Tag: world

The damaging myth of Immortality!

~ PA ~ Leave a comment

Ask anyone what they want to achieve in life and the eventual answer will lead you to one definite truth- “Everyone wants to be remembered”, Well reasons can be different-good or bad- duration can be different long or short- but the fact remains- people have this urge to be remembered and recalled and guess that is what is a hallmark of humanity- nothing wrong or right about this space- the real fun begins with the concept, the contextual relevance and the eventual reality of what “Immortality” really means and how it will in all probability manifest! Join me over the next few minutes in attempt to simplify and add clarity to this ambiguous space! to know and learn why, as humans we are the way we are!

To begin with the concept is as humorous it can be, I mean to be immortal essentially you have to die and the best part is once you are dead, you don’t ever know if you really have achieved what you had set out for while you are alive! Sounds weird right? but well that’s how plain stupid and ironic the whole shit is! But wait, in’st the world full of autobiographies and records of great people who have created or destroyed the world- Well sure it is, but if you dig deeper, you will realise the number of such documents only exploded exponentially since the mid- 1700’s once the ability to print and record became mechanical! Search any medieval time frame of history or even ancient records, you will always find that even the greatest of all civilizations that ever existed and flourished had a limited number of documented recordings (compared to the last 400 years) whether in text- or through inscriptions on the stones or whatever medium was possibly used! What does this tell you? A couple of things, firstly, majority of the people who got recorded in history in greater details- lived at a time when they were too brilliant or simply the finest among the best- either they weer surrounded by real idiots to look smarter or on that rare occasion (the period when science flourished early 18th century) you had a dazzling collection of the finest minds which catapulted the breakthroughs in science and technology almost simultaneously across Europe and the Atlantic! Secondly and most importantly, none of the people who came to be remembered for longer times post their departure, never lived their life pursuing “immortality” , they basically kept things as simple as they could for themselves and went through their lives doing what was best possible and the way they could create an impact with what they had within themselves and around themselves in terms of resources and competence! As they say- once you start acting to the best version of yourself the world aligns itself to serve you and your cause! Whether that is a good one or bad one – contextually differs and let’s leave it at that! So you may want to ask me around now, fine so what?

Well, the problem is that people, in today’s era go about their lives as if they are going to live forever and are so obsessed with the fallacy of creating so called “legacies at work”, “signature statements” and so on and so forth, without realizing that, given the level of complexities of our time, unless you don’t do anything which has a radical, immediate and sustaining value of creation for the greater good of humanity- you will too fade away as just another “death count” in the ocean of humanity! Perhaps you will be lucky enough if you your grand kids remember you, well that will be the maximum that you will earn- as far as your tryst with immortality is concerned! Consider this, each day whether you like of hate it- you will touch some form of plastic, nylon based material- how many of you would know the story about the people behind the invention of this material? We all know about the Wright Brothers and the first powered flight of humanity- how many of us know all the fine engineers and designers who went on to develop and build on those principles to shape the amazing machines that we fly today? Well, don’t panic neither do I know all of them, so even I am as blank as you are- this is exactly the point- you see many of these great people would have spent a major portion of their lives- at times their entire life- creating an amazing machine for humanity or some great technological value that made our lives so comfortable- but in their giving up of their whole life for this cause- what have they got in return? Unless you are some kind of driven by research and bitten by the “Why” bug, you will never want to walk into the library and find for yourself from the dusty books to learn what all transpired in those times, through the journals of science and know the efforts that went into making our lives what they are today! We are just fine with a search string on a search engine and more often then not quite happy with the unfiltered and unverified garbage that it throws at us!

As much as it is true that great inventors, innovator’s and fine people who aided and accelerated discoveries and contributed to make our lives the way they are today, never went after the maddening craze and urge to be remembered forever- by uploading selfies, writing and re-writing books or posting online videos etc– well, you may argue had the technology been there- they would have- well, who knows, may be you are right too! But the focus here is- critically about how they lived their lives- they lived their lives with a finite purpose and focus – and yes- except for those few lucky rich inventors and scientists a majority of them were average wealthy co-creators who were able to strike a balance between their work and personal lives even as they went about creating magic for the centuries ahead! So what is this telling you- Not to forsake your today for a tomorrow, especially when you are not going to be around to relish it! Well, don’t jump the gun and say, I am asking you to be selfish, I am just asking you to be honest and accept the fact that you will not be there forever- so for the time you are there- Learn to create more value and whatever that you want to create in the “now” of your time and not being bothered by anything else! Consider this, you may ace a new way to bake a chocolate cake- you use your today- each day two hours each day for a year to come up with this super wonderfully delicious chocolate cake- now you have two choices- either keep baking and serving people as long as you are alive and then the recipe dies with you or write a book – create a video and let the people relish the goodness of what they end up making for themselves! But if you try to start thinking how people will enjoy the cake over next three hundred years, after you are dead- well than you have a serious mental issue which is no more related to immortality but straight way exhibits hallucinatory streaks! These are the seemingly innocent spaces where, the misplaced understanding of immortality ends up damaging people beyond repair in their present! Want to know what immortality is really about? well read on!

If you see the classical texts of any religions or civilizations, chances are that the oldest, the finest and the most famous one’s have been written, inscribed anywhere between 5000-15000 years BCE and some of them are still revered as texts of great value- so if you now analyse the “content” of what these texts say, well they all in a way try to communicate the essence of way of living for humanity and albeit few of them would have created religious or spiritual pathways through the content created- few would be mere civilization documentations mentioning how they went about their daily lives- and whats was meant, how and why- eitehrways the common and the only thread that is unifying and found across all the continents within these seemingly “immortal” creations is the emphasis on “quality of human life, purpose, direction, way of living and societal construct”. So if you are aiming to be immortal- first and foremost your creation has to be at that caliber-that even after 5000 years from now, that work of your’s must hold good and true and if this initial challenge is not enough, you will need to have a mass followership and a real line of disciples who can continue to propagate the idea/thought in a structured manner on an ongoing basis -adapting the same with their tweaks as times evolves through the course of history!

So having given you this secret, if your business or office work- is not helping you come anywhere close to this what I just mentioned, you and I will be all, but a death count and the fallacy of immortality can rest within the confines of our families!- They too will remember if we have given anything to them of merit and value which they perceive! So if you have been wasting your present for those elusive awards, works of fiction, great business numbers and all that- thinking you will leave a legacy and people will remember you- well sorry to disappoint you- no one would really care enough! because we live in times when managing ourselves by itself has become a task unto itself and you too know it very well deep within! So what to do?

Well get a helpful dose of common-sense and start living your life by creating, co-creating experiences which will effect and lead to some value creation for the people around you and the people that you engage with! Stop hallucinating about the right and the wrong- see the context and measure what best can you deliver against the contextual frame that you operate from! If you frame is small and your delivery is large enough- who knows you may just become lucky and really be qualified enough to become an immortal soul! However like it is often the case, we move about societies wherein the societal frames are too wide and too deep and no matter how much we attempt to create a splash the water seldom causes a ripple beyond a small zone and before anyone even reacts/ reads those ripples your life is all but lost within the great history of humanity forever! Lasting fame which remains for the next century or so will be a huge achievement, if you were to ask me what constitutes to modern day equivalent of immortality! Well, and to share with you another secret, unless you work or associate with something that changes the fundamentals or builds further upon or creates value to them, rest assured all that you do or don’t will not go beyond your grand kids!

Living in the “now” to create lasting value makes more sense and is perhaps the only incremental way to achieve fame (although it may only last for a few generations), without wrecking your mind or the people around by pursuing immortality without any real context! Final words- Immortality is the domain of the fundamentals of human society which pivot on belief’s, religions, philosophies and allied areas- unless you don’t create a lasting disruption within these corridors- lasting immortality will not go beyond your third generation!

I will leave you with my thoughts here and urge you to reflect when you hold your next coffee and look away into the distant horizon, to really understand within yourself -for your own benefit- What is that you are pursuing in your “now”? Fame or Immortality or both? and importantly if you are in the right frame to grow large enough to make that count! Never wreck your today for an unchangeable past or an unknown future, the “now” alone matters and that’s the only thing that each of us has got! What we do with it alone maters!

Ciao for now, will be back soon with another article! Before I forget, thank you for your ongoing support and the mails that come in! Keep writing and do let me know what next you want to read here!

Meaningful HR & Business Integration-The way ahead.

~ PA ~ Leave a comment

Yes, I know what are the first thoughts that are crossing your mind, even as you read the title! No this is not about fault finding with the HR aspect of business neither this is a glorification of how business and HR need to work together and contribute- enough of unwarranted positive shit has been written about that and it seldom works! This is about knowing what really helps or strops from that critical integration from happening and is there anything at all that can be done to ensure true synergy which translates into individual empowerment to the people on the floor and at the desks, irrespective of the product or service that they collectively create!

The genesis of the today’s HR came through the dark allies of the industrialized world, where the given dictum was that the owners of the businesses were out there to exploit available resources (people and material), unfortunately some businesses did live up to that dubious label and with that saw the rise of the union movement which provided the much needed collective voice and put a plug to stop and arrest unwarranted exploitation form time to time across different sectors and industries. Certainly over time, few of these unions too lost their grounding – since they too were run by humans- add to that the element of greed and you have the right recipe to completely compromise business exploits and you reach a point where you really don’t know anymore which side is more wrong! Even as these aspects were unfolding businesses were busy working on scientific finding and technological break through to modernize and make processes and services more cost effective and thereby more profitable and just as businesses learnt to manage products and processes they soon understood that they could also manage people and there is the birth of the modern day HR! Sadly though the struggle of complete end-to-end integration of business and HR has always remained a challenge- at times for the right reasons- where businesses require that sterile distinction or segregation to function and more often than not, because of sheer incompetence either with one of the entities or both of them, in today’s context it is a heady cocktail of incompetence which keep shifting from one end to the other in a cyclical manner which results into a “dynamic yet static space”- hence many a times when you go back to organisations even after few years- seldom things are different! Nothing wrong or right about that- at times that’s what is needed and at times that’s exactly what limits the organisations! So what’s happening here, where’s the catch?

It all starts, with like everything else- right in the beginning, even today, in 2020, there would be hardly a few, maybe less than 1% of entrepreneurs who would want to look at HR as a strategic investment which will provide an ROI to their firm with regards to the qualified talent that it can get in and even more importantly manage and ensure that the ” talent”stays and grows with the organisation- sometimes leading it (at senior level), at times staying in-sync ( at mid-levels) and at yet other times, developing a followership (at the junior level). This foundational mistake of discounting the true value and essence of HR right at the begging- when a business starts afresh, or a new business unit is thought of causes more damage to the entity than anything else! I don’t need to explain I am sure about what price an organisation may end up paying for the wrong people at the wrong time, at the wrong place and at a wrong price! Importantly always remember people are never good or bad, it is their “contextual settings” that either make them shine and excel or dim and fade away! You may have an average intelligent person among dumb idiots and that person may end up looking like an angel to your eyes, out the same person against the backdrop of qualified hotshots from top A schools, you may might as well want to kill yourself for hiring that kind of an idiot! It also than says something about your ability to judge and hire people- well but I will leave that for now and maybe some other write up on that- some other time!

