , as long as your mind is aligned to utilize those values for the causes that serve the greater good! You see copper sulfate is a great insecticide but if you forget to wash your fruits coated with it, you will end up having home runs to the washroom for a day at least!

Values are absolute, no two values are ever equal, because no two people holding them are ever the same! Once you have known this secret, you have aligned your life for the greater good, with a soul that yearns to embrace the conflict of values to form and forge you ever more, one moment unto the next so that you continue to be who you are, adding up what serves you and doing away with all that threatens to harm you or weigh you down!

I will leave you here with these thoughts, urging you to get in touch with the values that you hold within- which are negotiable, which aren’t, how do they make you- who you are in the now that you exist and how you plan to embrace the conflict of values as your venture out to meet new people, friends sand colleagues to make the world a shade better than what it was yesterday!

Ciao for now, will be back soon with another one! Until than stay safe, Stay wise and stay authentic!

The makings of a banana republic!

~ Parimal Aluri ~ Leave a comment

As the world races from one election to another, one political narrative to another, what better time to actually explore if you and I are part, cause or effect of a banana republic in the making! Join me as we explore, to understand if we are where we should be or we are in some grave tight spot and if that’s the case is there anything that can be done about it? Except the high handed bitching and tea sessions wherein ideas are born and buried with no real consequence or intent!

All banana republics almost always start with an utopian concept- which wisdom says is pure shit, but for reasons varying from society wide ignorance, to war of the narratives everything in between colludes and ends up presenting the chosen path to be THE path and this how the disaster starts to unfold! More often than not banana republics at this stage are always enslaved to what I call as “Sway of the popular idea” These ideas can actually promise everything and anything, but what people tend to overlook is the fact that, these promises are completely useless and never what is actually required by the people! You would have seen recent examples around the pandemic as nations raced to develop strategies, you had everyone becoming an overnight expert on Virology and Viruses – irrespective of what qualifications people had or not- everyone had a brilliant idea (almost short of a Nobel Prize for Medicine) and every two weeks that idea resembled to be as dumb as the originator of it! In that space few wise people across the world gave this brilliant thought of shutting down the economies world wide and ended up transforming a health emergency into an economic one! So you, see examples like these and others are rampant everywhere and this is perhaps the first indication that the society where you are is racing ahead to be a ripened banana republic! So what gets societies and people to this zone?

Ignorance and Indifference- these are perhaps the the most fundamental of attributes that cause societies to become banana republic in their won way- at times – sections of societies pertaining to a particular service area end up becoming a sham or at times whole societies end up becoming one happy-go-lucky tribe and needless to say when that happens- anarchy sets in. The indifference and ignorance however manifests when societies are failed by people who are supposed to lead them and more importantly that goes a long way to speak volumes about the quality of leadership that a society has been exposed to not for a few moths or years, but in many cases for decades and generations! If you look around and want to see the singular thread that binds all progressive, non-banana republic societies it is the quality of leadership! The quality of leadership alone ensures that elements and constituents within society never end up being indifferent or ignorant- whether members of a society like something or not, their being vocal and visible about an issue is at the core of a vibrant and thriving society!

When leadership begins to fail people, ignorance sets in first, if not checked, then indifference sets in and once this overlooked, well nothing actually remains about the original society to begin with! Based on intrinsic attitudes and disposition of individuals few people will embrace ignorance as nothing really matters to them, likewise few will try to be indifferent and try to stay focused only on what matters to them! Let me explain, say you have the most challenged sections of the society- these are those people who, even in normal times are struggling to just stay alive- Naturally they will not give a damn to anything because all that they care is about staying alive and that’s how it is- these are the people who bring in the element of ignorance. Next, you have that section of society which has access to what they aspire for and hence that brings in the indifference to all the other aspects developing around because as long as they are not impacted, they would really not care even if the neighbor’s house burns down! No matter which society you are part of, these two sections can drive a sane society crazy to become a banana republic and societies which have an increasing numbers of these two sections of indifferent and ignorant people, reach that stage rapidly with predictable certainty! So what can be done about this, is there some way ahead?

It all starts with the quality of leaders and their leadership. You see, true leaders who inspire, lead and act not only manage to lead and direct societies, but importantly are able to carry along with them each and every section of the society thereby reducing the number of people who tend to be ignorant or indifferent. True leaders rally empathically and solicit participation from every corner of the society that they lead and this goes on to create live, vibrant societies, where discussion, debate and collaboration become healthy and way to live all done with a singular focus to create a better tomorrow for everyone involved! Needless to say, it is only when real leaders are allowed to lead and connect that societies thrive and are kept away form the impending dangers of turning into a banana republic. So how can you and I make the difference?

Well each time you get an opportunity to select a leader, weigh the importance in this context, you want a leader who can direct and lead to a future that is inclusive and for everyone and not for a select few. You want to elect a leader who thrives and believe in individuality and collaboration as well. It is only when unique individuals collaborate that a vibrant society emerges and it is from this vibrance that stories of human progress and growth get etched into the memoirs of humanity! When you and I become the leader or choose a leader, we are not only ensuring our today but importantly we are creating a promise for the future to ensure that the societies that we are living in don’t end up being a banana republic threat we don’t want them to be! Finally, even if they do, we all know how long ripe bananas live and the rejuvenation is always certain, the only problem that, its painful, rapid and complicated, all of which is better avoided!

I leave you here with a singular thought, that whether you lead or are being lead, do ensure that you carry along with you every single person that goes on to make the fabric of your society, vibrant and thriving societies are the only real promises that we can offer to our following generations to continue the advancement and progress of humanity, the way it should be!

Ciao for now, will be back soon with another one! Until than, stay connected, lead or be lead mindfully!

Collective Intelligence.

~ Parimal Aluri ~ Leave a comment

The way that you have been familiar about collective intelligence is perhaps through the ways that it presents itself, like a group think, empowered groups, think tanks, special advisory task forces and so on and so forth. Join me here as we explore why collective intelligence works and at time doesn’t and what is that we can do to harness its seemingly unlimited power of the aggregated human minds!

To understand about why and how collective intelligence works, we must understand what is the whole story about intelligence to begin with! Well, I am no psychologist, but if you ask me what Intelligence means to me, well simply put- it is about bringing together, your experience, academic credentials, skills, competencies all of that to a moment and applying it to overcome a challenge that you are staring at! Sure enough you also require to add in other external aspects like knowledge, information and your own ability to stay wise to the context that you may be living about. So what limits our individual intelligence?

The whole issue with intelligence is that, it is dependent on multiple intrinsic aspects and the most important being- the Quality- the quality of the past experiences, quality of the value system followed and everything that goes on to construct the individuality of the person, needless to say if this quality is average- what is an ordinary problem ends up being an extraordinary challenge for an individual, while the same becomes a cake walk for someone else and that’s how we have end up having intelligent people acting dumb- because they are limited by the boundaries of their own intelligence. Can this be overcome? certainly, it cane be and hold your thoughts as we will visit this part towards the end of this article.

When it comes to collective intelligence, it is about applying the intelligence of a group of people to address something that they are working on or have been asked to sort out! The essence of collective intelligence is that, collective intelligence is only as effective as the quality of individual intelligence of the people in that group! In a way collective intelligence is the net intelligence of the members in a group (not the average intelligence) because when you have very intelligent people or very average/ dumb people coming in to apply collective efforts- it almost always ends up into even more ambiguity! You see the super intelligent group- will spend a lot of time shooting down great ideas (you know how this bit works!) and the average or below average group will go after every idea or thought (hoping something will work!) to hit one crisis after the other! Hence it’s no wonder that at one end of the spectrum you have some amazing minds working as a group and deploying solutions through pure innovation and ingenuity- space exploration, futuristic technologies are all part of this group and on the other end you have those never ending mundane groups which go on to address the routine problems of the corporate world and those meetings just seems to go on and on and strangely enough the problems too tend to keep coming back and back each time disguised as something else! So what is getting played out?

As I said earlier, people get limited by their intelligence and whether you are working on something individually or collectively, this remains! So as long as the horizon of your intelligence is far and wide, you will get into a tight spot, not because that you are reflecting incompetence, but simply because you are trying to venture into something that your intelligence is not equipped to deal with! Intelligence led failures are not because of incompetence, but mostly are owing to not been equipped to deal with what is manifesting- our pandemic is the case in point! No matter how advanced our science has been, irrespective of hundred and hundreds of the best minds collaborating to seek solutions to the menace, even to this day, as I write, we come across new findings and new insights about the virus and what seemed a scientific solution three weeks back, now seems to be all but vain! So how can we overcome this fragility of our intelligence, is there a way? Sure you can and this is how you go about it!

It is about doing, what great thinkers, seers and philosophers have always done- Internalize and Reflect. The human brain happens to be is a one of the most potent bio machines- and when it finds no challenge – it goes into a mode- what I call- “Leave me alone” or “Do whatever” and when people start functioning and going about their lives using this mode of the brain- the result is recurrence of same problems in different ways- as the vital, radical course correction is missing which is so much needed to arrive at a different outcome! Similar or same actions will almost and always give the same result as long as the context are the same, only when the thinking alters, will the outcome!

So, the only way, if you ask me to overcome the challenges of limited intelligence, is by expanding your horizon of intelligence and whether you want to do that for problems that you work upon individually or as part of a group. The way to expand your intelligence is by constantly spilling the cup of your mind, emptying it regularly and replenishing it with what’s relevant and recent! We live in an era where we are bombarded by information and not knowledge, unless you align your mind to acquire knowledge that is recent and updated and that serves your area of life and work- your intelligence will always continue to be more hollow than you really know!

Minds that are constantly emptied and replenished are the ones’ that lead and provide fresh perspective to age old problems or are often better equipped to provide solutions to new challenges! Although it looks deceptively simple, the task of throwing away something that you know (when it doesn’t serve you) and making space for something new (for which you have to take efforts) is perhaps the most difficult to do! It’s only when you have gained the ability to direct and manage your mind well, that you will be able to (with practise) see new perspectives and possibly identify the blocks to your thinking mind. When you do this is as an individual and when individuals in a group are able to do this, as a routine and make it natural to have a fresh and vibrant mind on an ongoing basis, a mind that is filled to the brim with what serves and and all that doesn’t make n impact is junked that the quality of collective thinking improves and you can than see groups coming up with path breaking ideas and moments!

Collective Intelligence progresses and fosters only as long as the minds of the individuals that form the group apply themselves to the conscious effort of keeping themselves relevant, updated and in-synced with what serves them and do away with thievery that doesn’t help.

For an organisation, society or a nation to progress, it is but imperative that vibrant thinking by empowered minds remains at the forefront at all times and for that to happen the quality of Intelligence needs to be enhanced with every passing moment by replenishing what helps and weeding out what doesn’t hold up to the present beliefs and the oncoming future!

I will leave you here with these thoughts for now, urging you to reflect on how you are ensuring that your Intelligence is vibrant and what are the groups that you represent and when was the last time, were you able to come up with a vibrant idea that was path breaking empowered by your expanded and updated Intelligence!

Ciao for now, will be back soon with another article! Until than stay progressively intelligent! Stay safe!

Guard your intelligence.

~ Parimal Aluri ~ Leave a comment

Waking up every day to some next level of crap seems like has become the new normal in the times that live in! Even in times of global pandemic societies the world over have been blessed to witness arson, rioting and looting for one reason or the other. If this political and social unrest is not enough, we have the never ending surprises springing up at the workplace that we are yet engaged with or we were engaged with! Whether it’s the uncertainty of the next paycheck, or the heavily laced work environments as each person tries to protect their turf and survive the job cuts and pay adjustments as much and as far as possible- Every sense and sensibility seems to have been thrown right out of the window and people are now, more than ever before in the recent history of humanity are reacting and reacting to situation as they evolve rather than proactively altering the narrative and responding to what emerges! Join me here as we try to understand what the real stories are behind the ones that get played out and is there anything that one can do in these contextual time warps to guard their intelligence and sustain their sanity! So here we go!

So, to begin with what does your mormal day seem to be like- well chances are you are waking up to that piece of aggregated advertorial- which some refer as newspaper- where the headlines are nothing more than a well curated orchestra of the collusion between the politicians of the day and the business that owns that piece of information thrown in front of your doorstep. Depending on who has how many such pamphlets are thrown public opinion is been swayed and directed to think in a particular manner about a certain topic and this is where the real game begins! If that was not enough- you have other avenues of intrusion that come into your life- that post on a social media handle, that craze for the likes you want to garner, or that comment which either puts you on cloud 9 or throws you into the abyss which either calls you to start with a smoke or start getting worked up for no real sense of reason! Add to this the real or created challenges at the workplace where you are possibly still hanging around by a thread or the business that your struggling to keep afloat! Politics, corporate bitching, undercutting, changing polarities, missing common sense and that rare arrival of intelligence among all this noise- sure seems to be too much to be handled by an individual for even one day! Well, the fact is that we actually ending up whiling away our whole lives doing this same thing or variations of these day in and day out and seldom realize what we have really achieved in the sense of the word called achievement and what we have really missed- missed as in something that web should have been anchored to and which we have lost never to get back! To all of this when you add that penultimate layer of your inner circle of your family and friends- well that is almost all about it and beyond this point you are already drowned enough, at times even forgetting to breathe for yourself to ensure that you stay alive! So what’s this chaos and noise all about, which simply doesn’t seem to go away and the more we try to fix it, it ends up fixing us and our approach to it and life in a way that we even forget what we had set out to do!