Unless HR is at the table with the business to understand and soak in every aspect of what the grand plan of business is and what’s the whole idea and importantly be listened to- there will never be a true integration! Sure enough in today’s times, even having people stick around at their own positions within the organisations- by itself is a challenge- and that just goes on to compound the integration challenge!– Even today,the normal brief always to HR can look like this- “The organisation would want to have an overhaul or a massive change once a CEO or a A level person moves on or just because the exiting one wants to have the HR do some work!”- you may ask “Why?” well you will almost always never get a sensible answer to that and with no “real HR” to question- the organisation will simply go into an overdrive to reinvent the same old wheel! Everyone will be happy doing that because it keeps everyone in the job and busy- but the fact remains , this unwarranted overdrive often ends up being the classical case of visiting history and needless to say- the results are always the same- “Nothing!” and every few years this nonsense continues and we have people coming and leaving and everything seems to stay exactly where it is! This is the fallacy of the much hyped integration of HR and Business when not carried out in a well thought and objective manner! So you may want to ask how does it look when it works and does it really work?

Well, when done right, HR can empower individuals, teams and business like nothing else can! You may want to ask me now, what is the right way, well the right way is the way of common-sense! If your business is heavily reliant on people and people are the reason for your businesses success or failure and if you don’t start your day without wishing “Good Day” to your HR Head, trust me no matter how big or small your business is, you will falter sooner or later and the reason for that faltering will be the disconnect with your people! So if you are a CEO, running a people centric business , make it a point to throw away your ego( which anyways is good to loose) and learn to walk out of you cabin to spend time with the person responsible for getting you the right people for your team- because when discussions happen here and the more often they do, you will begin to experience magic– magic in terms of the positive rub off that will happen within the existing people across your teams and the new ones that come to join your journey! You don’t need long meetings with endless one-sided communication expressing your dreams, fantasies or frustrations, you don’t need endless boring mails with subject lines reading something like “Form CEO’s Desk” or “It’s your HR” kind of gimmick! All that you need is a simple cup of tea or coffee once a day with the person who is responsible to get the right people for you day-in and day-out!

Now, don’t rush into patting your back, thinking that all the work to hold on to this integration lies only with the CEO’s or the business leader’s the HR leader’s too have to play their part and their part starts by behaving and acting like a business leader- who is leading the business of people! This approach seemingly deceptive but if played right, can make all the difference between having a HR and having a great HR! Awesomeness of HR comes not by knowing the rules and regulations and theories of HR, they do matter, but the real fun happens when HR understands and assimilates the business challenge as if they were their own (because they are their own problems- manifestations which are created by HR!) How?, you may ask, well here’s the simple test, When people leave when you least expect and business suffers, the question “How was this person evaluated and selected even?”, When a person leaves because he gets paid twice and more at the other place- “Why are we paying so less? are we?”, when the person destroys a million dollar machinery because of incompetence- “How did this person clear the evaluation and get in!” Well the lists and situations can go on and on- the fact is a HR disconnected with business problems and business plans is equally liable to fail as the business and what’s more a HR disconnected from it’s business can do more harm than a business that’s’ disconnected with HR!

True integration between HR and Business happens only when there is mutual respect and appreciation about what each of them do and how each one of them contribute to build and develop each other to ensure that the organisation keeps progressing with the right tools, both material and human! Unless Business teams stop discounting HR- assuming they don’t understand or see the point of business and until HR doesn’t stop hiding themselves away in files, operations and social media posts pertaining to job vacancy- this problem will persist! If you always wanted to understand why the HR never called you back or gave you an update for your hour long interview of multiple rounds of hour long interviews- well I presume you would have found your answer somewhere here! A disconnected HR with no insight into business revenues and business action plans- will try and continue the old classical way of reaching out to hundreds of candidates- when it is not required and eventually get stuck when the real time comes to hire- because by then externally the genuineness of the organisation has taken a beating!

There are and there always will be reasons and explanations for every connect and disconnect; some real and some are made up, irrespective of what they are, the fact remains that as long as people are involved and businesses require people, there will always remain a compelling need to to have people specialists and business aces to work together collaboratively in a transparent and purpose driven manner! This alone, If you ask me, this the real essence of integration, driven by purpose and proactive collaboration each playing to their strength, understanding the other team’s requirement!

I will leave you here, with these thoughts, depending on which team you are on- the business or the people team- do reflect on what worked and what didn’t and how can you make what matters work for you and the other team!

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

All about Experience, Knowledge & Intelligence!

~ PA ~ Leave a comment

This is the story of these three invaluable elements, Knowledge, Experience and Intelligence, how they help and harm to shape our lives and end up making who we are to the moment that we are breathing in! There is nothing right and wrong about them, by themselves; but once understood, these very elements can empower you from within so you know for sure which of these elements you want to use more or less , often or occasionally to ensure you keep moving down the chosen path with minimal disruption! So here we go!

Knowledge is the foundation- something that has been there and will be there. If you ask me what is good and not so good about Knowledge- well- Knowledge is what it is- it’s indifferent- human lives get altered or impacted with the way in which Knowledge is used and applied- this is the domain of every shifting human intelligence!Intelligence is what makes Knowledge come alive- Intelligence is what helps us to get Knowledge in action! The only real challenge with Intelligence is that unlike Knowledge, Intelligence can be driven to meet and achieve a specific purpose- a driven agenda and this is the fundamental space where things start to either get created and built or they start to crumble and disintegrate!

Every crisis that humanity has witnessed- whether it was wars , natural disasters, economic melt downs, social unrest’s etc. or every development that humanity has ever collectively witnessed- having humans on the moon, in the space, creating marvels of technology and enhancing quality of human life- through modern technology and scientific developments- all of these have one thing in the common the role of human Intelligence- at times- the brilliance of an individuals mind and many other times- a result of collective intelligence- working in teams, partnerships, communities, governments– Either ways there is no doubt that all our blessings and curses that we live by are but a byproduct of the Human Intelligence- I call this as the byproduct- because the real product of these modern societal frameworks more often than not ends up being human greed and selfish propaganda which begins at an individual level and at times dangerously manifests into state or national policy attributes with disastrous results!

This “double-edged sword” like attribute of intelligence makes it very uncomfortable to others, especially when the other person that you are engaging with either has less of it or has more than enough of it! Hence you will find- normally that a group of content individuals – friends- colleagues etc will always be a collection of intelligence which averages out to their level of comforts, you add one eccentrically dumb or brilliant person to that group and within no time you will have mini groups formed or a complete new restructuring or disbanding of the group! So what makes Intelligence so much in-the-face and uncomfortable? Well here’s the thing- unlike Knowledge which cannot be challenged, Intelligence- which is to do “something” with the “knowledge” can always be questioned and debated on the approach taken and who is taking it and the “why” of these two aspects! Add to this the layer of human insecurity- which comes because of either been thrown among more intelligent people or having to deal day-in and out with astonishingly dumb people around- less intelligent- the whole approach of dealing with knowledge and putting it to effective use to create something meaningful for humanity takes a whole new dimension and that is what the real essence of live’s struggle is! It is about dealing with differential levels of intelligence to ensure the available knowledge is harnessed effectively to serve the greater good of humanity, however the elements of greed and societal confirmation takeover & override intelligence which is the reason why we end up seeing our societies and individuals within and around us the way they are! Think about it!

Speaking about Experience, well it is certainly a subset of Knowledge but at the same time is limited by the availability or unavailability of individual and collective intelligence! You will find “Experience” as the buzz word among office corridors; “we have an experienced senior management”, “we have a rich experience to address consumer problems”, engineers, doctors, scientists, teacher’s manager’s everyone that you would have heard of or spoken to will always tell you stories about how rich the “experience” is!- Wherever they work or study! Well sorry to disappoint you, but the fact is “Experience is perhaps the biggest fallacy of our times!” The problem with experience is that it is based on a contextual setting of a time or event which has already occurred and possibly noted and documented- then the situation or event would have been dealt with in a particular manner- but as times change – our responses need to and better change! Consider this, say you develop symptoms of fever- how would have your doctor approached you say- 25 years back and now? Got the difference- well that’s what the long and short of experience is! When Experience is not weighed against the future and not checked for streaks of brilliance or competence which will stay strong in the times ahead, rest assured you will end up having white elephants within your organisation, who would have had a glorious past, a miserable present and a fast arriving disastrous future! When it comes to decoding and understanding our present and future- experience is no guarantee of success- never by itself! So what is the way ahead with Knowledge, Experience and Intelligence with regards to the times that we live in!

If you ask me, this is what I think (not necessary you may also think the same way- as I say- each one can carve out his own heaven or hell as they may please!); The secret for being in-step and possibly being a fraction ahead of the times that we live about – lies in the space of ensuring that Knowledge is continually harnessed by applying intelligence to the new discoveries made and found; one needs to tweak and correct their “experiences” and have them updated and refined! This process is the key and is a dynamic one which goes on continually and is the trump card to ensure that we are able to harness and optimize the power of Knowledge , Intelligence and Experience on an ongoing basis!

Experience is not about repeating the same tasks/over and over again through the months and years- it is about getting smarter and accurate with repetitive tasks and being able to create differentiation/innovative solutions for addressing recurring challenges and subsequently moving ahead to embrace new challenges- This can be achieved only when Intelligence is applied to Knowledge by adapting the contextual settings on an ongoing basis! This is the space where magic happens and a dynamic equilibrium is reached between Knowledge- Experience- Intelligence to serve the greater good!

I will leave you here, do reflect your encounters with intelligence- knowledge and experience! You will be able to appreciate the depth of experience, agility of your intelligence and the vastness of your knowledge!Once you know this, you can trim the flight of your ambitions for the journey ahead!

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

Decoding “ism’s”: Why they work & why they don’t!

~ PA ~ Leave a comment

Now, before you start making any judgment about what this article perhaps may suggest or not and what my take on the issue of “ism’s” is- well none of this really matters- what is important and what this article deals with are the observed facts – The things as we see and what is the best we can do with what we experience either by accepting, rejecting or remaining indifferent to all those “ism’s” around us! So let’s roll by starting to understand what and who these “ism’s” are!

No matter where you work or who works for you (if you have your own business), which nation you come from, what society you live in- “ism” is a phenomenon which is perhaps as old as human civilization itself! “Ism’s” stands for – groupism, nepotism, favoritism so on and so forth and also makes it presence felt through despise, neglect, indifference and behavioral non-acknowledgement! Like everything else with humanity- by itself – none of the attributes are harmful to cause any serious damage- When these are applied and work in a directed manner, setting off a cascade of imbalances -which more often than not end up harming more people than it is meant to help the few that adhere to the set of the operating “ism” that all hell breaks loose!

Consider this case, say you are a powerful politician with an immense sway and acceptance among the citizenry that worships you like a demi-God. After serving long, your time has come to hang up your boots and offer that position to someone else who can further your legacy- you have a set of loyal workers who have been with you through the years and you have your own kid- that has been showing promise- not necessarily the best of the best among your party (group) what choice do you make? Go by merit strictly- shunning away your own blood- to have a face off at the family dinner table every evening? or stand solidly behind- project your heir to the chair and ask your group members to swear allegiance to the new upcoming order and awarding them with what they want and what you can for this kind act! Well, depending on which part of the globe you are- irrespective of the decision you take- whether you go ahead with your party nominated leaders or place your heir to the chair- you will always be accused of practicing nepotism! This is is the fact of being nepotistic and furthering nepotism- but the counter-point is equally important! Park your thoughts on this politician’s case and we will revisit this towards the end!

I am sure you would have paid a visit to the doctor- at least for some reason- if not for yourself- for someone that you know- possibly for someone you care- What did you do-when you had to make that life changing decision of entrusting your life or the life of someone you value in the hands of a doctor for a major surgery? Did you go by the medical school grades of the doctor? His legacy? His family name and history?What was it? Chances are- if you come from a place like India- where the concept of “Family Doctor’s” is still alive you have generations of families aligned to generations of healers/doctors all for a good reason- that ability to heal and cure runs in their lineage! Well- you may call this unscientific bullshit- perhaps it is- but it works! The chances are that when you want to trust a doctor with your open heart on the operating table- you will find it more comforting to know that the doctor comes from a family of surgeons rather than having a dude who walked out of a medical school last summer with a gold medal! So at times- nepotism is the only pivot of hope, likewise you have lawyers/advocates. Surely- the Jr. Doctor- may not be as sharp as the Sr. Doc in the family line- well that applies to you as well! isn’t it! Intellectual degeneration is the hallmark of humanity and the ability to even retain the same level of intellect as the previous generation is a “wow” moment in today’s era!

Now let’s examine what plays out in the professional settings! Consider this, you have through sheer hard work set up a multi billion dollar empire or perhaps even a million dollar business- it’s time for you to retire- what are the chances that you want to promote that Executive over your own kids and place them on the Directorship of the firm thereby giving them almost the ownership of the firm- Simply because they excelled at their work? not to forget the fact that for all that they have contributed to the firm, they have been rewarded all along with perks and salary for the same all the way? or Do you place your kid on the board and ensure that the “A” team sticks together and follows the rule book by listening to the chair- no matter who is on it! In yet another setting it could be all about that odd film or that web series you want to make with millions at stake and investors gunning for your blood- should it fail, you are toast- what do you do? Go with the safe cast and crew to ensure the project is completed in time and there is a greater awareness and chances of recovering the investments or go ahead by experimenting with new faces and unknown technical teams- just to follow your passion of doing something unique and fresh? Well if that scores a goal- you will remain to tell the story- else you will be in all probability evaluating your options of survival! So does this mean that “ism’s” are here to stay and there is no way around that? Well the answer is Yes and No- Yes- “ism’s will stay as long as humanity walks on this planet and No you don’t have to suffer on account of “ism’s if you don’t want the profits that come with it!- How is that done- well read on!

The safest way and perhaps the only way to tackle and deal with the “ism’s” is to be fiercely self-aware and know more about yourself than you know about the world around you! You see the power to destroy/create or get broken or build comes from within- within each of us- unless you don’t individually allow or empower another person to impact/ effect your thinking and who you are- You are safe and can deal with “ism’s” either by embracing them- be a part of the gang-play your role for a while as long as you are comfortable and gracefully exit when the time comes- like most of them do- without bring bridges and maintaining social relevance! The other way is to Accept “ism’s” is – See them as they are and don’t get entrapped or allured by their power and temptation and continue with your track and approach – Knowing well that your trim levels will arrive much faster and quicker and that you will be eventually ejected from the system earlier than other’s irrespective of what your potential is and whether you are valuable or useless to the people and the set up that you are aligned with! This second approach provides the bedrock to create a formidable seed to downplay “ism’s” and that approach is of “Authoring your own story”. As an option perhaps, not many will be able to exercise this, unless they are ably supported by family and people who matter and care for who “You” are and this scarcity makes this tribe even more ingenious! This is the place that breeds innovators, world-class artists, experts in various fields- from culinary to medicine, from engineering to design! Once you arrive in this space of being able to create and craft your present for a future of your choice- You become indifferent to all the prevailing “ism’s” around you and ironically enough as you taste success- these very “ism’s” will come searching for you to again allure you to their clan so that they can keep harvesting on the exploits of the genius thinking that you offer to the world- by claiming that you belong to their “ism”! So you see finally even success crafted and created by your own merit will draw you back to something that you were escaping- The only difference being that this time- You control the pack and You get to decide when Enough is Enough and no matter what you say or do- Your Indifference – becomes your greatest asset- since you have already learnt the act and craft to create and survive without any “ism” around you!

Being a coach, we learn dealing through our experience with people- The only singular truth that remains is – the fact that- Each individual’s truth is a their own reality to which they will always remain glued- the depth and spread of that truth either makes them all encompassing or self-limiting! There is nothing right or wrong about “ism’s” how we deal with it and what approach we take to deal with it- either makes “ism” work for us and help us or makes it works against us to harm us! The human mind, being what it is- through your life time- at one point the “ism” will your vital need – pivoting on your existence and yet at another time as your purpose is served, you will despise and reject that very “ism” as it never existed! Nothing right and nothing wrong about it! The only important thing being- don’t plan your life aligned to “ism’s- that is a fatal fallacy and can wreak havoc with even the most intelligent minds! As long as you stay focused within and know who “You” are and learn to manage that bit- all else can be dealt with later!

I will leave you with these thoughts for now, to perhaps re-evaluate your priorities and see whether you are entrapped/ fostering or staying indifferent to the “ism’s” around your fragile life!

Ciao for now, will be back soon with another article! keep those mails coming in and do let me know what next you would like to read about!

Don’t let success fail you!

~ PA ~ Leave a comment

“Success” is by itself cryptic and means different things to different people, but what is common, is the fact, that no matter how you want to define it for yourselves, within it lie the seeds of your failure! This piece is all about understanding the real essence of “success” and how to ensure your success doesn’t sow the seeds of your failure! So here we go!

To begin with most of us, when asked , “What does success mean to you?” will go on answering this question with that unwanted grin and start adding all the materialistic attributes that one can think of- money, cash, houses, gadgets, vacations, lifestyle, grandeur, name, fame, recognition, food, indulgence etc. etc. and the list can go on and on- What is common within all the elements mentioned here is that all and each of these manifestations of success are all extrinsic and dependent of multiple variables apart from you! When this aspect is forgotten or lost in translation- shit invariably happens and you end up setting yourself for certain failure, ironically developing from your success and it is proportional to the extent of your success- the more successful you become (hinging on the extrinsic attributes and definitions of success) your failure will be equally noteworthy and iconic! Sounds familiar? Well yes- the stuff that tycoons, politicians and celebrities face right? Well yes, and more importantly each one of us too have faced this, every now and than at the level that we are and proportional to what we have achieved or not achieved in life! So this is what must be focused upon and this is what needs to be fixed! How do we do this? well read on!

The problem with our modern day definition of “success” lies in the fact that it all is entrapped into materialistic bondage! Nothing wrong in earning money, growing your affluence and being able to enjoy the best of what the world has to offer and what your money can buy- the problem is with ending up using that space and that ability to indulge with what you have to define your success which becomes the undoing for many! You would have heard stories of sporting icons, celebrities, business tycoons, who had it all and than lost themselves as they lost what they had (rather what they had- which according to them- defined who they are!). Well, this plays out when people misread and misinterpret “success” as an achievement! Consider this, how would you feel if every time you went to meet your doctor- you find your doctor- throwing a party because he cured ten patients yesterday! or when you visit a store to shop for some clothes and the moment you complete your billing- you find the counter staff breaking out in a gig celebrating their targets! Well, I am certain you would not have seen any of this! So what does that mean? Isn’t your doctor successful and shouldn’t he celebrate the “success” of his patients getting better? Seems aright to be celebrated, right? Even the shop counter staff, knowing they hit the sales figure, nothing wrong if they too celebrated their “success” isn’t it? So why don’t do they do it? Well in the case of the doctor or the counter staff they are practicing what I call it as “Internalizing success” – they know the simple truth- that they are working in the current direction and are sure that if they continue doing what they do- they will keep achieving the results and keep getting better and better- which will help them with building their lives! This is what internalizing success does and the bets part- well it doesn’t bother them much if that odd patient left treatment mid-way or unfortunately died or if they did not hit the sales number for that month! Because they know it deep within that – With each opportunity they give their best and than hope for the rest to manifest and this is what real success looks like- It’s hard work, non-glamorous and intrinsic! They don’t contemplate of stopping work as a doctor or leaving the job at the store, because one day, one event was not working in their favour!

Internalizing success does many wonderful things! First it helps you understand that your success is defined by Who You Are! Real success which clings onto a person always derives its strength from the person and not from the circumstances around the person! Circumstances are like a case of electromagnets wrapped around your working world- every now and then there will be changes and that change of flux around you will drain you of your internal latent potential unless you don’t do way with the habit of large dependence on the circumstances around you! Sure enough they are important- but no reason can be bigger than Yourself and who You are as person when it comes to defining success in the real essence of it! What happens if you don’t embrace success this way around?

Well as long as people define success by aligning it to standards, benchmarks and societal confirmations, there will be an ever ongoing disagreement between Who You Are, What Your Beliefs are, What you actually value and what you paint as an image of what others must see (which comes in as a rider to enjoy that stage success!). Success of this nature, which is measured and calibrated through the lens of the world/society or set standards and perceptional rules of engagement of the sectors that people work in- will invariably fail- once the external factors that fan the staged-success are depleted- either they wane away or they move to a new host- what is left, is an individual with a hollow reality of the staged success and with more questions than answers about themselves! This staged success which is hinged on circumstances and societal influence brings along a hidden baggage which manifests in different ways like, peer pressure, competitive pressure, one upmanship, group-isms and so on and so forth- this compelling need to belong to be recognized and to belong to a section or a select acceptance within the society ends up undoing all that may have been done by an individual and eventually sets up the person into a tailspin of self- discovery where answers simply don’t seem to come by and there are more and more questions as the dive becomes more and more terrifying. The only hope of recovery to come out of this deadly self-inflicting death dive is to “Know Yourself” and Know that Your Success is not dependent on others to the extent that you are made to believe!

True success is always a factor of the Individual- If you have been successful once you will be once again and yet again- certainly there will be spanners in the wheel as you try and move ahead and there will be twists and turns on the way- but as long as you don’t fall into the trap of “compulsive social acceptance”, “confirmation bias” and fall prey to the “be in the group” kind of situation- you will be safe and have a greater sense of achievement when you do and a refined element of learning should you fail- because whatever the outcome maybe- It is then always about who You are and that’s what matters! Once You learn that You alone make the difference and You alone get to decide Who impact you and by How Much, rest assured – you’ve imbibed the right way to “Internalize Success” and sooner or later You will become what You are Destined to be- no matter what the circumstances!

I will leave you with these thoughts, so that you may go head and reflect and see how you have experienced staged- success and true success as you wandered across the world! Always remember- The Final choice rests with each one of us- to define and be defined the way we want us to be! True Success is about us, each one of us and what we can uniquely achieve by being How We Are! There can be no comparison, never, simply because each of us has a different life story and a life path, to narrate and tread upon! All that hinges on others and external factors, will fade away, sooner or later! All that remains is the Belief and Faith within and that alone helps to weave the fabric of your true success- which solely relies on Who You Are!

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

Leaders too need help!

~ PA ~ Leave a comment

At times when the world stands at crossroads battling multiple uncertainties, depending on where you are, whether it is the still looming pandemic, the economic crisis, social unrest, or in general resentment towards the kind of leadership that you are experiencing whether at your national level or its the crisis of leadership at your workplace,its is of paramount importance to note that there are times when even these very Leaders need help- because even they too are human and in times like these they need it more than ever! This article explores that space of vulnerability that plays havoc with Leaders no matter what they are trying to overcome! So let’s understand for sometime what your beloved leader possibly is facing even as they try to keep a smile, a straight face or that mercurial temperament around them!