This, my friend is the modern day warfare of information which attacks, continuously and repeatedly your mind and more importantly your intelligence! You see, knowledge is about knowing what has already happened and all the entirety around it- What helps humans to keep progressing ahead and moving ahead is Intelligence- Intelligence which uses, Knowledge coupled with experience to create a pathway using ingenious ways to secure a pint in the future which moves away from the problems of yesterday and today as we see them emerge and dissipate and at tims compete around us all the time! Once Intelligence is attacked it is the proverbial death sentence to our very existences- because then we are no longer thinking and feeling humans- we are rather directed biomechanical units which perform what is expected of us by the people who have the power to have that done from us- this is that dangerous place where the top 1% control, strategise and direct humanity to perform and execute what works for them! Think about it a planet with over 7.5 billion souls all controlled and directed by a few thousand people- politicians, businesses, technocrats, innovators, authors,mercenaries, spiritual gurus- there is virtually almost one representative from every imaginable sector that you can think of who are part of this elitist of the elite club that wants to reduce humanity to cyborgs and biomechanical machines who think less and feel nothing and this is why the very critical need to guard your intelligence so that you don’t end up being the next victim in this scheme of things! Don’t trust or find it hard to believe- well live you life and tell me ten years later- if thats’ the way you think it works! Being a scientist, I can tell you one thing, you don’t have to burn your finger to know if the water is bling or not and this is what separates people who guard their Intelligence and those who outsource it! So why does this occur and is there a way around, through or over it? Well read on!

As societies evolved we have had different ages or definitions of power, there was a classical ancient time when knowledge was power and the ones’ who had it, manipulated and directed kingdoms and empires to their whims and fancies at times for the greater good and at times leading them to catastrophic disasters especially when a layer of human greed and the aspects of cardinal sins was applied around that! We then had a period of medieval history and recent modern history which saw the maturity of kingdoms and nations as governance matured and innovators and scientists arrived at the scene as new age heros and they were hailed and nations/kingdoms who had more of them invariably saw more progress and development and this has been the foundation of the last century and this is what has lead us to where we are now in this moment! If there has been any singular common thread running through the centuries, it has been the fact that each time humanity has worked cohesively for the greater good of society the society or nation has thrived and made great progress benefiting every person associated with that network! Each time the efforts have been subverted, sabotaged owing to greed of a few in those very societies we have seen downfall and misery arising again and again and all the negative aspects of humanity, whether that be wars, famines, capitalistic greed, political and social unrests all of these and many such challenging connotations of society have made their presence felt and very often robbed away those societies of all the progress that they would have done in the last few decades! Now the question you may want to ask is, why do supposedly intelligent sections of the society fall into this kind of unsettling trap? Well as statisticians say, numbers are very funny, once you learn how to play around with them, you can have 1 being greater than 2 depending on where the decimal lies and where the zeroes fall!

Once people let their guard down and start to consume everything that they see, read, hear or are spoken about as true and fail to apply common-sense and science to verify and test the veracity of the claims, individuals and societies set themselves up for their downfall by shutting down their ability to think! This is why you must guard your intelligence, because intelligence alone is what gives the potent power to analyse, debate and critically test everything and anything that is presented and this is why people who are locked into the prison of their knowledge seldom shake hands with intelligence- as they are trapped in the times bygone which hardly have any or have a rapidly losing contextual relevance to the present moment and for those yet to arrive!

Sections of societies, that elite group knows this fact quite well and hence the war of the narratives– eternal and evergoing- where they want to create issues where none exist,want to sweep away what needs to be addressed and all this done- with a single purpose- to direct your thinking to the way that suits their agenda and purpose and unwittingly people succumb to this and before you realise it, you have diminished your ability to think afresh, anew or be innovative and than are permanently resigned to the instructions and apparent guidance by these very 1% lords that hold the power to sway individuals and societies the way they wish to! So if this is that bad, is there a way around it, can individual make a difference? What’s the path ahead? Read on!

The most assuring part of intelligence is that it is there- it’s about whether you use it or not! So it’s like that electricity supply which is always on and you need to flip that switch to access the light you need to or that AC that you want, but the whole point here is that there has to be an effort made to flip that switch! Flipping the switch and the right one is the essence of using intelligence sparingly like salt is to food to create magic and outcomes that have the promise for the masses and serve the greater good rather than becoming a self-centric exercise! This intrinsic power of intelligence is what is feared by the 1% club and hence the ever aggressive race to create smokescreens and false narratives to try and blind out intelligence! So where and how do we begin?

The easiest and the the perhaps the right place is to begin with you- beginning with oneself- as the foundation – as an aspect of self-awareness and knowing well what serves you and what doesn’t- is the first step to ensure that your immediate circle remains free of unwanted garbage, clutter and nonsense that can creep in- under the guise of “critical or breaking news”. Once you have sanitised your immediate area- you have ample space to think, deliberate, maneuver and progress at a pace, time and path chosen by you- yes you alone and that is what makes the whole difference between being a leader/clutter breaking individual or a follower and part of the masses! Once you have secured his inner space, the next step and perhaps equally important one is about building gates that check and recheck what’s been allowed into your clean zone, ideas, people, opportunities, thoughts, everything and anything- because like a virus on the prowl, one bad entity is enough to unleash a cascade of unfortunate events which can bring down even the most intelligent of people, ideas and opportunities! I will stop short of getting into details of how we do it and what steps does it entail, because each one of us is unique – as unique we can be and our contextual truths of life are perhaps stranger than fiction and that’s where the opportunity too lies to defeat and win over the 1% elite club- by creating distractions and moves banking on our intrinsic intelligence to help us achieve what serves the greater good for us and the society around us! This, my friend is the essence of guarding deploying our intelligence, no matter what the pressure we face or what the odds that we face!

I will leave your here with these thoughts, urging you to take a moment to notice what’s driving you- rather what is that you are driving you life through or are you getting driven around! Wisdom lies in deciphering Knowledge from Intelligence and applying Intelligence to make knowledge work for your present and future and not allowing Knowledge to entrap your intelligence to the bygone eras!

Ciao for now, will be back soon with another article, Until then stay wise, knowledgeable and intelligent and yes, don’t consume all that comes your way- remember -even the virus got sent!

The Work From Home pandemic!

~ Parimal Aluri ~ 5 Comments

I know you may think, I am out of my mind, but trust me, when I say the next challenges pertaining to human creativity , collaboration and trust are all going to arise from this so -called magic bullet of work-from-home! Join me here as we try to gauge what is perhaps greatly amiss and why what’s missing here will eventually end up causing the next pandemic with connotations spanning the mental health, financial health and work health of individuals and corporations world over! So here we go!

As the virus came calling, governments did what humans are great at doing- imitation- yes imitate what’s happening with the other nation; so as one nation locked down, so did others- well not to blame anyone for so much little was even known as things started to go from bad to worse and by the time people knew what had to be done and there was too much of cheese all over the place to avoid people from tripping, falling and breaking their bones- so the holy answer to all problems became the lock down and with that piece of unwarranted medical harakiri came the second unintended consequence of “work from home”!

People forgot in no time,even their ability to think and see how suddenly, just because the law of the land said so,working from home became fine! It is the same company perhaps, which would have made you move houses so that you could cut the traffic and reach on time, perhaps it is the very same firm which said, the offer letter could be given only if you stayed within a 10 mile radius and can make it ot the office on time, these are the very same offices which cut your leaves, salaries because you clocked in ten minutes late , three times over in a month just as recently as a few months back, now they all seemed to be just fine- for them- even as your privacy and peace at home has been plundered, looted and laid threadbare- whether it is that pet calling for you attention, that maid coming in at the critical moment through you presentation or the small kid who simply doesn’t understand what the parent is doing toying around with an electronic gadget- all and many such more minute scenarios are laying the foundation for your next disaster in the making and if you are not careful, the next one will even shame the virus- because the next challenge coming your way will be more personal- created by you and can only be solved by you!

To begin with, let’s try to understand what has actually happened! One fine day, your organisation was informed it’s not business as usual- like many others you too rejoiced with the thought of being able to work in your pyjamas and seem cool- to post snaps from your kitchen and show your superhuman skills of being able to work at home and for office at the same time- well this was the first checkmate- you just proved to your firm that the work given by your firm- and the price at which it was given to you doesn’t seem to make any sense- so as a consequence- your work-from-home hours suddenly started to stretch beyond your levels of comfort and sanity- so that now forget the kitchen you also find it a challenge to relieve yourself! Add to this the next layer of complication that gets added when you have more number of family members “working from home”- conversations overlap, conversations are overheard, jokes become a pain point and tonality becomes a point of debate- next any remaining confidentiality- whether its that email to your colleague., vendor or boss- doesn’t miss the attention of the other members and often your emails will be spell checked and langage refined- finally at some point your people from office will know- you have got a communication expert sitting by you helping you counter your one more incompetence which now lies more exposed than ever!

Likewise there will be countless odditties that will come to the forefront and few of them will many a times not what you had been saying all the while to the people with whom you worked at the workplace and now that they have intruded your private space- well the sad fact is there is no place to go further and create ambiguity- so what does this to the trust between people? Well as colleagues you have mental images and comfort evolved dealing with specific individuals- not everyone you know makes you equally comfortable hence- you tell what you think is the level of comfort for both of you- but with this private space intrusion there is a new level of problem- a lot of people come to know what you have perhaps not told- because it may not have been necessary- or required or because you didn’t want to- in any case what that ends up doing (which again is unwarranted) is erodes a small amount of trust and once this process starts, trust me there is no going back and it’s just a matter of time that you will see so-called team re-alignments and working dynamics change and in extreme cases people shuffled across the board and in a few other case ejected from the system! All simply because your privacy got intruded and you really had not planned for this shit coming your way!

To all this drama when you add multiple stakeholders and also add the other work-from-home members from your residence (now which resembles kind of a public arena-because of the kind of activities that seem to start at 8am and end only around midnight!) the chaos and confusion only adds up and in some cases is bad enough to drive you crazy enough to either share some unpleasant exchanges with the people in the zone or simply hang up your boots and say a hasty goodbye to what would have otherwise been a smooth career pathway- the one that you had aspired for and set out to achieve right from your college days! So what’s really happening here? Is there a way out of this and way to manage this? How long will this go on and what’s really the matter- the work or you?

Let’s start from the beginning! Do you remember few of the conversations that you had when you took up this job (which has now intruded into your privacy)? Yes, topics like- work-life-balance, respect for private time, no calls or emails on holidays and weekends, why you must move closer so that you can commute and be in the office! Why the office discourages working from home- because they respect your privacy! and now this very office is advocating the very opposite of all that was said and agreed upon- why? The Virus- not at all- you see, global businesses, whether you are selling donuts or some high end jwellery have been under stress even before the pandemic broke out and globally the capitalists led- world of corporate blue collared elites have been waiting for an opportunity to correct the systemic wrongs and the pandemic just happened to be the blessing in disguise that they were ecer waiting for! This once in a lifetime opportunity gave them the reason to dishonour their corporate lease agreements, defer payments to vendors and staff indefinitely (unless in few nations where in the governments intervened and set the rules of engagement – to salvage some sanity), get even with the governments of the day to extract deep discounting for the next few years so on and so forth, not to forget the reset of their banking terms and conditions (the corporate ones- even as at an individual levels you still get hounded by debt collection calls!) So you see, the real thing about asking you to work from home is the least interest of your safety- but in the larger interest of corporate finance and the compulsions that go around with the nexus of business and politics the world over- nothing to say good about and nothing to whine- because neither I am the business nor the government! and you ended up thinking the work-from-home- intrusion to your privacy was a sacrifice that you are doing for upholding your company! Well keep thinking that way- and wait for the next nightmare!

The other serious level problem that has happened is that as individuals begin working connected through distributed spaces- human brain the way it is- trust erodes rapidly and you add a personality angle to it, this differentiating rate of trust erosion for all the right and wrong reasons helps accelerate the fall of teams and bring in the “new order”- read creating lean teams as the new need of the day- thereby kicking in pay cuts and job losses- each and every aspect of this is linked to the innocent looking solution of “work-from-home”! The things that help this, are the ability to track meticulously- time everything to the nth second and no more- lobby meetings, board room chats and walk around the office so the sudden addition of a 60-80 minutes of additional time through the day- ironically enough ends up making you look more non-productive than ever before and you too begin to loose a grip as the normal way of planning does not help as work seems to get over sooner than you think and as the battle to prove efficiency amongst colleagues takes centre stage- each one send sup undoing the other one and eventually create enough fluidity so that when the time comes- all are swept away in one masterstroke of team realignment! The only way that individuals hope that the organization still holds interest in them is by understanding if their home-office furniture ordered is coming in or not! I mean really! So is there anything that we can do, if this is all a game cast at the upper crest of societies and nations, do we stand a chance?