Who are leaders? They are not super-humans in terms of any anatomical context, but they perhaps demonstrate their expertise and ability to fare better than the cohort that they are part of and that is why they seem to move ahead within the sub-set that are a group of! Look around you, you will find almost every Leader has emerged as being the best alternative in the context of time and space that the Leader has arrived. Perhaps a few years or decades earlier, this person would have been passed off as an average person, a few years down the line, we may not even have people like them in our consideration sets! Since requirements would have changed and they constantly shift and move to wards the next step of dynamic equilibrium which is so much needed for growth and progress no matter what you choose to lead- a company or a nation or even yourself! This dynamic contextual setting within which leaders operate ends up making them fragile and manifest “Leadership Fragility”! Leaders who are touched by fragility, start to become so much risk averse that at times when they are required to act and move ahead rapidly, they seem to freeze and stay frozen from taking any decisions, small or large and thereby put the whole system that they influence into chaos and confusion! This fragility can occur for multiple reasons- it could be because of the leaders arrived at the control too early- without much experience or leadership baptism, it could be that they were given a wrong picture of the operational space within which they were supposed to hold the fort, it could be they were given a wrong army to fight a battle, it could be that the weapons of change provided to them were compromised and no matter what destiny they try to write, the ink simply seems to vanish away each time and they keep starting again and again! These varying aspects of dealing with day-to-day scenarios at work end up making few Leaders fragile and hence you can find their leadership style reflecting this element- when they are intentional slow, take their time, check and double check and re-check and move ahead only when it is the only and the most necessary option and when every other option has conclusively closed!

Leadership Fragility as a concept also shows the flaws and chinks in the armor of the ecosystem within which leadership is supposed to play its role! It opens up the whole contextual appreciation of team dynamics, ability to see through and develop clear view on strategic and operational preparedness that leaders have developed or have not developed which makes them vulnerable to threats within and from outside their ecosystems!

Normally, we always come across leaders who are accommodating, non-accommodating, easy going or headstrong personalities, but what is important is,instead of jacketing them into any of the singular or plural adjective definitions, we must take an effort to understand the eternal , “Why” of their leadership style and what could have lead for them to adhere to what they seemingly are glued upon with no real end in site!

Leaders are in that odd space within the system of things- which is closer to heaven and hell in equal measure with a caveat that nothing from their experienced heaven or hell reaches the earth (where their team lives!). So when team members look up to the leader- they hardly have a clue of the kind of turmoil that the poor soul is dealing with and the only impression that these earthlings carry along with them is whether their boss was good or bad- because they increment was x or y! When the Leaders occupying such tight spots are not the real “owners”of the business, well, needless to say their lives are as miserable and lovable as you can imagine! Imagine a pendulum which swings far away in each direction- one the eternal core of heaven and the other end the core of hell at the speed of light! When Leaders “own” the businesses, they have one and only one benefit- that is ability to decide when to pull the plug off and leave the business- either shut it down or sell it off and start to toy with something else and start a new life by taking a professional rebirth all over again!

Leaders are constantly shifting between managing the pressures that they meet from above and what they must hold within and pass on what they can while ensuring that they soak up every ounce of pressure from below as well! So needless to say often you find leaders who believe in the maxim Mind over Matter, because that is the only thing that stand between them and Insanity- Their Mind applied firmly to the Matters at their hand!

The next time you start to judge the leader that you are facing- whichever reason that may be- think about it- The Leader may be operating from a point of Strength or from the point of Fragility! There could be plans and strategies which the leader may have devised or there can be mandates which the leader has to simply execute and make them operational! Unless you don’t fathom what is the context from which the Leader is acting, it will be unfair to arrive at conclusions in favour or against the Leader or the Leadership style! You may now, want to ask, so what is that you can do about it or should you really do anything about it? Aren’t Leaders paid and haven’t they signed up for the shit that comes along with the glory that bask in?

Well, the fact remains, they too are human, and like most of us, they too sometimes end up singing up for something which they would have either not understood completely, would not have been told about it completely or they would have misread it completely because of the facts and picture presented to them while handing over the reigns to them as they took charge of whatever that they are supposed to lead! There could also be that rarest of the rare case of “Incompetency” playing out – this happens when Leaders arrive too soon to lead on the scene without having a a clue of what they are supposed to be doing and where they are! More often than not, these people end up blowing up and destroying everyone and everything around them, eventually also damaging themselves!

The only thing that you can do while dealing with the Leader that you face or engage with each day of your life is, to appreciate and decipher the contextual settings and studying what is driving the Leadership that you are experiencing, whether it is the strength derived by the Leader because of who the leader is, or is It the strength derived from the position that an individual occupies, next you must observe the pattern of decisions and the impact created around that- if you see diminishing returns on decisions being taken- you know for sure something is not right and sooner or later you will have a changed leader! Likewise when Leaders act from the space of compulsion- driven by the business owners or stakeholders, often you will see that they too will eventually fizzle out as demands and expectations start to borderline around fiction over ground realities of business and facts! Leaders who also own their business, when they start to act in non-coherent manner it is a clear sign of decay and you can be rest assured that a big change is on the way- which will probably involve a change of hands at the business ownership eventually!

It is not always about the yelling boss or the cheerful happy face boss, it is about the undercurrents that keep these professionals on the edge for the right and wrong reasons that either makes them super achievers or ends up pushing them to cramped spaces wherein they experience their fragility and once that sets in you can see it manifest around the team and all that they lead and influence! Next time when you sit and listen to your boss, take a moment and try to read through the unsaid message and listen to the unmentioned whisper, perhaps your boss needs that extra cup of coffee with you more than you do!

I will leave you here, to explore, experience and think around leadership fragility and the experiences that you would have gathered through your working life; being a leader or by witnessing a leader, no matter what the context would have been, the fact will always remain that even Leaders are Fragile and they need help too!

Ciao for now, will be back soon with another article! In case you or your firm is looking out for Individual or team Coaching, write in to us today and we will be glad to help you!

Dealing with your job loss.

~ PA ~ 2 Comments

If the title grabbed your attention, there can be two reasons- either you are or have been at the reeving end of this or you are at the end form where this will start! Irrespective of which side of the table you are, this is going to impact you and this article is about trying to see how meaningful this sordid affair can be turned into- how can we possibly create diamonds from the unwarranted pressure that loss of livelihoods brings with it! Rest assured this is no – sermon for the making everyone feel good- but more about how to introspect and make sense of the developing nonsense around you! So here we go!

Well, to begin with, let us get some clarity, the pandemic- the virus per say- is not the only reason- why you would have been discussing your job loss! Depending on your sector, which nation you belong to and the kind of business that you are working for, you would have been getting signals of something not being right for at least 4-6 months prior to Feb/ March 2020. The world economy was slowing down and it was well on its way to hit rock bottom- the only thing that happened differently – unlike earlier recessions this one got camouflaged and over-ridden by the global health emergency and headlines changed to number of infections and deaths from disease – replacing the usual financial headlines that come with an economic melt down! Now your job loss could have happened for multiple reasons- or actually in few cases- for no real reasons at all!– I mean large companies do have a qualified and experienced senior management and business risk advisors who are supposed to save the day for these companies for exactly the kind of scenarios that we are facing! So what were these enlightened ones’ doing as they were scouting for the proverbial “Iceberg event?” More surprising is the fact that their- risk mitigation strategy often starts with the reactive stance of suggesting job cuts- rather than having an ongoing preemptive and proactive stance of avoidance! – About this, I will write, some other time! Now that you kind of know, that you are not entirely to blame to what you are facing- let’s get started with the “dealing” stuff!

If you happen to be one of those unluckily-lucky fellows, who are under 30, the blue eyed resources for the corporations, armed with those enviable management and engineering certifications and as the norm is now- a-days goes- digitally certified- by everyone and anyone that can offer a certificate- well this is a the pivotal moment of your life and trust me you should embrace this as much as you can! No matter what sector you have been working- you took up the challenge- performed- if not excelled- at times surprises yourself and other s around- at times hit rock bottom- gone through the whole baptism of corporate world and just as you thought you were acing the game- well the playground is suddenly closed for you! So now you are angry, confused and in utter shock and disbelief- “Why me”, “What did I do to deserve this?”, “Why not the other person, why was I chosen over that one?”- As long as you remain stuck in these self-serving- defensive and consolatory state of mind- trust me- you will only find it more and more difficult to come to terms and focus on what you must essentially do- Stand up- Dust yourself- and Walk/Jog/Run/Sprint ahead yet again! This easier said than done – can be achieved by clinically dissecting what you have gone through and this is how you do it!

It has to start by understanding well- really well- like an external consultant would do to understand the business dynamics- what has really played out- there could be multiple scenarios based on the nature of business- supplier side issues- vendor payments- accrued debts, working capital issues- managing partner differences, ownership slug fest, failing quality of leadership, as long as these manifestations arise form the work arena- chances are there would have been signals- clear or subtle signals of the fact that- all is not well- and there will be a bump on the way- now the ability to predict the dimension of that bump- whether it will allow the organisation to pass over or will it wreck the momentum of the organisation and rip it apart- is something which comes only with experience- hence for the youngsters- this can be excused- but the plain fact remains that- part of the job loss problem- is because , as individuals we are connected to the task that we perform but often fail to scan the broader pictures around us that are constantly shifting and developing– Its like you are a pilot who is flying the plane- with all attention locked into the instrument panel- and missing the whole picture through the windscreen ahead! When people tend to pick these signals up- they leave and try to avoid getting caught up in the unnecessary corporate warfare which happens through methods! This, is essentially the first learning for your life- before you sign up for that next journey onboard another corporate vehicle- scan the environments around the ship that you wish to embark! Check for operational stability, check for essential fundamentals and check how the vehicle is driven- who has the controls and what does that mean for you as an Individual! You may have a great company with a bad team or a bad company with a great team; and the results through these two scenarios can be strikingly different and the outcome, needless to say would be miles apart! Anyone of these scenarios can make you a great hero or break you completely depending on what is your natural inclination to deal with- as in what you are great at- fixing people or fixing processes!

Once you have understood that there are contributing developments that lead to situations like a job loss- the next thing that you need to understand and figure out is, what is that you could have possibly done to effect a change- a different possibility?- did you do that?-was it possibly to impact a change through the position that you were at? If you have cleared this basic step of understanding that you did in fact give all you could have to the work at hand at the position that you were- than well I guess it is a classic case of having boarded a ship which had embarked on a journey to find icebergs and crash into one! So once you signed up- it really didn’t matter what you did or not, as with time- it was eventually going to break apart and sink- here what matters is or what could have mattered is- how close you have been to the lifeboats on the ship and how well you have understood the emergency evacuation drill! So, yes, it all boils down to having a plan for yourself- the fabled Plan B, which helps you navigate uncertainties of life- everything and anything- form the traffic jam in the morning to being able to find your livelihood back!

Finally the most important aspect,“Learning” what did the event/incident teach you, what did you learn- this is perhaps the most powerful tool and mindset to carry with us all through our lives- A learners mindset helps to develop patterns and decipher our environments more rapidly so that we are better prepared when shot hits us next time- because it will , that’s for sure- as long as humanity operates form cornerstones of greed and dominance!This learner’s mindset will help you clear the cobwebs in your mind- which try to climb and cloud your thinking with tons of self-pity and self-victimization for no real reason- unless you were the person who was in-charge and you screwed up the whole damn business! Even in that kind of extreme scenario caused by intelligence malfunction- a learners approach will do well, to ensure you stand back quick and don’t repeat the same mistake again so that you can recover and race ahead!

A job loss is a great thing to happen- because it presents to you unknown colors and hues of individuals, collective groups- called companies and the whole societal equation that goes around with it! You will see behavioral changes and attitudinal shifts among colleagues, mentors, peer groups, so-called- friends, you will know the power equations secret (the real power is always in the chair- not the person- when it is in the person- chairs don’t matter!– That’s the stuff that Corporate and Political Godfather’s are made of!). You will see how narratives about you change fast, before you and behind you! You will get support from unknown quarters and people whom you would have hardly counted upon, that odd client- whom you always discounted as petty, may come to your rescue with some great recommendations! You will see a lot of things happen around fast- it’s kind of graduating all over again in a short period of time! You understand the power of the contract that you signed up which allows/disallows you to do”xyz” for “abc” months post your severance!

Most importantly you will learn, “To value your Life” in a renewed context, perhaps more time for yourself, more time perhaps for your family an real friends! You will perhaps appreciate, there is no point running a race with no finish line! There is more to see, and experience by pausing and walking and just being around the wold that we have, because once you have exhausted a considerable time through corporate slavery– that time is gone and so are those many infinite opportunities to experience life which could have possibly created a completely different and better version of yourself! Perhaps this job loss, allows that ingenuity within you to arise,a waken and create an entrepreneur that the world has been waiting for! There can be multiple an many scenarios, what remains certain is – The job loss is not really a loss- if you see it from the space of having a learners mindset and if you convert this loss to your gain by connecting with people, things and places that really matter; Elements which will be by your side no mater what!

I leave you here, to reflect, introspect and see how even in a seemingly awkward situation (which largely is always painted with despair and grief), can one also find the seeds of the future, and by knowing the right ones’ to nurture,you can create the pathway to a future which provides better awareness and calibration through the experience digested through a learners mindset!

Ciao for now, will be back soon with another interesting article! N, yes, If you are really hit hard and finding it difficult to gather your bearings back, drop me a mail, will be glad to help you- without damaging our mutual sanity and without serving unwarranted optimism and hope!

Practice Mindful Hiring to avoid Mindless Firing.

~ PA ~ Leave a comment

Yes! I know folks, you may want to start with a negative thought about this article, but trust me, it’s gonna be more fun than you think, remember my last article? about the layoff thingy, Well this is to put the context more clearly and possibly help people at both ends of the table to formulate their own strategies to avoid unwanted miseries in their life- given the times that we live in! So here we go!

Well, to begin with,let me make one point clear- Let’s stop blaming a microbe for everything and anything around us! Well, admit it, the world economy was stalling, faltering and failing it across nations around late 2019, even as the pandemic was manifesting itself- whether that was intentional or not, is a different story altogether, we will leave that for some other time, the point here is that the world was already on it’s way to a meltdown and there was just one trigger that was needed which could accelerate the fall- the pandemic came in as a surprise- although like always war would have been a favorite candidate to precipitate the economic slow down that we are witnessing today! So why did businesses fail because of a Virus? read on…

We need to understand, how geopolitics and collusion of business with politics and politicians runs deep behind the scenes and scrutiny of the public eye! All that the Virus was scientifically was asking one to do was – keep social distancing and stay away from vulnerable people (ill/aged/those who have weakened immunity) and avoid public places (basically places where it becomes difficult to stay away and trace who came from where , when, for how much time and why!) Given. this fact- see how nations reacted- Lockdown! Well, most of them did it and as this was unleashed- it ensured that business obituaries started to get written one sector after the other, one regions after the other and this whole event created a chain reaction which has now plunged the whole world into a severe economic crisis even as nations continue to battle out with the health emergency! You may now want to ask, what has all this got to do with hiring and firing of people? You may want to present a case, “Why should business continue to pay employees, if there is no business activity?” Well actually that is far from what the real problem is!

You see, when all was smooth sailing, businesses, their favorite bankers, their lovely political friends all of them came together to ensure that each and every business is magnified with an intention that every business seems to be bigger, better than the next competitor and so much so that, even the “I am Number 1” parameters begin to come up with different metrics and business bodies end up with “Award functions” all through the year, where every organisation gets awarded for the same reason by a different awarding agency! Well anyways- nothing to say bout this right or wrong- each person’s nectar is divine for that person! This is the point where the problem starts!

You see, humans all have egos, even I have a much earned one- where I refuse to speak with people with lower intelligence than myself!- The point here is the Business egos are far more dangerous and destructive especially when they collude with politics, the whole market place becomes one big rigged casino- no matter which machine you want to play at- you are already defeated even before the game starts!

Companies have been traditionally into the space of what I call Myopic resource management- whether that is people or other things. Myopic People Management is by far the most fatal of all the flaws that businesses can come up with and when these get operational, slow and painful death of an organisation is all but certain! Business always have had a tendency to keep hiring- at times for no real reason-Sometimes to fill up a large office space, do the cheap multiplier- get more for less dollars, just let there be a buzz, anticipating clients coming in- which is nothing but hallucination provided by the “close inner circle” who themselves have often no fucking clue of what they are upto! All these myopic dealings eventually end up being a case of ,”Too many cooks and nothing to cook”, situation for organisations every year – every few years; and you will notice, some companies do this with striking predictability- they will fire- than after a few months they will re-hire- and the cycle goes on and on! In all this happening place- big names get thrown around- some picked up, some left out and there will be multitudes on unnamed workers who will be left wondering- what did they do deserve what they are been given?! They worked the shifts, they took no leaves, they put in long hours- Why did the company not make any profits if they were working day in and day out? Who kept an eye out of the watch tower? Who was charting the course to ride the waves of business turbulence?

These firings that happen on account of business not doing well, are actually seeded into the very business plan when the business starts off in the first place! When not enough thought is applied and when no real projections and honest discussions happen in those long, polished boardrooms, this is how shot happens! Boardrooms when are not transparent and are hidden away- almost always translate into becoming the secret chambers where lotteries are picked up to name and shame the fall guys for the organization from time to time, season to season! So what can we do about this? is there anything that can be done?Well surely there is something that can be done, as long as we have the intent, the “we” here implies those blue eyed boys and girls who “own” the businesses. I mean “own” in the literal sense of “owning it” not “working to slog” because some investor has pumped billions from an Atlantic Ocean Island which happens to be a tax haven!

People have been and will always continue to be at the centre of all that we do, automation yes, but even to manage and drive that automation, people will be required! Once businesses and companies make an intent to pursue, “Mindful Hiring” and stop being reckless about themselves as firms and about the people that they cross paths with through their professional journey, the problem will start to solve itself even before it reached menacing proportions!

Mindful Hiring is not about, not making mistakes, it is more about learning on the way as mistakes happen and fixing them on an ongoing basis rather than ignoring them and allowing them to become eventually unmanageable! Once businesses hire people with an aim to provide livelihoods for a decent future timeline which could be anywhere from a 12 months period to a 60 months period depending upon the nature of the business, the planned growth strategies and than plotting the projected growth story for the individual through that time within the organisation, half the battle is won!The remaining half is achieved as the newcomer starts to get the value to the table and keeps growing and moving ahead along the plotted trajectory of growth for that individual within the organisation! Mindful hiring is more detailed, it is about knowing “who” you are hiring, “why” and “what” is the value that you are seeking from that individual and “how” all of that fits in and magnifies the business outcome in the given context of time and space during which the person is supposed to be working. It is as simple as this and doesn’t get any simpler than this!

So now you may want to ask, if this is so simple, why don’t organisations do it? Well two reasons, one because we deal with “people” and a lot of unplanned shit happens to them and keeps happening all the time- even if the business environments get sanitized and completely mindful- an individuals approach and the self-destruct button (which all of us have) is good enough to screw up everything either by accident or by design! Secondly because of this very reason”people being a little weird” having that kind of extensive team to simply keep track and measure attitudes and behavioral manifestations of individuals as they work on an ongoing basis becomes more difficult- easier said than done -as they say! So business do what they always have been doing- where they need 100, hire 160- they know eventually only 25-30 will remain- sure enough not all businesses thrive this way- you certainly don’t want the hospital you visit to have doctors being hired and fired this way! Don’t you? So what’ the way ahead?

Well, simple- Once businesses start “Mindful Hiring” with an intent and focus to provide growth and plotted trajectory for limited times for people- they will find even the people that approach are clear about what they can offer and what is that they wish for in return- so no baggage burned or carried and as the value exchange is done, each of them can shake hands and part ways without any bad blood! This step also automatically does away with the need of “Mindless Firing” because once you have the right nuts and bolts working the way they should, rest assured you have developed some formidable immunity to deal with business emergencies and financial challenge- because your machine is lean and mean and knows exactly what to do and how to ride over the turbulence – because you always knew “Who you hired” and “What value they bring”!

I will stop myself here, and urge you to make an effort to embrace “Mindful Hiring”, Whether you are hiring someone or you are the one who is being hired- take a pause and think about the plotted growth trajectory and the value exchange- if none of this is clear-walk away now and don’t do it- because a flight with no flight plan is surely not coming down easy! Embrace Mindful Hiring to avoid Mindless Firing!

Ciao for now, have your coffee, think! I will be back soon with another piece!

How natural events are transformed into disasters.

~ PA ~ Leave a comment

Cyclones, earthquakes, landslides, mudslides, flash floods, seasonal floods, volcanic eruptions, tidal bore, tsunami, avalanche, sandstorms, tornadoes, typhoons, well all these seem to be cousins from one big family who are hell bent at making human lives miserable and hell, but the truth is far from that! This short piece is to help you make some peace with these wonderful gifts of nature and allow you to enjoy them while ensuring your safe and don’t suffer! So let’s go!

Our planet has been evolving and continues to, with each passing second- that’s how it has always meant to be! Even before humankind evolved as we know it today, these natural events played a major role in ensuring that the conditions were conducive enough for complex organisms, ecosystems to develop and foster which have made it possible to be who we are today, and for me to write this blog!

Through history- ancient and modern- there have been replete examples of storms, and cataclysmic events at times well documented and at times lost partly in the passage of time. 200 years ago the earth was the same, the natural events would have been more or less the same- the only reason why we possibly never had such a hue and cry about things was possibly because our science and the accompanying dumbness had not yet arrived to the scene! With breakthrough’s in science, technology, it became possible to have satellites hosted up, weather balloons sent up and snaps clicked to understand comprehensively how the weather systems worked in tandem not only in a small area- but across larger areas.The boundaries of nations are created by humankind, for nature there is no international border or allegiance to any trading block or political alignment- if there is a storm coming your way – Nature will not decide your fate on religious or political alignments- your acceptance of science and common-sense alone will make the difference between you have a future tense or getting permanently stuck in the past tense!

If one goes to see what has changed in the last 200-300 years, it is the spread of mankind in areas as remote as one could think of- remote in the context of climatic harshness and habitat in general. So what did we do, well we applied science, technology and ingenuity, perhaps all that we could apply (sans common-sense) to create cities, towns and human settlements in areas and locations which were nothing more than a ticking time bomb with regards to how nature implements it’sown plan! Last 200-300 years historically have witnessed large events wherein there has been general disregard to nature, whether it is altering the course of rivers for dams, whether it is draining the swamps to make way for construction, whether it is reclaiming land from the Sea, or blasting off mountains to create transport lines, or clearing natural habitats for agriculture and cash crops, you name it and you will find it- these and many allied factors around these events- which have a geo-political and an economic overtone to it have accelerated the conflict between Nature and Humanity. The funny part is that humans have first created this problem and than gone a step further in creating a whole new business of trying to figure out how to deal with “Climate Change”even as every passing second the climate is being altered and changed through human activities on an ongoing basis!