Well, as history says, when the war is with the system, you need to be in the system to beat the system or develop and evolve it, never has anyone been able to alter the course of history by staying aloof, unaffected or away from it! The fact remains that even as we engage and present ourselves to work with corporates or business houses- irrespective how experienced or inexperienced you are- you need to have your own intrinsic non-negotiable terms and conditions! Like all offices have a office rule book or a manual or better still a code of work , you too need to come up with a code book for your life- I mean, after all isn’t that the most important thing that you should ever be bothered about? Something that core and intrinsic, because when all else and everyone leaves you at some point in time- which they will certainly do- what stands with you apart from your shadow will be the core values systems and the intrinsic systems that construct and make you who you are! This, my friend is the essence of being able to stand firmly and face all the storms and high waves that may ever come your way- by harnessing the strength of who you are and for that to happen you need to be connected within and know yourself as well as you know the vocation that you pursue nor the people who matter you! Once you have cracked this essential adb vital code, rest assured, there could be a hundred more vurusses coming your way, the next time an organization asks you to work-from- home,you will know what is coming your way and chances are you’ll either insist to work form office or politely ask them to get in touch with you once the offices reopen! Exposing your private life for the capitalist greed of businesses and politicians is the last thing that you should ever do- this is similar to a soldier allowing spies into the nation! Think about it! Is anything really worth it -at the cost of peace, harmony and the wellbeing of the core unit that you represent in the society- the family that you have!

The work-from-home pandemic is the greatest illusion and perhaps even more dangerous than the virus, the virus will eventually will be tamed- there be vaccines and solutions through medical interventions, but the pandemic of work-from-home if allowed to get a foothold- will end up eroding the basic functional units of the societies the world over- these units could be families- small or large, could be partners living together, could be friends, or good people working on something bigger and better together! All of it will be lost to be enslaved to the greed of the growing capitalist clut with or without collusion of the political class of the day! The only way through this and to stem this, is by knowing who you are, what your value systems are and very importantly having the courage to say No- when enough is enough and guarding your private zone with every ounce of courage that you have!

I leave you here with these thoughts, for you to reflect, what your experiences have been and possibly urging you to create a blueprint for yourself and the unit that you hold close to you- so that you guard yourself from the next attack that may come your way disguised as yet another some new way of living or working!

Ciao for now, grab that coffee and I will be back soon with another article!

The only thing that matters…

~ Parimal Aluri ~ Leave a comment

Well, as you get ready for your weekend during these times, what better way can there be, to urge you to spend you weekend in knowing and discovering that, there are really only a very few things that will matter or that ever matter and it’s always wise and sane to know them and stay anchored along them! Join me here to know what this is all about and why these are really the only things that matter!

Our lives are always filled up completely to the the brim! Irrespective whether that filled cup makes sense to us or not, that’s what we get to handle each day of our lives, that filled cup is at times you work, at times its your family and some other times its your network/ friends/colleagues or all those areas that you tend to stay invested! Well there can be nothing right or wrong about that, each one of us is free to choose what matters and how much priority one gives to which area of ones’ life! The real trick though, is being able to understand and appreciate the depth and quality of the things that you consider to be a priority for yourself and re-check if thats really what you want the cup of your life to be filled up with completely all the time!

Well you may be working for yourself or for someone else, many a times, this space contributes the major part as far as keeping our cup filled up goes, the question here, is what are you really doing? Are you really sure that you want, your work area to dominate and take up so much of volume in the cup that you hold? Is it really worth it? Look around you what are you coming across (not necessarily now, things have been the same way for a long time, only now they are becoming more and more evident!), pay cuts, job losses, realignments, new loyalties, shut downs, all this even as you had your cup filled up and put in your efforts at an individual level and did what was right throughout- no questions asked, yet when the time arrives, you are the first one to face the shock? Why do you think this develops? If this is an area that is so important for your cup? How can it become redundant so sharply and quickly? What have you missed? Hold on your thoughts here and read on as you will be able to decipher the same we we move ahead!

Let’s explore the other aspect which goes on to complete your cup, your network, in few cases this part often takes up more space than the work part, yet few other times, there is a heady cocktail between this space and the work space- at times because of the nature of the work, some other times as an occupational hazard- which if not managed can evaporate both the elements of the work and network form your cup rapidly even before you realise! But wait, how does this network really help you, I mean if say there’s no work, does this come to your rescue- as in not helping you get back the work that has gone missing- but as in being there for you! How many of your networks can stand by you like a mountain- not helping you with the money or the next break- but by just being there? Well if you haven’t got any of these type of mountainous network elements standing by you, then sadly enough, you have just added additional baggage to your cup which occupies space- adds to your wright and actually does nothing to enhance the favour of your cup! So that’s so much about your network element within the cup and yes, you can sure enough weigh and read through other elements like friends and acquaintances through the same lens,the people who say they are there and then disappear as if they never existed! Now let’s move to the final elements of your cup!

The family area which takes up again the decent volume of your cup! Well, now depending on the originality of the contents and how they play out with regards to the flavors and intensity, either you will get a cup with an additional dose of vanilla or have a cocktail of tastes- leaving your mind tipsy and brains fried all the time! Well, since it’s about the part of the family, you too are equally responsible to what you end up getting in the context of tastes that come back to you! If you have been able to provide the right conditions, temperature and ambiance, the flavors will always resonate that and if you haven’t; well might as well prepare for what you have done- whether intentionally or unintentionally! Needless to say this element overrides all other elements in your cup and has the potential to unleash havoc or create great balance depending on its own intrinsic character! But did you notice, even as your cup is so filled up and has all elements that you ever can ask for or think about- you know what’s missing here? Its You!

You may argue, that all other elements in the cup are but an extension of who you are, certainly they are, but they are your extensions- you- perceived by the others and not the real you! This is where people struggle the most and tend to get waylaid easily as they rush through their busy lives holding to their cup of life- not realizing that what they hold and are managing is what the world exactly wants them to be- not necessarily who they really are or want to be! This fundamentally folly is what makes many of the lives around us a struggle- simply because we are living lives- not of what we should be because of who we really are but rather because of who we are perceived to be, by others whom we have ended up collecting around us either by intention or by accident! So is there any way around this or further to this, can anything be done and if yes, whats it?

The only way to go around this and the only wise way, is to ensure that “you” end up filling as much as volume you can in the cup that you hold and let this volume be filled up with “who you really are” and no matter what comes your way- ensure that you don’t loose that element- because once you have anchored yourself to who you are- You will then automatically gravitate and end up attracting other elements of family and network circles based on who you really are and not end up becoming “who others want you to be” (which is possible only when you end up adding others to your cup before you could add yourself)!

You see, once you have developed a refined sense of understanding who you are, what ticks you and what ticks you off, you will be in a better position to connect to spaces, people, things and pursuits in line with what is helping and growing you- intrinsically rather than monetarily. Monetary growth no doubt, is important, but when done and pursued in divergence of all your founding elements of your life- family, network, work and yourself often will end up draining you in the long run and over time instead of making you stronger will end up making you weak and susceptible to the ravages of time and other powerful competition that you face which possibly are growing on virtue of their own internal core alignment!

What really matters is how well you have been able to craft the idea of who you are and how well do you want to execute that idea into the world with allies who are around you as network circles and families because of who you are! Once you have achieved this zen like space, trust me nothing at all will bother you- neither the ups and downs of your business neither the layoffs or the firing of the jobs that you are engaged with, because once you have connected within and know you worth well enough- these out worldly aberrations will not be ever strong enough to slow you down or knock you over!The only thing that matters is, how well you are connected with yourself and that one singular reality is what will help and empower the right things, people and contexts gravitate towards you!

I will leave you here, urging you to grab that cup and reflect on one simple point- How well are you connected within and how much of “you” is present in the cup of life that you hold so dearly close to you at all times!

Ciao for now, will be back soon with another article! Until then stay safe and stay wise!

To solve a problem, define the problem!

~ Parimal Aluri ~ Leave a comment

Guess, the title says it all, never before in our lives (not that it was not important earlier) has it been important than now, to learn the vital art and science of “defining the problem well”! Unless we don’t define the problem well, we will have it visiting us again and again- disguised as something else, even as it remains the same fundamentally! Through this piece we take a quick look at understanding what does it take to define the problem and how that helps us all to live with one less headache to manage! So let’s roll!

A few months back, I had written , why “The Virus is not the problem”, and I am glad I did it, because as days and weeks have passed, this is what has been really true, sure enough no one is denying that the virus is fatal and can kill, but what needs to be foretold and given due emphasis, is the fact that it is not merely the virus by itself which is fatal or has the potency to kill, rather it is the contextual settings around it which alter its fatality and potency- The virus can harm, only if you allow it to harm by being reckless, unhygienic and inconsiderate for the health and safety of yourself and the people around you! Had the fact remained that it was only about the virus- the number of lock downs (partial and total) that the world has seen would have by now completely ended the whole pandemic- but that is not whats happening! The virus has opened up the scientific community to an extent where they seem to be more at logger heads rather than collaborating to find a solution, Immunologists, Virologists and the Physicians all have a story to tell and each one of them is right- the problem is that each one of them is right to the limited extent of their knowledge about their subject and experience and frankly the virus gives a damn to that bit! Allow me to quickly explain!

You see, the virus will be able to infect you, only if the health conditions of your body allow it to do so- which is an area that you alone control! Whether you have been healthy or reckless, it has always been your choice and you have now the only option to follow the guidelines that suit you, based on what you have ended up doing to your health, even before the virus made its appearance! So at one extreme end, if you have had a disciplined life and respected your health alongside your job sans all the non-productive garbage that you normally would end up doing as part of the so-called lifestyle (which in itself is a dis-ease), you would have nothing to worry or at the most, have a limited challenge to face a virus- this or any other, for that matter! On the other hand if you have been reckless and on a never ending party all through your life, high on everything that you are not supposed to be on, well in that spaces, you are the ideal candidate that this virus would like to see you wrapped up in a body bag!

So this way, it is not only about the virus- the story starts much before the virus comes to the scene and that is the only truth with every problem that we face ever! We set ourselves up for problems and challenges even before they arrive by doing or undoing what we do and what we do/ undo further determines whether we will prevail or succumb to the problems as and when they make their gracious appearance!

Let’s leave the virus alone for now and let’s focus on our world of work; right now many companies are in a frenzy to sack people- sacking of the very people- whom they would have hired paying competitive and at time more than competitive wages and incentives- just with one intent- to have the best so that the clients know- that you have the best and the finest and thereby attract business and revenue to your stable! Fair enough, then why sack now? I mean have you ever heard about a Captain of a ship who asks passengers to jump into the ocean or change ships or throws passengers with lifeboats in the middle of ocean because there is a fuel problem and he must reduce the tonnage of the ship?! Or have you heard about the pilot who decided to drop off half the passengers mid-route because he had a change of mind?! Well, you may say, what can the businesses do, if they don’t have the money- well, so see the problem is not you, it is the money! and what makes you responsible for everyone else’s salary? I mean, had you been able to deliver what you required to for a calendar year and justified your costs, then the organisation would have been duty bound to hold on to you- no matter what! No one throws off a Ship Navigator or Flight Engineer off the ship or plane no matter how heavy it is! So this is where it finally comes back to! The real problems start when organisations end up paying whatever they can afford or are asked for (without verifying adequately)- hoping that the returns will come back to them as told by the hotshots, as they speak for themselves, negotiate and argue at the interview; but as that crucial delivery begins to falter and eventually fail, it ends up becoming a loss for the organisation in the normal times and during these crazy times, like we live in now, it is the next closest thing to a complete financial meltdown! Next, it starts a whole new finger pointing game from the HR team to the Business teams and back to HR in a never ending loop asking only one question, “Why the heck did we hire this person!” and more importantly “Who hired this person!”

The whole point of taking these two dissimilar problems was to drive home a point that no matter what the problem is, unless you are able to define it well and set it up correctly contextually, there will be no solution that comes your way and you will end up being visited by the same variants of the problem from time to time! A disciplined and healthy lifestyle even through normal times is a checkmate for any infection/pandemic, likewise prudent and wise decisions while picking up assignments and offering assignments saves a lot of unwanted melodrama to both the employer and the employee as well, because even if one of the entities goes on to promise what they can’t provide – failure will be certain!

So if you, want to keep that drama quotient a little quieter in your life, begin by defining your problem, define it well and see where the buck stops! Check if you have control; lesser the control you have in managing or to prevail over a problem, the more likely you may fail! More control = Less failure. Next, engage in what you can manage- promise what you can deliver- whether it is the next salary you want, the next business deal you want to crack or the next target that you want to set up, be practical and realistic- one simple way to set and plan for things is – your objectives must be just enough to give you the moment of “aha”, joy or achievement, but at no time through the process of achievement or post the achievement should you be exposed to burn out- mental or physical- because that will mean that what you have achieved is merely a fluke and asked to do it all over again you will just wither away by the mere thought of it! So, it is vital that your ambitious pursuits, at all times remain confined within the walls of sanity, because the line between eccentric success and madness leading to doom is a very thin one!