The simple truth remains is that humanity through it’s development has sadly allowed the human greed to override human acceptance and the better use of accommodation mind-set which is so very critical- as each one of us knows that this is the only planet we have (at least as yet) and this is the only place we can call our home in the whole known spectrum of the Universe! This human greed to have it all, consume everything and dominate resources of nature/from nature has ensured we are always in the firing line of natural events! Cities have been built around sea fronts world over – knowing very well- that there exists a clear and imminent danger form what the oceans have to throw at you when they have a bad day at office! Hill sides and mountain slopes are cleared off recklessly to have the quaint little hill top or mountain view idyllic settings for that ever elusive Instagram selfie- without giving a second thought about the risks that come with an unstable earth on precarious slope- setting up of whole city blocks close to river flood lines – clearing vital pristine natural forests for farming- all of these set up as a society in direct conflict with nature and when shit happens- which it will- instead of the storm going away flattening trees in a forest- where they can grow back fast and quick (as part of the natural processes) we end up having messed up cities and devastated human lives at times with terrible stories of agony and pain which take years and years to recover and by the time that recovery is complete we are surely hit by some other incident in one way or the other! So, by now if you are trying to think I am making a pitch for an environmental cause- well I am not, because even that is business! I am trying to share a simple and yet wonderful thought- Get Humanity out of the way of Nature and everything will be just fine!

If people don’t senselessly clear forests, build resorts by blasting off mountain slopes, don’t whine for sea-front properties and understand that nature is beyond your lovely pet and the money plant in your house or office, well I guess, we would have already won half the battle! No matter who says what, it doesn’t matter how much of science you know or not, what matters and perhaps the only thing that matters is if you generously use common-sense and want to feel empowered by nature and share the sunrises, sunsets, spring flowers and the snowfall in the right way at the right times and wish to paddle down a call, clean river or have a campfire by the beach or in the woods- remember it always starts with you, every singular effort done to ensure that nature is not being trampled upon is the essence of ensuring that we are able to handover the pearls that nature has to offer to succeeding generations sans the unwarranted anxiety and whole narrative of “the world was better earlier”! Remember, earthquakes don’t kill, it is the man-made structures that fail- which kill people, Flash floods don’t kill- being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time gets your killed! Nature has it’s own way to send out signals of distress and warnings if you understand it that way- have your wondered why animals ride it out better when natural events occur? You may say they sense it, well yes they do, the fact also being, even we can, but our capitalist and modern day greed has ensured we have ended up switching off our receivers which can help us too- should we ever trespass into a natural place at a horribly wrong time!

Finally, it is never about Nature Vs Humanity, we are part of nature- once we are ready to keep aside or even trim a little of the ever growing greed of wanting and dominating the planet, this world will be a much better and safer place! Remember, natural events never were designed in a way to kill anyone- let alone humans- it is humans who have found ingenious and dumb ways to get into the path of nature and at the wrong times and add to our ever growing list of demises which occur because of non-application of science and commonsense-applying even one of it can save human lives- always- no matter what nature throws at you!

I will leave you here,for now, so if you happen to be somewhere close to brewing thunderstorm or by the beach, show some respect and use your limited knowledge of science or common-sense to ensure you can appreciate the great sights and sounds that nature puts up for us and also ensuring you don’t get killed and live to see another sunrise!

Ciao for now, will be back soon with another piece and here’s wishing you a eco-friendly life!

The story about Change and Uncertainty.

~ PA ~ Leave a comment

Hello there! This article is not about the the “All will be ok” manual for your this life and next life, but what I want to share with you through this piece, is about reflecting on few aspects which you would know the best, simply because, no matter who says what, You and you alone are the master of your life and you get to chart the course of your life! So let’s move ahead!

Change is something that we all love (heart in heart) but as we are told, it’s on the way, we start with a certain about of rebellion! Consider this, we all know as kids, our parents asked us, requested us and whacked us on multiple issues whether, it was about brushing twice a day, saying our prayers, keeping the room neat and tidy, helping with domestic chores, you think about it- and each one of us has a story to relate to this aspect of our lives! As we look back to those incidents which could be anywhere from few years ago to maybe decades ago- we realize how foolish and futile was it to just say no – to brush our teeth twice, keep our rooms tidy etc. etc. So what is happening here, why is it that whether it be the boss in our office, or the homes that we come from, every time that something changes- why do we start with a freaking “NO”? Why is it this way?

Well, the answer lies in the most primitive part of our brain- a part of the brain which has been programmed through evolution to “Always keep doing what you have been doing”- simply because that has not killed or harmed you! That’s why you get the cold sweat each time you want to try a new sea food, or think about changing your job or experience that fear of being fired or simply the challenges with moving houses so on and so forth! The human mind (in it’s true and natural way) has been programmed to keep us healthy and safe- hence it works well with repetitive chores and functions, however with evolution and development- few of us have been able to adapt and overcome this strong primitive desire to stay anchored and have embraced the world of curiosity- this happens only when individuals experience a powerful trigger at vital points through their life- the triggers could be positive or negative- but what they do is propel your thinking to disregards the primitive, cautious approach to embrace a new more risk seeking and adventurous route- which when works- make people successful, innovative and leaders to a new aspect of life and when it doesn’t work- well not many come to know about it and soon you are coiled back to your own original lesser self doing what can be done effortlessly just to ensure you stay alive!

Change and Uncertainty, since ancient times have been the fundamental reasons for the advancement and destruction of human civilizations and I believe that this is perhaps a cycle as ancient as the planet itself! If you see deeper, the problem is not really with the Change or the Uncertainty- It has got more to do with what is being communicated about these aspects to the people- by those who they trust- which makes all the difference between accepting and embracing change or raking up a complete rebellious situation! The essence for helping Individuals to embrace change is about crafting and designing a powerful, yet simple communication which connects and directs them to act in a way which helps them internalize the oncoming change and makes it their second nature! Once this is done as change gets closer, it feels like their second skin and not something alien which they may get spooked by!

Uncertainty is like the older cousin of Change , because Uncertainty can get along Change or Change can bring along Uncertainty! Either ways they are never far away from each other! How one treats one of them goes a long way with what the other aspect is going to throw at the Individual! Consider this, You come to know, because of this CCP Virus, you are technically screwed up and have no clarity on your next pay check! Well there you have a forced change and uncertainty walking right through the front door towards you! Now what do you? Well you have a choice to make either you talk with Uncertainty and plan to deal with Change or you strike a conversation with Change and then try to figure out the extent of uncertainty and it’s nature! Either approach will help you take some meaningful action which will ensure that none of the other negative manifestations of Change and Uncertainty (like paranoia, anxiety, PTSD etc which can set into your mind and unleash havoc!).

The only way to deal with change and uncertainty is to embrace it, acknowledge it and accept it. It doesn’t get simpler than this! As an individual you need to come to the present time- be in the now- away from your dreamy past of I could, I would and staying away from your anxious future- which keep on rattling of things which commence with I will, I can etc.. you need ton be firmly anchored into the present moment to make any and all sense of what the coming Change and Uncertainty is trying to communicate to you! Once you have deciphered what the message is, than moving ahead into the next moment becomes a breeze and you will find that these very elements of Change and Uncertainty become your allies and help you propel into the future! The trick here is about understanding the coded message that Change brings along!

Change often communicates only one of the few things; It could be- a) Keep going- race ahead or slow down. b) Stop and Think or c) Take a detour fast or slow! It can never be anything else, and once you have figured this out- you probably also come to know why the onset of change is manifesting to begin with! Once this vital aspect is understood than embracing change and dealing with Uncertainty becomes fairly simple! Uncertainty by itself has got to with our own misplaced anticipations and expectations from unfolding events! Uncertainty is noting else but what our minds refuse to accept and it gets compounded when we simply refuse to apply ourselves and work towards confronting it (with the know- how that comes to us once change has been deciphered). Once we learn about the essence of Change, resolving Uncertainty becomes easier as we start to work in the direction that increases predictability of outcomes and clarity- this approach alone clear away the fog of uncertainty which otherwise can assume demonic proportions and create demons in our heads for no apparent reason!

I will leave you here and urge you to reflect and think what was your experience like, the last time when Change came knocking to your door with it’s cousin- Uncertainty! Did it make you or break you?

Ciao for now and will be back soon, until than take care and stay wise!

The experience paradox and flawed followership.

~ PA ~ Leave a comment

Through the last three months, wherever you are, your living rooms would have been flooded with “experts” and people having “experience” and being appointed as advisors, “expert committees” who would have pledged in one way or the other, about not worrying on anything and that they have control and will end this pandemic quick! The fact though remains that the virus is here to stay among us- not necessarily wanting to kill us- unless we have a screwed up immune system- which is because of what we do- what we eat and drink! So who are these “experts” what is all about the magic label of “Experience” and who are these people “followers” whose “followership” qualifies these idiots to lead and make a bad problem worse! Whether it’s a national view, about your immediate community or the work place that you go to, you would have either suffered or have had unwillingly contributed to aggravating problems rather than offering solutions; Thanks to these “experienced” people! Join me here as we try to understand why “experience is over-rated” and why “quality of follwership matters”!

The simplest of facts remains that, “experience” explained the ability to perform a similar or the same tasks over and over again and that made a lot of sense when you needed a shop floor worker to tighten up the screws of physically end up welding joints through a manufacturing process and still it does hold good when key skills are need to perform a task which is routine with utmost precision and accuracy. Surely enough you may want your heart surgeon to have experience because that person would have opened up and closed many beating hearts to ensure they keep beating afterwards too! But the moment you ask the heart surgeon to open up the brain and fix things up! Well, yes, you’ve got what I a m trying to say, you are asking that person to do something which that person has never done before! So you see all that accumulated experience becomes of zero value! Likewise if the welder knows how to work on a particular machine /component and tighten bolts for a particular product type- and now if that person was to move over to a new assembly line- his entire so called “experience” will be of little or no consequence as things change! What remains is competence and skill- A skilled worker or a surgeon- one will always remain- who they are- skilled and competent- but the accumulated experience does not help them solve something that they don’t know what to do with it! The current pandemic that the world is facing is getting aggravated by exactly this kind of disposition where all the governments of the world have assembled armies of “experienced” people who don’t have a f**king clue of what to do and how to deal with what they are trying to solve! – simply because this virus was manufactured either by man or nature just few months back to engage with the biochemistry and physiology of humans! It would have been roaming in the wild among animals for millions of years- who knows- but these changes and the impact is new and what is needed to tackle this is not “experience” but “intelligence” to study and work on solution pathways by studying the ongoing impact so that quick fixes are made available keeping in mind regional, geographical, demographical specificity of each nation and the regions within large nations!

This approach is the only hope that so called “experienced” people can bring to the table to ensure the world emerges from the shadows more rapidly rather than wasting time, money and resources to feed on their egos of misplaced experience which has no or little consequence simply because they have never experienced anything like this before and all their accumulated learnings are a big zero to this new challenge- what remains is the their skill and competence which needs to be supported by available intelligence to over come these situations- which I believe is a different problem of diminishing intelligence and also the fact that these “experienced folks” have never seen a problem like the one they are trying to solve with their limited past experience which has nothing to do with what they face!