Whether its is a problem that you have been facing because of a job loss, or the impact of a health crisis, the real problem is not these events- as they unfold- but how we set ourselves up, long before these events- in terms of our approach and belief systems about ourselves! To solve problems, you may like to start working on yourself from within through a course correction of your belief systems that serve and do away with those that don’t serve anymore- perhaps correct a few, omit a few etc. This is a dynamic and ongoing exercise and perhaps the only approach which will enable and empower you to analyse the development of events around you even before they tend to manifest into complete problems! Always remember, never confuse unfolding events as the problem! The events around indicate how things are going to form, reorganize and morph in the times ahead- learn for those indicators and prepare yourself to thrive in that new evolving order post the chaos and ambiguity! Just as we are unique, so will be our problems and there will never be a one-size fits-all formula- there never is- hence as you keeping walking ahead in your lives, doing what you choose to do- consider, retaining sense around insanity, learn what you require to, laugh off, what you must and ignore all that you can!

I will leave you here with these thoughts for now; go ahead and grab a coffee and ask yourself , “How good have you been in defining your problems and how much more better can you get at that!”

Ciao for now, will be back soon with another piece! Until then stay wise and stay anchored!

Bouncing back and racing ahead.

~ Parimal Aluri ~ Leave a comment

Through this article, I share with you few basic, common-sense led plain speak approaches which may just help you that bit extra to bounce back and race ahead, whether it is about yourself or about the team that you lead or an organization that you are responsible for, or, in that rare case if you are leading a nation! So let’s see what these simple steps are all about and the kind of impact that they can create, when executed well! Before we move ahead, it will help to always remember that humankind is perhaps the most unpredictable species of all, and at times may end up doing quite the opposite what it’s mind will ask it to do, just to teach someone else a lesson, irrespective of what compounding damage that kind of reckless act may cause, and no where in the animal kingdom, will you ever find any other “social animal” displaying this kind of behavioral disposition, hence, this disclaimer to let you know,there are no easy slides to heaven and why no matter what anyone tells you; rational wisdom suggests that common-sense always holds the foundation to give one an ability to bounce back and keep surging ahead! So here we go…

Through my engagements and shared learnings over the years, there have been few broad and common approaches- which when mapped to individual specificity of a problem tend to provide a more meaningful way through , over or around the problem! Here are a few of them (and yes, these are not the only or holy grail of problems solving!, so keep adding to this what life has taught you and I am sure you will do exceedingly well, at times surprising yourself!)

Measure what matters

Find the “Why” of your discomfort

Be a Realist- Not an Optimist, nor a pessimist

Clarity of Thought and Communication

Plan for others around you as well

Keep milestones close and within view

Cultivate your common-sense

Be grateful and thankful

Keep what you must and discard all that you can

Measure what matters: We live in an era where we are bombarded with information 24×7 across touch points and irrespective whether we are interested or not! In this kind of an environment and the mad rush to stuff information down the throat of people regardless whether they have a discerning mind to understand, evaluate and conclude rationally with that information they are served is perhaps the most paradoxical problem of over indulgence after obesity (which is caused by overindulgence of food- most of the times!). Even in the current crisis that the world is facing, people are bombarded with statistics, number of total cases, deaths, new cases so on and so forth, what point is being missed out is real sensible data, what are the real active cases today? , what is the fatality percentage, what is the percentage of population infected from the total population and importantly what is the severity or potency of the infection! If people had focused on these parameters, over half of the 184 nations would have never gone ahead with the dumb lock down strategies that they initiated in the first place! Hence it matters and always it is only about measuring what matters and is relevant as we deal with problems  in the real essence of it!

Find the “Why” of your discomfort: If you have read “Start with the Why” by Simon Sinek, you probably know what I am suggesting, If you haven’t read that book, do yourself a favour and do read it! One of the most fundamental mistakes that people tend to get into is trying to solve a problem – thinking that “what they are solving is the problem”, truth actually can be far away from that and in few case the people happen to be the biggest problem, because of their limited intelligence and skewed perceptions of the world around them- which is nothing more then defence mechanism to either hang on to their dear job, career or a failing business, simply because they can’t imagine a life without their business cards! Unless you do not come up face to face with the singularity of your problem or challenge that you face and understand that all solutions and remedies begin by altering yourself from within as you try to set things straight, no matter what you say and do, you will end up wasting the valuable seconds of life coming back to the same problem over and over again – albeit with differing intensity but continuing with the broader flavor of distress will tend to remain the same! Once you have found the true “Why” rest assured that will give you enough bearing to keep moving in the direction which will remove you away from the senseless loop and give a sense of forward motion even as you untangle the mess of the problem at hand!

Be a Realist: Not an Optimist, nor a pessimist: As much as thinking negative, being hopeless, constantly nagging, cribbing and sulking is bad, dancing about and fiddling away meaninglessly as if everything is always great and you are experiencing heaven even as the world around you is turning into a hellish nightmare, can be far more damaging to a point where people start to actually doubt your mental construct and frame of mind- whether you are displaying psychopathic behaviors or have a complete hard disk failure!  The whole challenge with the “Stay Positive” movement around the world has been that few of the so called masters have ended up making it a big joke unto itself, I mean you may have an individual being diagnosed with terminal cancer and you want that person to stay positive? or a person in a terrible terrible financial mess and you want that person to believe that  all will be glad stay positive? Shouldn’t it rather be asking these people to first understand what the situation is then help them rationally evaluate what are the meaningful solutions that are available to them so that they can lead the time at  hand in the most productive manner so that their pain is comforted and there is a sense of achievement in the way the simply carry out their day to day chores or start ton re-build their financial credibility one day at a time? Certainly let’s not even bother to talk about the “nothing will be good ever- ultra-pessimistic way of thinking- that is painful even to write here forget about thinking that way! Having a true assessment of the situation in a given context (which comes from deciphering the “Why”) and mapping it to ones’ individual abilities and competencies is the only way to make the best of any situation that comes your way! Nothing more and nothing less! Staying real, pragmatic and exhibiting courage to confront and deal with the granular reality of the moment will alone help one move ahead and simplify ones’ ability to know the real challenge within the fog of ambiguity!

Clarity of Thought and Communication: This is of utmost important, especially when you are dealing with others and others are looking unto you for guidance and leadership in crisis, whether it is a small crack team that you manage for an assault as an officer, or whether you lead a team of 100 professionals which are working to meet team objectives- the sooner you can provide or rather continue to provide clear communication (which can only occur once you have ample  clarity of thought). This clarity has be at all levels, what is expected, what is being asked and what is been provided to have the tasks accomplished- this all can only be manifested when there in intrinsic clarity of thought about how the team is being led and what is the shoreline that has been earmarked to anchor the team – if required. When Leaders provide clarity at this level- the same is resonated down the line and that makes the jobs of the leaders a breeze and that sets up the team and the organisation for a fast recovery to everyone’s surprise! Importantly, the sensible and impactful communication pieces are Realistic and don’t share misplaced optimism and unwarranted pessimism! 

Plan for others around you as well: Very often when crisis hits, the first and natural response is to make oneself safe and have your immediate responsibilities (family) accounted for, likewise when it is a team that you lead, you are the leader for that unit of your’s and it only makes sense that you lead, guide and provide for you teams like you would for your family in the way and manner that is aligned to the organisation culture and ethics! No one is asking you to become a cult leader or go out of the way and pick up fights with senior members for your team, the point here is to be responsible and accountable so that even in worst case scenarios wherein you need to have a few members offloaded, that whole process remains dignified, so that if ever you need them back, they will be happy to oblige and join you back! This approach of being emphatic, sensitive, and accountable to every member of  ones’ team should be intertwined in the soul of the leader and that empowerment of the soul must be used to take calls and decisions which make sense and serve the larger good!

Keep milestones close and within view: Often people- leaders like to share milestones- what will happen in next one year, three years, five years, well good- nothing wrong with it, but real fact of life remains, that even if the leader remains (which by itself is a miracle- because people leave even at leaderships levels around 3-5 years) there will be new people in the team on an ongoing basis- and each time you have new people – if you were to make the same presentation, it will end up being routine for some and “wow” for few others! The only way to beat this type of  meaningful shit is, spell the broader strategy few times through the year, make it a decisive point and revisit that only when you need to and through the course of the journey have meaningful milestones which are more relevant, visible and actionable- perhaps having monthly or quarterly ones’ that keeps everyone updated, everyone feels involved and everyone gets a sense of forward motion! This will un-complicate whatever you try to pursue and keep enough cohesion to make things easier so that even when hurdles are met, the team knows what needs to be done to overcome them!

Cultivate your common-sense: Human mind works well as long as it is sharpened and that sharpness only comes alive and working when we are presented with compelling cornered spaces and challenges which have no routine parallel! This is where, trusting and following your common-sense, gut feeling becomes all the more important! You may have tons and tons of data and metrics to deduce and take scientific decisions, nothing wrong with that as long as you are choosing one robot over the other or one product range over the other, but the moment decision making starts to impact people without bringing in the human element in the framework, disaster can strike! Consider this, currently many firms are laying off, announcing wage cuts (as if doing a favour that you still have a job), but not releasing, where will they get that very talent back which would have been nurtured, trained and developed over a period of time to meet the organisations exacting requirements in coming times?, Sure people are aplenty and so is talent, but the time needed to retain and re-equip which will be dangerous lost opportunity (in the hands of a right competition can spell a disaster for the business) and can cause severe unpleasant business damage! Even more funny is what does the wage cut say? Does it suggest that an individual was paid more then  their real worth or does it say that ones’ worth has gone down or does it say that the hiring strategy was astray to allow that kind of omission to occur and pay someone what they were not worth of in the first place? What is the messaging that is being sent out? The only and only sure way of doing away with all this unwanted nonsense is cultivate common sense so that even rational decisions; when and as they are forced upon can be routed through the test of common sense and than action can be taken once these decisions stand the test of common sense! 

Be grateful and thankful: This simple exercise will work wonders for you as an individual or as leader of a team, be grateful for what you have- as you start the day, your mind, the resources that you have access to so that you can go ahead an weave the magic that you need to, playing your role and discharging your duties so that you keep creating the subtle difference which matters and keep the momentum going in the forward direction! Being thankful helps, it helps you to begin with so that you know what you could have achieved or not and what is that you are able to achieve or not with the people and resources around! Once you have reached this space of being grateful and thankful, and you begin to rub off this simple yet powerful thought within your team, you will see magic happen as the narrative will change from what is not there to what can be done with what is there!

Keep what you must and discard all that you can: If life is a walk, a marathon or a race, depending on how you see it, in any case, it will always make sense to reduce the baggage! De-Cluttering will help you individually and also as a leader! Knowing what to carry along, what helps and letting go off  things and people that harm and obstruct is the key element to ensure that you are able to bounce back fast and in time to make the most of an approaching wave which can propel you further ahead and give you that much needed early mover’s advantage as businesses race to be the first one’s to re-engage with their clients and customers!

I will leave you here, perhaps you want to add a few more elements, remove a few, the choice is your’s; for you alone know what is the contextual reality of your world and these are but beacons which can help you to glide along safely without running into mountain faces and odd weather, so that as you embark to your climb, you have all the power you need from the people on your team and the machine that you have! 

Ciao for now, will be back with another piece soon!

When the cure is worst than the disease.

~ Parimal Aluri ~ Leave a comment

Continuing with our rant on how stupid, dumb and mind-numbing decisions are being taken on a routine basis- all around us, this short piece is an attempt to see how we may eventually end up harming ourselves more by deploying half -measures, knee jerk reaction and imitation strategies, even as we try to do away with responsibility, accountability and ownership and use of meaningful scientifically validated rational actions! This is a journey to explore what it looks like from within in a typical case of “When the cure is worst than the disease”! So let’s roll!

To make it simple, we will see the different scenarios with increasing level of complexities which go show you how hurried diagnosis can actually make the cure worst than the illness! So here they are,

Anxiety Driven Disasters

Conformity Seeking Disasters

Information Led Disasters

“Always Agreeing” Disasters

Anxiety Driven Disasters: As the Coronovirus decided to embark on a world tour, educational institutions were caught off guard, the ones’ that were not technologically ready, needless to say suffered the most and this is where from where we get our first learning lesson! A few schools in India faced this, even as the different state governments urged schools not to ask for fees until the sessions for the next year began sometime in June/July; schools required to pay their staff so that they are able to retain their talent (which by itself is another subject altogether!). So when some parents (who yet refuse to believe that we are living in a cornered space) who had paid the fees and yet others who showed willingness to pay the fees, were told that you can pay later as schools will take time, they cam back with a boom to the schools saying, “Why can’t you go online and start, we can throw that money at your face, this is not done, we work in IT companies, we work from home, students can study from home”, so on and so forth… This trigger sets us up to the point from where everything now starts to rapidly go downhill! Well, the schools being who they are, ramped up fiercely, put extra time, teachers worked extra hard to get the content into the online format to ensure it stays meaningful and relevant for the students on this new medium and the parents were informed that, the schools were ready to start online sessions on time and that we can move ahead! This is that golden moment when the same parents who were ranting all through for their child’s loss of education etc etc, came back to the schools and started to say,” How do you expect a child in Grade I to have a laptop and use it?”, “I can’t lend my laptop for such a long time, I have office work!” So this is how shit manifests! 

If only, the  parents had not decided in haste, caving  in to their anxiety of  “What do I do with my child, who is free and I don’t know how I can add value to the Child’, and  completely outsourced their kids to schools and institutes, this episode would not have manifested, likewise only if schools had the conviction and authority to let the parent’s know that, “They know more about Education” and would have not heeded and given in to the parent’s anxiety, all this colossal waste of human manpower and ingenuity would not have gone to waste! Well there is certainly a lot of good stuff which will come through all this mayhem, but if you ask me this is a very elementary  level or rather a limited damage scenario emanating form a mismanaged crisis! If you are wondering what are do more damaging scenarios look like, we have our next type..waiting for us..and probably playing out near you even as you read this article!

Conformity Seeking Disasters: This is by far, one of my favorites because it is possibly the simplest to explain! The pandemic is a live example- The brash, blatant and unwarranted lock downs, shut downs, and whatever you may be calling them around the world have just ended up playing to the people who would have wanted the things to manifest the way they did! If you step back for a moment and maybe rise high- and take a bird’s eye view – you will understand- what we are dealing with is a virus attack- which has spread across different regions, nations, cities which are different demographically and socioeconomically as well, the one size fits all solution (read Lock down- which was in all probability planted into the minds of a few to be replicated by others!) has been needless to say a more bigger disaster then the virus- wiping away livelihoods, incomes, businesses and all chances of revival and hope in an unprecedented global meltdown much worse then the disease! You can pick and choose a nation of your choice, check the average number of daily deaths ( before Covid19- say for same time last year) and check them now- you will have your answers! If you are wondering why nations and leaders can get way laid- well the simple truth is – we all have evolved from Chimps and as the saying go, when uncertainty hits, it’s but natural to imitate and do what someone else has done- because if that has not harmed the other chimp, I too will be safe, hence as the first nation marketed “Lock down” as the holy potion for victory, others blindly followed, getting into a traps- which for some nations has been far far worse then the actual impact of the virus spread by itself! These episodes set off another set of economic disasters- which will run parallel to the primary challenge and will end up exhausting further the rapidly depleting and diminishing intelligence within societies to recover from the mayhem of a health emergency and financial emergency!

Information Led Disasters: I have touched this topic in my last article, this is played out more in the arena of businesses, because they thrive on their decisions both strategic and operational through important cues and visible indicators coming out through governments and regulatory agencies- so when the governments are all caught up in their own shit of “Conformity Seeking Disasters” any and all direction coming from them to businesses will be at the best confusing and contradictory- which in turn becomes a fatal blow that takes away even the remote chance of businesses surviving by trying to innovate and suggest alternative course of actions to revive and stay relevant! Businesses soon start to imitate each other, “what’s happening within my sector?” they ask, “What did they do?” in hushed whispers everyone is asking each other and then the conversations start, OK, “They have a turn over of xxx, they laid off abc, so I have a turn over of yyy so I will layoff pqr!”..Well this madness really has no sense because in this climate of Information (read Mis-Information), different contextual realities and race to Confirm and facilitate Capitalist greed, there never seems to be another way to get things done and so the death spiral among businesses starts, the result, well unemployment yes, but more importantly loss of Human Talent which comes biting back as a fierce competitor in a few short years and by then the people who have taken the decisions today are all but irrelevant and there is a new set of people grappling with this new unwanted competition for no fault of theirs! So well yes, this is one more aspect when impulsive, short sighted, best described myopic, unwarranted and unchecked haste creates a long term problem which is greater then managing a few businesses or sectors and ends up being a larger socioeconomic societal or national level problem!  

Always Agreeing Disasters: When crisis hits, even battle hardened, officers will tell you, they need on their team people who can speak their mind – to anyone – certainly respectfully- but one must say what they intend to- they must speak- courageously enough even when authority seems to be faltering and making decisions either in haste, impulse or on facts which are unverifiable and lack credibility- either because of the content quality or the source! When nations are run by people who lack courage, conviction, vision and simply don’t dare suggest or question authority on the scientific rationale behind decisions being taken- it is all but certain that the future is doomed because it will always continue to hand around over the horizon which never is reached and which can never be touched! Whether you have been part of a corporate that had called for a meeting of all your unit/ SBU CEO’s and all “agreed” (read “YES” people)  to cut costs and have people thrown out and calculated mathematically, myopically without understanding “Who” was being ejected out (the person- the experience- the competency angle) – it’s just a matter of time before the people who acted in such haste and impulse get the taste of their own medicine! Very often within the corporate corridors- the so called “CEO’s” (many of which I have found to be struggling with the true essence of that designation label and are nothing more then glorified managers at the very best!) act in haste and then later regret for what unfolds in due time- rarely do they get time and space to do damage control and many of them fade away into corporate obscurity with no future reference or direction like a satellite turned off and set on an endless revolution around the Earth for no joy! If you think this is bad, well when you amplify these kind of mishaps pertaining to “YES” people at governmental level especially if they are part of the strongest nation on the Earth or part of the largest democracy- just imagine how horribly wrong things can go when you have “YES” clan advising every critical aspect of  national security, financial wisdom, healthcare, social justice, growth, business environments, environment, think of an area and then just imagine how horribly wrong things can go! and yes when do go wrong, as they usually will go with a decent predictable timeline- the events that unfold make national and international headlines!

Well, I will leave you here, giving back your solitude, think and feel what you are witnessing, wherever you are, whatever  you may be doing, perhaps you are a national leader or a school teacher or a doctor or a pilot or a business leader or the average person who works for a living, take a step back, see the kind of decisions that are coming your way  or your are obliged execute;  try to decipher their source and the coded messages within the narratives; that alone is the way to salvage your today and safeguard your tomorrow to ensure that no matter who says  what, “The Cure mustn’t be allowed be worst than the disease!

Ciao for now, will be back soon with another piece!

The real story behind the Layoffs.

~ Parimal Aluri ~ 2 Comments

If you happen to be one of those people who have recently been asked to move on with some dignified (according to the employer) monetary compensation and a possible restraining order (that you will not speak negative about the firm for next 12 months), because the world is in a crisis and because your “not so long ago market leading firm” is collapsing and about to perish, this article is here to help you see through what would have happened behind the scenes, so that even you know how much you are really to be accountable (and if you indeed really are) and what does it speak about the modern day “futuristic caring organisations”! So let’s roll!

If you have been used to reading my articles for sometime now, you know it too well, I like to be to the point, simple and clear, no ambiguity, no opinionated bullshit and no creation of unwanted emotional stress, present the picture and leave it for your perception and interpretation based on how kind or unkind life has been to you! There is a good reason why we all as humankind are unique, even twins will be different, one may be absolutely sane while the other one may be a certified psychopath! So from my perspective there are broadly the following reasons that precipitate Layoffs, if you have any more apart form these, feel to add them to these coveted list!

White Elephants and Peacocks

Disconnected Processes

Right Team for all the Wrong Reasons

Incompetent Leadership

Business Led Strategic Opportunism

White Elephants and Peacocks: Well these roam about across businesses and organisations, easy to find, detect and trace! As the name suggests, they exist as long as the senior leadership enjoy their antics and can more importantly afford their salaries at the expense of someone else (that could be public money in case of PSUs or listed companies or money from Investors and parent companies!). Once the senior leadership changes, or has a change of mind (not to be confused with wisdom) they will change the sets of White Elephant and Peacocks with a spooky predictability- that’s why you find that few companies have their white elephants and peacocks getting changed every 2-3 years- it keeps their corporate zoo busy and adds to the meaningless excitement!  These are the ones’ who make most of the routine layoffs on an ongoing basis irrespective whether the economy is up or down, whether we are in midst of war, famine , surplus, whether we are growing at 10% or 1%, irrespective of everything and anything else, these are the ones’ who keep the HR teams busy hiring and firing them on a regular basis, larger the organisation, multiple such instances! You may want to ask me- but why do organisations get these White Elephants and Peacocks in the first place? Well hold this question to the end, once we have completed the other types, you will begin to see a singular thread which possibly will answer all your questions and provide ample enlightenment! So let’s leave this circus here and move ahead…

Disconnected Processes: Processes lead to Layoffs? Well, yes they do, normally you would have read them as “automation led layoffs” sounds familiar now right?, So here the question to ask is, why would an organisation create a pathway of automation without figuring out a smooth transition wherein the number of people are gradually phased out through “normal routine loss of workers”. The answers that you will end up getting based on the type of organisation you are dealing with, will be something like these, “we want to build a futuristic place of work”, “we want to flood the market through spewing out tons and tons of our products-irrespective whether someone wants them or not”, “machines are more reliable then people”, “this SBU doesn’t resonate with the new management’s line of thinking” etc etc. So you may start to wonder, why is it so hard to plan a strategy of 2-4 years duration to embrace automation, re-skill needed labour or workforce and then reuse  excess workforce through re-skilling and re-utilization aligned to the new process? Why do people start coming up with “Job Ads” to hire new people for the new process? Well hold this question, we will answer this towards the end! Let’s move on to the next one!

Right Team for all the Wrong Reasons: Through my experience, one truth that has established again and again is the fact that, Even as people come in all hues and shades of psychological make- whatever one may want to say, People are good.. always good at who they really are!–Everything else remains to be an acquired skill which either develops or fades away depending upon what opportunities are made available or not to an Individual and the Team that one belongs to! Often you will find in some sectors, that when a Head of a Unit leaves, the whole team moves, what does this say? Well if you ask me, it is the classic case of having a right team and asking them to do all the wrong things! Consider, you have  team of excellent communicators and sales professionals and you inform them that they will have to route their sales pitch through scripts and call centre outbound calls and them just keep sending pre-formatted templated emails to prospects- well you know what a true bred salesperson is going to tell you! well yes, he is all likely to ask the senior leadership to “FO” and not teach him how sales is done and managed! Now you may have a valid question, Why do organisations hire right people and ask them to do things which they aren’t supposed to do or make them do things the way it is detrimental to their growth or the process? We will answer this too towards the end…so hold on to this!

Incompetent Leadership: This certainly is the perhaps the most apparent and visible factor as Layoffs happen! Layoffs are almost always seen as Leadership Incompetence and in many cases- most of them that hold good- this is not about the Incompetence of Individuals at the top, that is different, this is about the collective intelligence or lack of it at the top that translates into Incompetent Leadership! One more face about Leadership Incompetence is that the more larger an Organisation, more are the chances of the same getting manifested and more are the pathways of Incompetence manifestation- imagine a debilitating attack on the nervous system from within- that is what Incompetent Leadership does! You may now argue that, how is that when majority of top management comes from famed business colleges/engineering/medical degrees from institutions (which most of us only can aspire to be an alumnus of), how can they be so dumb? or rather incompetent? Well sure enough that’s not how all of them are, most of them would be sane and wise- as long as they are all by themselves- the moment you add them to a team which comprises of similar people and calls for applying collective wisdom- and is trying hard to realize an utopian dream-shit happens and that’s when you start listening, “A” has joined the board, “B” has left the board and so on and so forth! So what, has this got to do with layoffs, well as these leaders struggle with their own collective challenges- they often get lost in a maze of inconsequential things and as this seeps through the organisational structure, the effects start to show and the resulting layoffs happen!

Business Led Strategic Opportunism: This is by far the most often invincible and the real reason behind many layoff stories around the world! This is what leads to creation of compelling PR narratives and creating diversion, distraction and deviation from real issues and this is the one reason which superimposes itself on all the above reasons and plays out choosing one or other type above! Human greed with no end, senseless capitalism and the ability to decide the fate of the majority by a few eclectic minority- when goes wrong- layoffs are perhaps one of the most minor things that manifest, the world has witnessed more murderous and damaging aspects of Business driven greed and Capitalist domination with no end in sight! If you think Conflicts and world wars were fought for territory, well you are right, but partly because each of them weer funded deep and long and that funding didn’t come only from government taxes but also through the invisible hands of the capitalists who favored one side over the other so that when everything settles down they get their pie of the cake to exploit and continue with their never ending hunger for world dominance through wealth creation and managing that!

This strategic led intervention when micro-managing- chooses the timeline for the elephants and peacocks, starts to throw spanners into the operational wheels so that collective wisdom start to falter and even the highly skilled and qualified individuals start to fail collectively! It is this factor that creates imagery of adding SBUs, shrinking units and hiring the best and then without much noise doing away with the best! This is what creates a narrative that wipes off every gain and every note of what Individuals and teams would have achieved in the organisation for the organisation and has the power to play down every achievement in face of some other narrative that is completely opposite to what real facts could be!

You may be a CEO and if you think you drive the business, you are wrong, equally wrong as the last executive who got laid off even as he had given all that the job called for! Layoffs are a narrative which are a dynamic camouflage to a larger purpose which is held close to the heart and mind of the business owner who is in turn dictated by the people who own the ecosystem wherein the business exists! If you think It’s your fault or mistake…think about it all over again! Ask one simple question- If you were really that bad and incompetent- Why would they hire you to begin with! 