This misplaced experience not only is detrimental in situations like of a global pandemic, but when these”experienced” geniuses walk the corporate world, they leave a trail of destruction like no one else and yes, fundamental reasons are almost always same- trying to solve a new age problem with an old age belief system and based on what they would have previously done; add to that the next layer of “flawed followership” which ends up becoming the final nail in the coffin for a corporate meltdown!

Firms hire- people with “experience” not realizing that the problem being faced is unique to the organisation and the circumstantial set around it- yes you can hire for people who show competence and skills to deal with complex situations but that is no way a guarantee for being able to fix the new problem at hand (it may be a recurring problem for the organization- but for the people walking in new – it will be a new problem and with time either they are able to fix it or end up growing avoidance strategies like everyone else around so that the problem stays and grows alongside their careers in the organisation! What’s the easiest way to know if this has manifested- watch out for the words- “This is how it is- this is how it will be!” How to go around this? Well only one way- Always hire for competence, skill and personality- These attributes are at the very foundation of an individual which will tell you whether a person that you want on your team is an all weather solution or a fair weather peacock!

But then why do people have so much of misplaced stress on “experience” well this has more to do with the “Followers” and importantly the “Quality of Followership”! Remember folks we get our urge of being followed and high of leading even as we evolved from being chimps into humans- but the quality of followership speaks a lot more about the Leader than the follower! If you want to ever decide whom you want to to work with- do check the followership for the person! In an ideal and highest form of Leadership- Leaders are meant to create more Leaders and not Followers (Refer- John C Maxwell), but given the short supply of common sense and reducing intelligence- even if Leader’s are able to get high quality followers, I will pleased enough! Look around you, whether it is your office, it’s your city council, your national politics- what do you see- you will see an unfailing pattern- Like attracts Like– That’s the universal law and holds good very much when it is about the quality of Followership! Say you have an intelligent leader- but obviously the followership will be more of intelligent people who are able to understand and contribute to the leader’s cause and actions- those who don’t understand a shit of what the Leader is saying will simply walk away- saying that the leader is an idiot! Well at times it may be true- when Leader’s camouflage their dumbness and call it as intelligence which is lapped up by an equally greater number of dumb followers- who also are believed into thinking that they are wise because they are following a wise leader!

This eternal strife between real and assumed intelligence and the quality of followership ends up serving societies with leaders who now have “experience” and become “experts” who are then entrusted with all our lives when we meet global challenges! Well I am certainly not suggesting that all are idiots, what I am saying here is- the quality of follwership and giving more importance to individual intelligence, competence and skills is much more valuable and meaningful if the world needs to find it’s way back not only from the pandemic but also from a growing economic disaster which will turn into a socio economic problems with law and order connotations in the coming weeks and months!

Experience only helps if you are going to go about doing the same thing again and again the same way as you have been doing it earlier! When contextual settings change- as life changes- what will help and what alone helps is – intelligence, skill and competence which are as intrinsic to every individual just as their blood group and it is all about doing what best they do with it that makes the difference between surviving and crashing during a meltdown event!

I will leave you with my thoughts here, time for a coffee and will be back soon with another piece, until then do think about what leader’s,experts and followership quality have you seen around you and what is that you want to change for the larger good, form this moment on!

Bouncing back and racing ahead.

~ PA ~ 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.

~ PA ~ 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!

Moving forward through turbulence.

~ PA ~ 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!

 

Adapting to a new way:The human factor.

~ PA ~ Leave a comment

The best thing that happens when disasters strike; everyone and anyone suddenly becomes an expert and has definite answers to “what could have led to the disaster”, but rarely is there an answer ever found even from the certified experts about the “Why” part of it-  why was it allowed to develop into something that it would have and why were the early warning mechanisms either absent or why did they fail! Well this  piece looks into the human aspect of what people can expect coming their way and what could be the possible ways to navigate these times! Whether it is about an Individual, a business or a nation- People are at the very foundation of everything that we do, no matter what you say otherwise and if the people story begins to fail, in no time you will have failing Individuals who will translate into failed societies, resulting into a full blown humanitarian crisis!

As Human Beings, we have evolved through the years to survive, prevail and better our societies- immediate and the next with a single purpose of making life as comfortable as we can- how  we go about doing that- largely depends on the other aspects of demographic distribution, climate and opportunities which are heavily moderated by the agreed society type and governance models! Mankind has been a witness to many large scale potential wipe out events- whether they have been wars, famines, epidemics; but each time eventually societies have emerged out of the challenge, albeit changed and stronger- for the better or worse- well that is left for you to decide- because the answer to that question directly relates to who you are Individually are and how much impact do things bring upon an individual and what the Individual then decide to do with it- React or Respond! This time will be no different, but since the scale of the event has been global- there will be deeper scars and the time to heal will be longer then usual- which in itself will end up leaving fractured communities and societies as the unwarranted byproduct of the healing process! At the core of bounce back, will be the choice of behavioral attributes that will make the difference between successful adaptability and an ever going struggle to cope up with the new ways and developments!

Whether it be work, private lives or the grandeur of business and public life, as we move ahead and out of the current global slow down, Individuals who display a saintly level of patience and perseverance especially when they are occupying leadership positions will be able to thrive individually and put their teams and the businesses on a super fast growth trajectory, sure enough, contextual settings will matter, if a nation is sinking it really doesn’t matter whether your business strategy is a prize wining one or not!  What this singular grain tells us is that, as humans, we will want to move ahead and calibrate our surroundings to the known levels of familiarity and feeling of being secured at the earliest to begin with, which will be rapidly followed by an intense period of observation and social change which will tend to do away with everything and anything that does not serve its purpose in the new systems and designs of work and life that societies and individuals will now begin to adhere to! Whether this works to the help or harm an Individual or a society will largely depend on the intent of the governance model- which way they would want these steps to move- whether to expand and settle to close to earlier expressions of freedom and access or whether they would want to have a restricted and controlled environment for the next 12- 16 months with an aim to go by the maxim citing, “To Err on the side of Caution”!

To put it in another way, businesses that value people and are able to evaluate qualities exhibited, the value systems displayed with fine prudence will be able to hold on to the most prized and coveted Individuals-who  in-turn will play a pivotal role to drive the business ecosystem. If there is a slight error of judgement in evaluating people and their attributes, as businesses emerge from this disruption, the ones’ who have made bad choices with regards to people will suffer even more greatly in times ahead and will end up loosing any advantage that they would have built in the earlier stages as they will no longer be managed by gifted and professional individuals!

Among the Individuals who will be able to steer themselves and all that they lead (whether a business or a community), patience and perseverance will be the two fundamental pillars, which will be worth their value in Gold which they will be able to utilize in the changing times, even as they demand  consistently evolving individuals. These leaders will be able to sustain and manage the tantrums and discord that will come their way through eccentric or sporadic human behaviors and  complicated business environments with ease and confidence which will further propel their cause and ensure that the lives that they influence and lead are aligned to the all important growth mindset!

People who have been natural introverts or calibrated extroverts will be able to tide over the changing dynamics with more ease as compared to extroverts who belong to the sub type of social butterflies-who thrive on meaningless interactions- which are good to see and observe but carry no valuable content or quality of engagement! Needless to say irrespective of what type you belong to, having a thinking and rational mind which anchors on science and common sense will be of prime importance!

This also happens to be from the anchor point of history- that moment in our lives, where across the layers and maze of society, we will witness that two distinct patterns emerge! The first one will be a set wherein Leaders will create more followers and the second one where Leaders will create more Followers- which of these sets becomes more powerful over the other and takes the popular lead will end up deciding the future fabric of your social engagement and the way we are able to move about doing business, and thereby creating our limiting beliefs and new bench marks of societal confirmation biases for the next decade or so! Which one of these approaches is right or better over the other, well largely depend on the contextual settings of the society, what my understanding is that, Evolved and literate societies will create more Leaders and this will provide these societies to emerge rapidly once again as “Thought leaders” and thereby consolidating their dominance around the world as Nations which create and set standards for the other nations to follow!

I will leave you with these  thoughts, so that you can take them  further and reflect on your experiences; possibly devise strategies that align with your Individuality, reality of you and the group that you lead! So that as we emerge in the times ahead, collectively as a society, we are still able to hold on to the promise of togetherness, even as some of us may agree to have more Leaders and yet some of us may agree to have more Followers! The fine line remains, that Humanity must and should prevail in spite and despite of everything and everyone else!

Ciao for now, will be back with another piece soon, until then stay safe, keep your mind anchored with wise thoughts and remember, humor doesn’t harm!

 

 

Leadership-Calibrated by Incompetence.

~ PA ~ 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 story of large shadows.

~ PA ~ Leave a comment

Hey! hope you are fine! Well if you are able to read this now, I presume you have put the worst behind you and are now preparing to make sense of all the chaos and uncertainty that surrounds you and intrudes you through the various intelligent sources that you have- your whatsapp, your google and your network of networked friends and well wishers! Well this piece is to make some sense of the chaos around you and help you to find one way to inspect and make sense of all that is been thrown at you or will be coming your way over the next few weeks, so here we go!

Let me take you back to your childhood, you would have at some point in time, played with candles and studied how they cast shadows and also experimented to scare the daylights out of your friends! As a matter of fact what we are facing today is no different form this seemingly inconsequential episode! You may find this thought to be very simple, certainly it is a simple thought- but simplicity of thoughts does not mean that you discount them or simply brush them off as not been valid! That is the prime fallacy of the conformity bias wherein as a society we have evolved over time where we have started to believe that if ideas and things are not complicated they are not worth it, well actually the fact remains that the converse is more apt and more true! As societies have evolved and as we have evolved through work and education this constant and never ending one upmanship and pursuit to show that “I am better then the other” had laid the foundation to our own detrimental fall in the coming times! This whole pandemic episode is one such example- Well, one may argue that WHO (World Health Organisation) said this and said that, the question is what was your common sense asking you to do?! Possibly many nations wanted at first instance to shut off their borders but didn’t do so, just because they were afraid to not confirm to the global standards and when these global standards turn out to be grave errors of judgement, you get what we have just got served; A pandemic which was purely meaningless and avoidable with unwarranted loss of lives and misery to millions worldwide!

Our approach in the modern day has been about being ever connected in an ever complex society which has laid to an overdrive of dependence- let’s call that over-dependence! This over-dependence on each other works well as long as things are good and pleasant and the tug of war of commerce ebbs and flows as it should- the moment there is additional strain on it and one of the partners feels or thinks that they want to nudge a bit, the whole ecosystem will fail and with it everyone gets hurt! Even before the pandemic, not many may recall, the world economies were struggling to find ways ahead and were attempting to see what best way they would want to have their nations navigated as the next few quarters were starting to look rather more unpredictable! What the pandemic has ended up doing is, it has provided a hard stop to global economies, put them in suspended animation for the initial first few weeks and now, unless there is a measured and calibrated response from all nations in a sequential manner, the results will work in favour of a few and will be counterproductive for few others, which side you will fall into , will largely depend on how self-reliant, robust and intrinsic strength of resources a nation has over the others!