As the old saying goes , not all is white and neither all is black- we live in an era that is colorful as it gets and has these specks of grey here and there, at times these grey’s block out everything around and that is the philosophical essence of what layoffs truly are! They are not the measure of the competence or lack of it of an Individual- rather they are a statement of how change is being allowed to come in- Transformation – as they call it- whether that’s a positive experience or not- depends on which side of a table you are sitting and what is the bargaining power that you bring to the table!

I will leave you here, and just to say this- Layoffs are good, like everything else, as long as you know how to make use of this blessing in disguise- be glad that it happened now as it happened for some other time perhaps would have been more painful- As long as you are bound by corporate slavery- Growth is Optional and Layoff is a Certainty!

Ciao for now, I will leave you here with your coffee, to think and reflect and make yourself Layoff proof if you can!  At Simplifylives, we are able to help and guide those who need help during these times with regards to their professional challenges and ambiguity, drop us a mail and we will be glad to assist!

Say no to Corporate Slavery! Embrace Layoffs!

Moving forward through turbulence.

~ Parimal Aluri ~ Leave a comment

The world provides ample opportunities to learn and reflect; as long as we are ready for it! When humanity faces ambiguity, it has always relied on the founding bedrock of established and proven approaches to overcome the challenge at hand and then move ahead! This short article I bring forth a few of them – the easiest one perhaps and the most simple ones, which when practiced at an individual level are potent enough to see you through most of the turbulent weather that life may have in store for you and ensure that you stay on your flight path to the destination of your choice! So let’s race ahead!

Anchor your anxiety: Whether it is the pandemic that you are dealing with or it’s after effects, as we deal with problems large or small, one needs to remember to stay in control and one of the easiest way to achieve that is to “Anchor your anxiety”. Anchoring your anxiety comes an Individuals ability to clear the clutter and see through the smokescreen that the mind is presented with. It is only when this has been done, that one can see beyond the chaos, what really does exist and more often then not, the proverbial devil is nothing but a figment of an overthinking mind which has gone into a steroidal overdrive of imagination! Once you figure out the fact and clinically cut that away from the fiction created by your mind- you have done a great service unto yourself by anchoring  your anxieties- unfound fears of things not going your way, rather going a way which can be counter-productive to your desires! This is the crucial first step, if you want to remember that way and always begins when you start to wonder, “Why is this abc person or  pqr event or incident, bothering me so much, what is the real “why” behind the apparent reasons that are projected over to the mind.

Trust your Intuition: Your Intuition is your internal compass- this keeps  you in good shape and no matter what the weather seems to be across your windscreen, as you keep moving ahead, it keeps pace with you and plays the role of a much needed early warning mechanism. This further ensures that you always have an inbuilt and  working risk avoidance or risk mitigation system at hand to overcome the odd            bumps or incursions that tend to creep up into your path! These odd bumps or incursions can either come with a fair degree of warning or at times appear out of the blue! Either ways, if you have a working and tuned Intuition, that can do real wonders for you and ensure that you are able to overcome most of the times and continue to stay on course to your planned destination, may be with some unavoidable yet meaningful detours on the way!

Choose your route:  Experienced mariners and navigators have one thing in common, even if they rule two different realms of transport, they are experts when it comes to charting their course in their space! They know exactly when to cruise, when to slow down and when something is safe enough to take that risk or when it is wise to move around and take a longer path, if that ensures that they will reach the destination! Likewise when stuck by uncertainty and ambiguity, even though it may seem difficult and unclear at the beginning to chart a course or look ahead, once you start forcing your mind to seek direction from the clutter that it first seems to see, you will eventually start to get a sense of clarity and direction which will help chart the course which at some times could be as simple as what you decide to do tomorrow and at times can be a compelling detail about how you want to keep moving ahead.

Break the routine: The human brain is an amazing machine, yet it has it’s own lethargy, when it is presented with similar conditions over and over again and it tends to start assuming things and that can be dangerous– if you want to know what I am talking about- well just consider remembering these few things- how many lace-holes does your shoe have for the lace to pass through, or how many teeth do you think you have! Well the point that I want to make here is that, the brain gets easily bored with routine and then starts to play the game of assumption and these assumptions then start creating non existent demons, eventually leading to complete ignorance to real issues and not being able to dig deeper and see through what is being presented. A break from routine upsets the predictable pattern that the brain would have been tuned into and thereby helps it retain it’s optimum alertness levels as it normally should! This alert brain is vital as you strive to move around and over through turbulence!

Re-build yourself: As long as individuals stay invested in themselves, no matter how big the problem seems to be, they will always be able to find a way to overcome and keep going ahead! Re-building oneself is like carrying out that engine overhaul or that complete strip down maintenance of the building or your bungalow, where you remove all that is rusted, ain’t working and replace it with what you require moving ahead and what you possibly did not have as yet! Perhaps, new gadgets, tools equipment, areas so on and so forth, likewise when it comes to U, you will have to see what is holding you back and check what you can possibly do, to eliminate all that is working against you and holding you back and add up all that will help you! Certainly this is easier said then done and this has to be an ongoing exercise, irrespective how calm your journey appears to you at the moment! This re-building is all bout adding skills, wisdom, street smartness and components of perseverance in the new emerging contexts that you start to feel as you continue to move ahead.

Make your journey too a destination:Unknown to most if us, travel detours and turbulence are an opportunity to learn, practice and get familiar with something that we would have otherwise missed out. Having a mindset to explore every moment of the journey will do two things, firstly it will make every moment an unique destination unto itself and secondly the learning that comes to you through these moments will definitely come in handy as you keep navigating and charting the course of your life! Still unable to get this bit, well try and recall the last time you have  shared a chat or an idea with a stranger on your flight or on the train that you boarded, what kind of stories did you hear and what is the story that you shared;was that a learning and uplifting experience or was it counter productive. Like wise when mariners and aviators chart their course and when they do hit the rough odd patch, as they will some or the other time, they apply all their learnings to ensure they keep everyone safe and even as they come out of the odd space, they have yet learnt something new either about the problem or the way they handled it! This way the learning goes on and each of those moments becomes a captured moment- a destination unto itself!

Focus on what matters: Whether it is the theater of war or the scene at a fast paced workplace, with multiple things simultaneously developing and popping up with passing time, and the mind being fed with more and more information very second, the ability to take reasonable and rational decisions gets even more challenging and the only way to manage this and ensure that this clutter doesn’t fog your thinking is to stay focused on what really matters! You have to develop a dynamic approach to ensure that you receive the most critical and vital information that is relevant to the contextual moment of time that you are transiting, because one moment later that information in all probability will become redundant and you try to apply that content a bit earlier, chances are that a preemptive assumption may put you into a more grave situation and precipitate unthinkable complications for trying to rush through by assuming what is not there and what would have possibly never manifested! Timing is the essence here and staying focused on what really matters in the contextual moment of time is the key! Through your journey, you will be hit by an onslaught of information nuggets, some wise, some useless, your ability to judge and pick and choose at the right time will eventually determine the quality of your judgement and the resulting action will speak volumes of your success or missed chance in an equal measure!

Learn to “Let it go”: There will be times when you will have to simply let go of things, consider this, you are a pilot and flying into an airport and the weather near the destination airport has suddenly changed over the last 20 minutes and now there is no way that you can land- so what do you do- well nothing- but divert to your next secondary airport. Now in this case if you were to try to go against and execute a dangerous landing well, you would have landed with a certain degree of risk, but the cost of risk is too big to allow for someone to even try that! Many challenges and odd patches are similar that we face, whether it is the moment where you are supposed to speak up to you boss, your government or people in authority, what you need to understand is the singular fact that fighting battles and wars which have a pre-determined outcome is never a wise strategy!-Learning to choose and pick your battles is of utmost value and knowing when to Let off is even more valuable! The lesser the baggage you carry, lighter will be you journey moving ahead! 

Make your own lemonade: As the saying goes” When life gives you lemons, squeeze them and make your own lemonade” Your intrinsic ability to see a challenge clearly and knowing how to crush it completely to your advantage is of prime importance, fighting with the same problem over and over, eventually may make you fall in love with the problem and succumb to it- whatever that may be, but once you learn to deal with a challenge with intent, focus and a will to crush it completely once and for all, you will see how liberating that feeling is- when you know that you have possibly not only cleared away a threat permanently but also have created a strategy to deal with it if it ever resurfaces in the manner and the intensity with what it would have earlier fostered!

Believe: Believing in yourself perhaps is the one of the final things that i have on my list! The ability to have faith and self- belief is vital for one to be able to cover come challenges and turbulence and let me tell you this is not about misplaced optimism or a gung-ho macho approach, rather it is a deliberating and slow non glamorous approach which depends only and only on all the accumulated experience and wisdom that you would have gathered to make those critical decisions in a crisis which eventually ensures that you either live to narrate the story or go down in history with your final moments being constructed on the theories that come up based on circumstances! This belief within you must stay and remain- always- this is the only attribute which can either ensure you that you sustain and overcome the turbulence or loose out at the very end moment and end up vanquished even as success and victory was within your reach!

I leave you here, with these thoughts, for you to reflect and think what are the other things/ attributes that you can think of and which perhaps may be more relevant for you in the unique way that you approach world! As I said, this is not the “Know it all” and “Elixir of Success” this is merely a starting point to start getting collected and identify what are the aspects that help you and what are the things that harm you- so that the next time you hit that odd patch, you know exactly what to reply on, how much and what not to run after!

Ciao for now, will be back with another piece soon!

 

Leadership-Calibrated by Incompetence.

~ Parimal Aluri ~ 3 Comments

Whether you are in India and wondering what more worse is in store for you, or whether you are in the USA and have been through the process of social suffering and social mourning, irrespective of what your individual story is, right now, perhaps since World War II for the first time, Humanity is held at Uncertainty, which is nothing more or nothing less then the reflection of Incompetence of Leadership at the highest visible levels within the societal arrangements that we have adhered to as humans over the last 60 years, and perhaps this is the reason why the evolving changes will question and possibly topple existing rituals and arrangements in the months and years ahead- some may help and yet a few may harm! Join me as we try to make sense of the clutter and chaos and understand what the noise is all about within the moments of deafening silence that we get to hear every now and then! so here we go!

The current crisis – so called crisis (if you ask me) is a stark reflection about how something that could have been better managed was allowed to slip away and run free and unleash havoc in no less then 184 countries when the virus was at is peak! I am not going to use this article from the point of view of who did t, why and all of that political rhetoric, the focus here is, “Why did world leaders react the way they did” even as details (no matter how insignificant and ambiguous they would have been) began to emerge about the ferocity and damage potential that this virus was capable of.  A part of the answer lies in the fact that our world is an ecosystem of delicate and fine balances, like an orchestra all the different musicians and creative geniuses come together to play not one tune but their different tunes and just make it audible enough to know us who is out of syn and who is in the fold of the developments, the current episode has been so bad that it has turned a global orchestra into a big mess where every player has ended up not only playing their tune but also has ensured that the other one can’t play and hang on to their own tunes! This, I call “acoustic dissonance”! A space where no one is listening enough for anything specifically and whatever that is getting played is being accepted!

Leader’s decisions are understandably calibrated to the limitations of what they are asked to govern and manage. The problems start when they begin to govern and manage not from the mandate that has been provided to them or the positional power bestowed unto them but from a space to imitate and replicate what is being done elsewhere and when they start to find their answers in the same problems which are being resolved elsewhere; completely forgetting that the contextual setting of a same problem will have a differentiated impact based on the context of the other place and the specificity that it brings along with it! So  to begin with,why does this happen?

Unlike the golden age of emerging nation, new world and economic order that we have witnessed between 1950 until 1990s, the digital age has hastened everything and created blanket formulae for everything and everyone, whether it is a job that you need  or the vocation that you need to pursue, there are templated pathways to success and failures, and of course, when it comes to politics, there are dynasties and legacy handovers- but not all of them necessarily are mature or wise like their earlier generations! What all of this leads to, is a sum total of failing competencies across the social fabric, with citizen pressure low and misplaced with regards to their priorities, aspirational quality of governance, for life; the governing arrangements reciprocate by doing simply what is being just asked and aspired- and completely doing away with any visionary effort to preempt or proactively mitigate any foreseeable challenges- these aspects are then exposed as the next disaster strikes and then each element of this failing incompetent social fabric is rushing to help each other- something which could have been avoided in the first place!What’s worse as soon as the challenge is overcome, the social fabric falls back to the misplaced notion of comfort that all is well, until the next time bomb sets off, which in all probability is hidden in the current challenge and is already ticking off as this one is being managed! So now the question, can we do something about this?

Well the answer is a Yes and a No, the modern day social issues are unfortunately driven by individual greed and disease of wanting more and more with no end in sight, when this amplifies across society, it’s a hopeless situation which keeps repeating over an over again like a never ending spiral death dive unless there is a radical shift in the leadership model which is able to stall this dive and align the whole critical mass of the society for a greater and higher cause and purpose by leading from the front! This is where true leaders emerge and that’s why Leadership experts and Human Behavioral specialists  often say, True Leaders emerge from the Crisis even as Pseudo Leaders create the crisis in the forts place! This alone is the hope and promise which can pull failing societies and individuals from a never ending self defeating death spiral and align them to a higher purpose and direction for the larger good!

Leaving the larger governance issue here, if we see what happens within our work areas, it is no different; every organisation grows to the limits of the Incompetence that is displayed by their leaders and the limiting beliefs that come along with it! This is why you see the churn that you see when individuals decide not to work with Mr. A , B or C or for a Company X, Y , Z- this has largely to do with this simple underlying fact, which gets camouflaged and distorted in the disguise of team meetings, restructuring, formation and disbanding of SBUs so on and so forth! Another quick way to see if you are facing the Incompetence challenge at the work place, just make a note of hoe many meetings you are part of and what real world difference have those done to you as and Individual or your team or the client (who actually pays for your in-office entertainment sessions!). The moment you do this, your next decision will be either to chart a course for your growth within the firm because things are still manageable and repairable or you will get busy planning your exit strategies! Most of the organisations suffer not because the people are ineffective, it is largely because the direction and quality of leadership is severely compromised which simply doesn’t allow people to either contribute enough or has them disarrayed in all  other directions then what they should be focusing upon, thanks to the element of Self-Obsessed- Self-Driven – Megalomaniac style functioning! So how does an individual navigate around this and stay safe from being drawn into this trap of Incompetence?

The simple approach to avoid Incompetence traps comprises of really basic stuff! Firstly you may like to start by saying “No” to that undue promotion, designation, money, incentive which, heart in heart you know is not right and not worth what you are! Well yes, this seems idealistic, but that kind of introspection and being brutally honest with oneself is the foundation to ensure you don’t get entrapped into the world of Incompetence! Importantly to execute this strategy you need to have a design for your life and value system in place which provides you beacons and alarm systems to ensure you stay ion track and calibrate your growth, progress and monetary success by staying away form incompetence traps all along! Next what you can do is remain “Authentic” no matter what the compulsion and temptation, don’t disguise to what and who you are intrinsically not, if you cant tolerate dumb people, ensure you study the collective IQ of the team that you are supposed to work with or lead, rather then ending up with increased anxiety and hypertension, this first step can ensure a lot of unwanted explanation and white noise in your life is taken away in the first instance! Lastly learn to create clear protocols and keep you expectations right! If you want to travel faster then Mach 2 you need to be on a fighter plane and not on a commercial airliner, so be sure you are using the right framework and contextual settings which allow you to get what you expect as long as you continue to provide the inputs that are required to receive your expectations! This list is not exhaustive and there can be more and more nuggets of wisdom and plain speak that can be added and created to suit individual personalities and contextual settings and that is the most important aspect of life, since we are all unique individuals, could be similar in a few ways perhaps but necessarily unique, each of us requires a unique solutions to a seemingly similar problem because the contextual settings are always going to be different and that is the key to steer clear of Incompetence around us!

I will leave you here, allowing you to think and reflect on your share of experiences with incompetence and what you could or did do to either help it or stop it and whether you are zoned out or zoned in within the entrapment of Leadership that is Incompetent!

Ciao for now, will be back soon with another piece, Do keep writing to us on topics that you want to learn and share and do let us know if you or your organisation needs assistance to mitigate your Leadership crisis! 

 

 

 

 

The dangers of misplaced narratives.

~ Parimal Aluri ~ 4 Comments

If you think or rather want to continue to think that “We’re in this together” and “Together we will prevail”, are great things that seem to inspire each one of us- Well, think again, these statements look great, the only problem that I have with them is, dude, I did not sign up for any of this shit! I would have rather joined a UN coalition force to rain down a barrage of bullets on the bad people or signed up for the olive green uniform for my country but to get drawn into a global narrative that is being literally shoved down my throat and placed in front of my face by trying to tell me that I need to contribute and be a part on this- so called war against a virus! I mean, wait a minute, have we really lost it!? A war against a virus, I mean really?! Take a pause and think about it (since you would be either in a quarantine or a lock down), how come one  gets coerced  to contribute to  alter something about which neither anyone has complete  facts- the How, Why and What of it and neither the solution to it!- neither you are a biologist, chemist or a molecular scientist- so what’s really going on with all these forceful patriotic narratives, the clapping, banging, singing all over the world- what’s really happening! Well this is what is called as the “War of the narratives” and this is something that every nation wages at some or the other time, the only difference being this time, all of them are doing it, at one go for one singular narrative- The Pandemic!

History is replete with examples wherein narratives have been created to drive select agendas of individuals who have been able to harness power, position or both and lead societies, nations to the gates of hell! So why is it that even when people, who are generally well educated, aware and have a thinking mind fall into the trap of these gimmicks and symbolism of false narratives? The answer lies in the qualities that I enlisted! Literacy, Awareness and Mind never help when literacy is not equated and filtered through education, awareness is built on prejudice and pre-preemptive assumptions and people even after having a mind, decide to lock and kept it away!

Misplaced narratives are perhaps the greatest invention of human mind! It is no surprise that most of the times they have been used to push through agendas which normally would have not gone through! So why do have them in the first place? Well, go back to history! Each time global communities- whether they be nations or regions have stalled and the governing agencies (elected governments, dictators and whatever fits into this systems that rules over the masses!) have hit a trim level with regards to any vital metric of the society that they govern, it has almost always ended up giving birth to powerful narratives- which essentially were a distraction created for the masses more then anything else! What these narratives almost always did was to lead people in a directed way of seeing at problems or thinking in a particular manner which reinforces the decisions made by the governing agencies! If we go back to the times when the great world wars were fought- you will notice a singular trend- every action that was taken even from the beginning of each of the wars was to do something with a powerful narrative by an individual or group of individuals who had come up with a clever strategy to communicate what served their purpose- to an extent that millions of people- whether soldiers or otherwise felt it a patriotic obligation to get in harms way (especially when a few of those countries were least impacted directly at a time when limited escalation broke out!) Consider Vietnam- the much famed theater of war from where US had to move back and was also the reason why powerful counter narratives were made in way of movies and films to keep sending the positive messages around the war to the general public! Truth certainly comes out, but if it gets mistimed- it looses its essence! This fact is being used and abused by people who govern and believe in creating false narratives!

In our current case, no government sounded off alarms about the deadly contagion that the virus is in the beginning, but as they realized that mistakes were costly- the narrative changed from the governments accepting accountability and responsibility- to telling citizens what to do and enforce a lock down. The lock down in nations where the virus was more aggressive ensured that those who were sick were more or less written off and had no chance of waging a come back as the system was reduced to choose between people when it comes to who lives and who doesn’t- Inhuman it seems and it certainly is- the worry here though is not that world wide health systems can’t cope with this kind of deluge of  sick people- The fact here remains that governments watched every our and every day as the things began to spiral off and decided to get active only when it started to suit their objectives- again not by- being honest and truthful of the omissions and mistakes, but rather by creating false narratives and putting the onus on people for their own life- The over all feeling across the world based on what governments are telling their citizens is “Well, we have a problem and you can alone ensure you are safe if you do a, b, c and If you don’t do this, well I cant guarantee you anything!”

Misplaced narratives work extremely well to serve political and strategic points for governments but in the long run they ruin and completely break down the communication and trust within the social frameworks and end of the day, more often then not end up reducing citizens to some crazy “Citizen ID no XXX”. That’s about it- eventually this is where we all will be heading to and this is what will remain as the reflection of the nation that we belong to . This one number will define how high and farther we get within the context of the society we live in. So you may want to ask me now, if “misplaced narratives” are so bad and dangerous why are they allowed and how do they get a foothold in the first place?

You will be surprised to learn, that individually each one of us and collectively as a society we ourselves are to blame for the extent of false/misplaced narratives we are ready to buy into and agree to! Yes, this is very similar to herd mentality and the overbearing need to comply with “social conformity bias” to be accepted as part of society and not be seen as an outlier or oddity who can be taken out/ ejected depending on what type of society you are going about in! The reason why these things get a foothold is surprisingly our “intellectual inertia” a behavioral attribute wherein we perhaps know what we are witnessing is against established logic and normal universal principles of humanity, yet we decide to do nothing about it- nor say, nor act and well this inaction serves as acceptance in the scheme of things  and misplaced narratives start to rule! Remember Hitler- one person who made millions believe that killing innocent people from a specific community was their greatest duty of service to their nation” well, yes- this is what it is and this is how it can get played out from a worst case scenario point of view- An Individuals delusional thinking and intellectual hallucination and fixation of an idea- brought the whole world to the edge and resulted in sufferings and deaths of millions and millions to an extent that the effects of those are felt even today when you visit towns and places tucked away on the quiet corners of Europe, Japan or other theaters where all hell had broken loose! A simple act of not using intelligence, cognition and displaying inertia at individual levels when reinforced by societies leads to a deafening silence which fuels the development of “misplaced narratives” which eventually end up harming the society which has surrendered and outsourced its ability to think to the whims and fancies of an individual or a group of individuals! So is there no hope around this? What’s the way ahead, are we kind of really doomed?

Well the fact remains, if there’s a problem, there is a solution always and this applies to the ability to ward off misplaced narratives as well! The first and possibly the only step is to use individual intelligence and wisdom before you agree to disagree to anything that is coming your way- e.g. If I were to tell you clap for five minutes everyday at 12 pm to become a millionaire in one year- well I am sure giving some kind of marketing twist I will be able to tempt you to try that dumb thing! But if you have a mind which starts to weigh my statement against principles of science, philosophy and common-sense , you will know this is rubbish and nonsense and  you will ask me to shut up! When one voice turns against a misplaced narrative- it by itself is powerful and when you amplify that using the power of social media and create a compelling counter narrative which is based on facts and science- which can be verified and explained in plain speak- this powerful counter narratives are what revolutions and pressure groups are made up of! Remember the Jasmine Revolution, – well that and many such were the result of powerful counter narratives when individual members of society came together and decided to stop misplaced narratives by confronting it collectively in unison with facts and more acceptable solutions!

Misplaced narratives are often the first steps before a nation is planing to change their political framework and these are more often then not tests run with tact and strategy and regular intervals to gauge the mood of the citizens so that any dissent can be stifled- using appropriate force as needed to ensure that the governance agenda- whatever that is- can be met! If you happen to be in any nation wherein you are seeing the political class becoming more and more in your face and in your app or in your life- Well, welcome you are now officially part of a society where a powerful misplaced narrative is completely hiding away from you what is really happening behind the scenes! If you think-all world leader woke up to a pandemic late- well think about it! If they have so many resources and time to mitigate and control the things now- why couldn’t they stop that from ever reaching to those levels in the first place!? No, I don’t need you to answer now, but keep thinking, maybe the “Pandemic is a Misplaced Narrative” and there is something bigger unfolding- which is hidden in plain sight!

I will leave you here with a cup of strong, very strong coffee and wake up  your mind, and try to sieve through the narratives that you have been a witness to and allow your intelligence and wisdom to guide you to unravel which one of those are indeed, “Misplaced narratives and who fast are they racing to impact you!

Ciao for now, will be back soon with another piece soon!

The unavoidable outcome of a Pandemic-WFH to AAH!

~ Parimal Aluri ~ Leave a comment

Hello there, yes we are at war- with something that we can’t even see with our naked eyes! Well call it rule of nature or whatever you may like to- The fact always has been that wars and enemies emerge from unseen blind quarters within or outside! Today, I want you to think around what is developing behind the smoke screen of the pandemic- sure enough- the pandemic is real people have risked themselves and have become history- but there is more in store and for what is in store- not everyone needs to die necessarily- but the changes over the horizon will be no less then having a rebirth! This piece is about what the unseen and unavoidable fall out of this chaos will be for the next 12 months at least- beyond that- well let your wisdom guide you!

So wherever you are on the world map right now- If you have been one of those lucky one’s to get a reprieve from travelling to work and are soaking in the windfall time with your family or pursuing your hobby or plain speak- something that you like to do (rarely that is possible when you are at work!); be wise and stay cautious! If you have not got that call from your boss, that client of your’s and if you did not get a chance to wear that mask and do a quick trip to your office like a super-hero to save the day- well you know what chances are your Work From Home (WFH) will eventually plateau out to a Always At Home (AAH) scenario pretty earlier then you would have thought! Yes! you read it right- you don’t trust me- well, no problem- drop me a mail around September 2020, then we will have a chat! Now don’t get scared- here’s what you need to understand and take charge of to ensure you stay relevant through your absence!

People tend to forget the age old maxim- “Your absence must be just enough so that your value (if any at all) must be realized- but your absence must be not so long that people learn to live without you and move ahead!” This is the space where the risky WFH is treading on- We live in times where interpersonal skills among people in work environments are already substantially screwed and messed up- if there is anything important that we talk with co-workers even as we work- it is about the third person- whether that third person in the context and content is a team member, your client or the classical corporate bitching session that has no end! I read somewhere- what people have started to realize is how shallow the entire corporate experience has been- once everyone has been packed to their homes-for their WFH- the realization has dawned that- the only thing that always mattered was the responses to the mails, the quick chats of under 3 minutes with clients and action planning and getting work done for that day! Everything else suddenly has started to seem to unwise- dumb and completely useless! Well, realization of all this is good for you as a worker- the problem here is even your employers now have started to realise- how dumb they have been to get sold to your personal charisma- your high value degrees and much hyped and eternally eroding experience(of course- there are a few exceptions- and this is not about them!)

Yes, folks, even as you think you have been smart to convince your employer for a WFH waiver and you are possibly working as you binge on a some movies and web series even as you work! Employers world wide right now are unleashing the complete available power of AI (Artificial Intelligence) – something that you, would have contributed to- knowingly and unknowingly (knowingly if you have bee a software and systems developer and unknowingly- if you have left a great digital imprint of your existence on the planet to provide ample data points to study behavioral and capability patterns)- and this is what can possibly make you technically redundant!

Well, there is nothing wrong and right about this – It is about knowing what we have done to ourselves as human beings!– First, we built capabilities through enveloping our intelligence- next we misuse and abuse them to sub-serve ourselves and for those who we work for – whether employers or society and finally we play dumb and under the garb of automation end up making ourselves redundant! What is happening to the service sector today- is what had happened to the manufacturing sector thirty years ago with the advent of robotics and CNC (Computer and  Numerically Controlled) programmable machinery, and as humans guess what- We failed to remember what we should have learnt from that instance- We should have could have set a limit to our levels of procrastination and laziness which have in a way led to the need and urge to seek more and more automation! Automation from an innovator’s point was always designed to make things easier for difficult situations- now that has been extended to manage dumb and repetitive tasks (that’s what I asked in a previous article- Does your designation define your incompetence!)

So what next, well as humans we can do only one thing what we are best suited to do- turn the circumstances to our advantage- understand and differentiate from what is meaningful and what is meaningless!– I will tell you what- here’s simple test- If what you can do- can be done by anyone else- Well then you are in trouble and you need to course correct your life and skill sets now- to stay relevant and stay alive! another step you can think around this is – Can anyone do what I do the Way I do It- here if you have answered NO- Well, then Congratulations- No matter how much automated the world becomes- You are and will always remain to be one of those human beings who have been and continue to be “Human” in the essence of the word by simply being “Who You Are” and that is how it is supposed to be and this is what each one of us should aspire for ourselves to be! Always remember, every time that stepped back and gave away the control to technology- technology has come back seeking more and more and there will be really no end to it- The only way to subvert this, is to ensure we are smart enough to limit and know what we should, can and need to automate and to what extent!

I leave you at this point- Take a pause and reflect- What is the essence of being an human mean to You and more importantly Being You – whats is that helps and harms you! Importantly also Know what is the relationship that you share with automation- Who is the Master and who is the Slave and what are you going to do about it- so that in times to come that equilibrium stays the way You want it to be and that’s how it should be!

Stay wise, have an awakened weekend ahead and stay who You are and stay Relevant!

 

Staying sane through insane times!

~ Parimal Aluri ~ Leave a comment

Humanity, never disappoints! The moment you go to bed thinking all is fine with the world- No one is threatening anyone with a war, growth stories are being written around the nations- few true, few fictional ; the next morning, you wake up  to your living nightmare in the form of the news of a pandemic and worldwide economic melt down! Well, this article is more about trying to isolate the real problem from the apparent one (the perceived one) and try to ensure we stay sane and don’t get done by our own dumbness by keeping the reason and behavior blaming the virus aside for some time (unless of course you have tested positive!).

One of the ever perplexing issues with the human mind has been that, it always tries to rush into finding solutions to a challenge that is been put to it!- It simply wants to get that task done and relax! Well, this part is normal; the fun begins it, when it starts to operate the way it has been conditioned to operate by the person who is the owner of this wonder-machine- that is you! Going by the “Who the majority of us actually are!”(Irrespective what our social media handles projects who we want to be or we want to be perceived to be); The way we have programmed ourselves to think; by wanting to be or being at times, fast- quick- rational- irrational- impulsive- brash- well, these and many more decision types come in all colors and hues of the personality that we hold;  which again is another byproduct of the way we have conditioned our thinking! Well- wait- read this sentence again- don’t get confused- but that is a fact! More often then not our actions driven through our thought processes are nothing but an extension of our personality statements which have been conditioned by our brain- based on what we have fed into it as experiences- memories- shades of pleasantness, fear, disgust, avoidance and affection etc. etc! So how do we tame and learn to debug a mind that has the potential to run away with it’s own unfound areas of fear and gross disregard- which can actually make you history in no time!

To begin with, you can try a simple technique- Whenever you are presented with a scenario- try to evaluate and ascertain- what is expected out of you!– Whether you need to do something- if yes, are you supposed to lead someone or follow someone or be doing it all alone, what are options available- which is the one that offers the least harm to you (read risk mitigation) and finally going ahead with the chosen step! The irony here is- this kind of level headed and process oriented thinking needs space, peace and time to arrive at wise decisions- and normally when push comes to shove- normally we end up making bad quality decisions – which are a result of why we tend to be where we are in our lives! Many a times- the best decision is about doing nothing and just letting things be the way are- “There’s never a point trying to fix something that’s not broken!”

Another important thing to remember is to do a PRA (Personal Risk Assessment) whenever you are hit by uncertain situations- whether at home or at work- or in general wherever you are on the map of the world- doing whatever you choose to pursue! This PRA technique has to be simple and operational. This is something that you will have to design for yourself!- As I keep saying each one of us- is fundamentally a different being- we may be similar and aligned to common goals of larger good to humanity in many ways- but the way we can engage and contribute is a value of the Intrinsic ability that we have within us by virtue of many things that go on to make who we are! This ability to come up with a correct, consistent and accurate PRA on an ongoing basis for the small events and large unforeseen events largely determines how we ride the waves and ensure that our ship holds good in stormy weather and calm seas with equal ease! The ability to come up with a refined and good quality PRA, again loops back to how well our cognitive and thinking ability has evolved and what kind of sensible and critical data points we have shared with it to ensure the outputs that we get are actionable sane and safe enough!

Finally, using common-sense along with the supply of intelligence that you may have- is the last line of defence that you have in times of extreme pressure- like the one that we are facing right now!– At a time when the media seems to be in an overdrive- and everything around you seems to be sending out signals of things around failing and falling- It is your generous use of intelligence and common-sense alone which will help you stay away from unnecessary hysteria, melodrama and ensure you do not end up being victim or a contributor to mass hysteria (which more often then not is completely useless, unverified, unproven and unfound!). Make it a practice- to always weigh what you get as an information input- weigh it against the source from where it comes- weigh it for credibility- authority and validity-and finally do check if it really, genuinely makes a difference in your life! Even as we have the virus outbreak across all the nations unfolding- if you happen to be one of those astronauts right now aboard the International Space Station- it will do humanity a lot good if you remained focused on your experiments up there- 440 kms above us- rather then trying to dole out sympathetic verses or worrying about things- on which you have literally no control! The trick then is to control and manage what you can and ignore and leave out, what does not impact you and certainly what remains beyond your effective control!

I leave you with these thoughts for you to think and come up with your own little nuggets of wisdom and value, so that you ensure your safety and sanity and thereby ensure the mental health of others around you!

Ciao for now! Grab your drink, stay sane and stay safe!

 

 

The isolation advantage!

~ Parimal Aluri ~ Leave a comment

Well, in the context of what’s happening around the world, for now, “isolation”, may be the only word that is so respected  and feared at the same time! So even as nations battle it out there using all the tricks that they have in their book- one common thread on all this happens to be “keeping distance” and “isolation” as much as possible- well certainly that’s the way and perhaps the only way to fight contagious diseases from spreading (we learnt this as students of grade four, I guess), until we have the vaccines in place. But still what’s important to observe and study is how the human mind is coping up with or loosing it, as social interactions are restricted and at times when Isolation becomes the norm! This is about knowing how amazingly we the see the best and hope even in the darkest and most trying times! So here we go!

We all know about humans being “social animals” and have learned this at school (and even if we have not been to any), through the mere fact that we are related and would have a dozen of first cousins and over two dozens of second level relations, merely reflects how human society has evolved through the last three centuries! As the promise of resources (read food, water, shelter and safety) grew over the last three centuries, humans have resigned themselves to the comfort of community support for all situations good and bad– whether it is a community fun fare, marriages in the little town tucked away far from the city, political representation (unless you are yet being ruled by kings/ autocrats) or it is about saving lives in face of natural calamities and being there for one another when disaster strikes! This is more or less how we have always been and this is how it is supposed to be – irrespective of all the differences of ideologies and pressures acquired by a society by virtue of the urge to control and dictate- this fundamental thread of being able to look out for one another for good and bad and expecting nothing in return ( and you always thought only animals are wired like this!).It has always been so and it is again, we humans who have from time to time either ignored this or played even this to our advantages!

Looping back to the times that we are experiencing right now, the induced isolation, through self-quarantines and medical quarantine worldwide to protect ourselves and the ones around is throwing up some strange strategies to cope with this new dictate of the ruling governments! There are some communities which even under lock-down situations have managed to connect through human voice and music (even as they stay isolated), there are yet who have possibly sought refuge to engage and interact online, so that they feel and stay connected, yet others roam about as if nothing happened ( and these are the gifted ones’ who have always remained in self- imposed quarantine either because of their lengthened intelligence or completely extinguished cognitive ability- either ways it’s helping the world for now! More strange have been those instances where few- really handful few- who have mustered the courage to escape and run away form quarantined zones! So what are all these behavioral attributes saying about us and the human mind! What are we now evolving into as we face and overcome this global menace which is requiring us to manage social distance and be unto ourselves- how will this help or harm the future of our societies?

Human brain seeks companionship and that’s how it is hard-wired – you may be the most eclectic of yogi’s or saint’s seeking divine bliss- but even for you to tell the world that you have attained it- you will still need someone to speak to about it! So when you put people in completely unnatural situations- the first involuntary reaction is of disbelief- “No this can’t be happening- not to me- the medical guys have made a mistake- they are idiots- It can’t be”, this is followed by a quick realization of the next point- “well what if they are right and I am not taken care of – I may not exist and I may be well on my way out of the planet and the end up being a statistical number!- This powerful thought then overcomes the initial disbelief and shock making co-operation possible and then resigning oneself to the orders from perfect strangers who call themselves whoever they are-doctors, paramedics, you name it – The simple promise that you will be fine and safe by doing what we say- is such a powerful statement that almost 99% people will comply and pay heed to what these strangers are saying(In different context of history though- read dictators- it is exactly a similar response that has ended up having more people killed then cured!).The remaining 1%, well yes they do exit and these are the one’s who will end up doing eccentric stuff- running away, not following rules, not taking medicines, playing dumb- intentionally and unintentionally- they do this not because they want to – but simply the situation has become so overwhelming to their minds that they no longer can cope with it and hence neither have a trusting bias or a doubting bias (if you have one of these biases you can be managed and cured by developing an alternative narrative- but when you keep switching fast between the narratives- you end up becoming a living nightmare for the world – far worse then the battles against a virus! So what’s the way ahead and how do we make most of a situation which gets labelled as “Isolation”

One way, is to change the narrative from the word itself-instead of calling it Isolation- Call it “Time for personal investment”- a time to invest into yourself – to develop your personal strengths, learn to do away with your fears (demons in your head) and your weaknesses, a time to pursue something your daily routine and rush of life kept you away from (as long as it can be pursued within the confines of being isolated- I am not suggesting someone to pick up a guitar and arrange for live concert- rather pick it up and upload a video online!). This “Me time” can be used to assess your priorities in light of the new vulnerabilities that the world is bring to you- maybe you need to move to a new place- maybe you need to reassess the job you do – maybe you need to learn how to be strong and focused by yourself to keep you safe and maybe its time for you to realize that “Life cant and should not be taken for granted”! Once we flip our view of isolation and start to fill it with the books we needed to read, the films that we wanted to watch, the chats that we wanted to have with our friends, the peace that we would have wanted to hold within or as simple as the afternoon nap that you wanted to have in so many years- just seek what was amiss from your busy life and let this curse of isolation be turned into a blessing in disguise and use it to your advantage so that we the crisis is finally over and you emerge- you emerge as a person changed for good – who now values each moment of life in a more meaningful and mindful way- and possibly by then you know what wise issues you should engage with and when you should walk way from what doesn’t make you feel enriched and a better person!

I leave you with these thoughts on a Monday, wherever you are reading this, no matter how isolated you are, now you know how to make isolation work for you! Remember it is not the Isolation that hurts, it is the fear of missed opportunities and lack of connect that troubles us- because we tend to have a fear of missing out the social beacons (which we normally  use as our glide path as we navigate around society!). Once you have reached deep within yourself and re-assessed your priorities- thanks to the available time through isolation- you will no longer be in search of beacons and will most probably end up being a light house for others in the society to follow!

Ciao for now, grab that drink and stay wise! Run wild  with your thoughts and imagination and pursue your dreams- for this is the time to build upon your strengths, dreams and ideas and these will come alive eventually as you sustain and their time arrives!