If you were to now extrapolate this aspect to your workplace scenarios you will perhaps understand how these similar dependence value systems would already have played out and will come up as organisations begin to come up with coping strategies and building BCP (Business Continuity Plan) measures which are more robust then the ones that they possibly already have in place! One important thing that businesses would have found through the sudden hard stop would be the plain simple fact – that either they have had misplaced dependence, duplication of processes and unwarranted complexity of chain of command and a fragile span of control! Needless to say, businesses will move swiftly to rectify these aspects even as they commence joining the loose ends and at the same time there will be new design elements evolving with regards to organisation structure and systems which will ensure that, next time such an event unfolds on a global level, and there is a need of another hard stop that will have minimal or negligible impact on their way of work and this will be achieved through only two ways- Investment in the right technological processes and the Right People at the Right Places!

The current events unfolding the world over have exposed, if you may say so the vulnerable aspects of governance, be it at the governmental levels, businesses or even how Individuals manage themselves through a crisis! This vulnerability relates to the long shadows that we talked about as we began  this piece. This vulnerability of the long shadows like in the child’s play comes from ignorance and feeds on fear- fear which is rooted in ignorance and a strong risk averse mindset! The only way to dispel this fear or mitigate it, before it consumes one and all (just as it has during this global pandemic showdown) is to fight the war of ignorance through knowledge and cure the fear of uncertainty by illuminating the hope within each one of us! Unless we are able to lead directed and focused approaches to dispel our ignorance and lack of knowledge and rely to depend on existing confirmations and norms that have worked well in the past for a pleasant tomorrow, we will keep getting surprised from time to time and these surprises at times may not be very pleasant to say the least!

So the point here is, the shadows that play within  your mind, reflect what is lacking and that is the direction where the mind should be lead to in a calibrated and focused manner to seek wisdom and do away with fear of ignorance which allows the shadows to be bigger then the problem or the object by itself! It is this approach alone that can answer many a situations whether that be the routine mundane task at home or the more complex challenge of saving humanity from the grips of a so called pandemic! I call it so called, because as I mentioned earlier, when ignorance is wheeled around the world what we end up getting is not a solution but more fear and ambiguity! When we wheel around the world a focused message of action and hope that’s when there will be enough light to dispel the shadows of ignorance and keep them at bay – behind the light in front of you and that is how it should be always!

Ciao for now! I will leave you with these thoughts for today, will be back soon with another piece and do let know  what next you may want to read here!

 

 

The UV(Unique Value) challenge ahead.

~ PA ~ 3 Comments

As work places the world over begin to come back to life and kick start the much awaited and needed meaningful life cycle for each one of us-few things would have changed already or will rapidly transform in the first 90 days, as operations begin to gather speed, this piece is about exploring on such facet and what to expect and how to manage what is likely to come your way! So let’s roll ahead…

Before we try to ponder on how things may impact us going ahead, it will make a lot good to understand , what really happened as activities were halted globally in a planned/less planned or unplanned way!Since we are dealing with only facet of the human aspect we will try to limit our observations around that one central piece and move ahead.

Humans by and large end up either ending up in the space of being employment generators or employment receivers and then we have the small segment of businesses consultants/ Individuals who are both generators and receivers unto themselves. As activities came to a halt, multiple things would have dawned at all levels! In some cases the real face of human value systems/ belief systems and Individual priorities would have far superseded the collective cause of managing a workforce or a team at a small office or vice-versa. This break in continuity, at one end would have manifested through massive layoffs/ unemployment that has been written all across the world; Ever since this unplanned halt in routine came into the picture! So what has happened here- Well one  may argue that the business viability was cut short and since there were no mechanisms to cushion the offset of losses (which seem to be astronomical) there was no other way but to close the shutters and let go off people– well ok- hold this thought for a minute and we will address that later as we move ahead.

Another scenario that too has played around the world has been the overarching concept of “We are in this Together” (Even as I hate this thought -as much as I can because it simply defies any rationale sense!). In this space, people have not been impacted that bad, governments, agencies, employers and everyone that you can think of, have come ahead and collaborated to ensure that people aren’t left to the elements and are being ensured that they have a wage and a lifestyle that they can still as yet hang out to- albeit by a slender thread and as soon as things are better, the turnaround will be rapid and directed! Well this scenario for obvious reasons seems to be the best way ahead- why not- it talks about higher societal virtues , duty of care and for ensuring everyone has indeed, had a fair chance to fight this time through and move ahead. Now that we have seen both extremes of the spectrum above, let’s amylase what people are actually doing in this time that has been available to them!

People being who they are would have used this time available for themselves either to waste it and let it rot as usually they do while being busy to slog like slave for making someone else rich or they would have put it to some good use or wise use depending upon the cognitive abilities, opportunities and the immediate flexibility of the societies in which they thrive! Broadly speaking we have two sets of people around the world right now in a lock down/isolation whatever you want to call that- The firsts set is working as diligently they normally would have – striving to balance the challenges of working from wherever they are in whatever conditions they are and making a point to see how best they can add value and keep contributing in their way to ensure the business that are working with or for remains afloat as much as possible! The second set has basically turned this whole episode into a endless meaninglessness vacation which doesn’t seem to end (Unlike the hotel property- you don’t have a pre-set check out date) so these folks who believe in the maxim- “Anyways everything is going to get tougher so while we have this time, why not binge and indulge into personal indulgences and give a damn to what tomorrow ushers in!”. Finally we  have a smaller segment of interesting people (irrespective whether they are the employers/employees or consultants/Individual businesses) who have used this time to realign their life priorities/ work definitions/aspirations/belief systems even as they have continued to work and contribute to what they have been doing! Knowing the facts about where the world is rocking around for now, now you may want to know how all of this will get played out as things begin to open up! Well let’s read on and remember the previous line for that has a big secret within it!

As the world comes out of the shadows, thanks to automation (AI) and some good serving of Common-Sense there will be rapid and quick realignment of businesses and individuals- Those who have been toiling through this phase will come up with fast decisions translating into large scale visible actions, whether it is reallocation of staff to other facilities of a large conglomerate, whether it is about training, re-training,  or whether it is about adding anew product and rolling it off within weeks, you think of a scenarios and probably you will see an example playing out- especially where the businessmen and the employees have been working through this tough phase diligently one day at a time and have had a road map for the future irrespective of testing times and uncertainties! These in some cases will also lead to decent amounts of lay-offs but what will be unique to this phase is the fact that Quality of the people getting laid-off will have a story to tell. In all probability this will have many people from the second set who were on that un-ending vacation and didn’t care for the world- well, as the law of reciprocal karma; the world will also care less for them  and that’s what will get played out in the end!

The rare collection of individuals  (whether employers/employees/consultants) who would have spent this time for thorough introspection and realignment of themselves to their cause using the Unique Value that they intrinsically hold; will be the eventual trail blazers and will play a vital role in setting up the next benchmarks of quality and process development across businesses! It will be this small segment which would have analysed and seen how each other member on the team has been functioning/ not functioning where the disconnects have been and where the strengths are and what can be corrected and what must be weeded out immediately to safeguard the business! This may look like a simple task that any manager would have anyways done- but what is different here is that for the first time perhaps in a long long time- there is no space for personal biases for being played out through those intense team meetings and “one on ones” within the confines of office meeting rooms -because whether teams and individuals have worked or not would have been captured through  a documented trail of emails, messages from collaborators and clients alike which are more telling and in-the- face to sum up quite a lot then any findings from over a 100 internal meetings  that one would have participated in! It is also in this segment that one will also see many wise people alter the course of their calling to something different, bigger and better then what they have been currently doing and this mutual separation from the routine will enable to open up new vistas and opportunities from human thinking, innovation and commerce to be built around that space!

So what is that will create that differentiation which will make or break an opportunity for an Individual? Well the answer is UV – The Unique Value that Individuals would have been able to demonstrate as they worked through challenging times and ensured that their tasks and jobs are delivered as they had been promised and the objectives were realized in the face of extraordinary challenges! It will be these UV’s when applied by businesses, teams and Individuals alike that newer avenues with far greater depth, clarity and purpose will begin to emerge from existing businesses to provide an opportunity to build new systems and businesses! 

These UV’s, will enable organisations become healthier by being leaner, directed focused and purpose driven, knowing well now that they do really have a duty of car, hence instead of boasting about an employee strength of 1000, organisations will change the narrative to a family strength of 100 which would imply an employees strength of 250! Likewise Individuals who would have found their zen by being flexible would possibly want it to stay that way so that their creative outcomes remain unique and well appreciated- this then would also work in favor of the businesses!

So, before I sign off, think well for the remaining “ME” time that you have at hand and be honest in knowing what you are doing with that- because your future will depend on the singular pivot of what you have done with this “ME’ time and what you learnt during this period!

I will leave you here for now, grab a drink and think and reflect so that you can face tomorrow all suited up, one you have realized the Unique Value that you have within and what you to offer as a giver and receiver!

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

Leadership in Crisis OR Crisis in Leadership-what are you living through?

~ PA ~ Leave a comment

Over the last two weeks, virtually everyone around seems to have been coming up with the governments, health care workers could be doing better, what did go well, and what was amiss- The only issue I have with this space is irrespective of whether people are praising their authorities of slaying them on the social media for being incompetent, the essence lies in how much does one really know about whats happening behind the scene- I mean how can anyone see a news clip or a media byte for a few minutes and then decide that this is what must be happening and come to a conclusion that we are all fine or we are all but certainly doomed! Well this is exactly what happens when you are experiencing either a situation wherein it is either about “Leadership in Crises” or “Crisis in Leadership”  and that’s making its presence felt through the society that you are a part of and this short piece is just trying to make sense of this! Of course yes, I am not going to be taking names of leaders or nations here, so that I don’t end up placing prejudices in your mind- like it always has been I would want you to decide and take a view of what makes sense to you and in way that goes on to serve you by enhancing your understanding of the developments around you!

When disasters strike they often come with shock and awe, well that’s the case with major sudden natural disasters like flash floods, earthquakes and tornadoes which seem to just appear and disappear on their own terms leaving a path of destruction behind them. It is a similar situation when man-made disasters strike humanity- like mass shootings, terrorist events etc unfold. The  real story begins the moment after the unthinkable happens! It becomes apparent quickly with ample clarity what kind of script is being played out to the world- we will now begin the instance wherein “Crisis in Leadership” begins to unfold. 

Of the many manifestations that are possible, Crisis is Leadership is always earmarked by a deafening silence and inertia in the initial stages. This is the moment wherein the proverbial throat runs dry and the leaders are left to the mercy of their critics for having failed to act/ or rather react in a specific manner to an event- which normally is derived from the majoritarian societal conformity bias! This initial step if not checked in- not only unleashes a chain reaction of ever increasing complications and problems but also creates a powerful distraction in which the real challenge (the event that would have occurred) is all but made secondary and the efficacy and the style of the leadership start to become the talk of the town and thereby begins a never ending bickering game which goes on and one as long as some other powerful stories tend to come up and overshadow these events and narratives!

The next indication of Crisis in Leadership comes when people speak irrelevant, nonsense, mistime the content or begin to contradict each other from the adjacent windows of the same are of operation! You may have by now witnessed examples of politicians like Governors of State and other task force members who have been entrusted with fighting away this virus come up and say things which were completely unwarranted for and make no real contribution towards the progress of attacking the virus and saving  lives- rather, a lot of their rant would have been talking about what they have been doing, trying to do and are hopeful of what they will be able to do rather then just stating the facts like- This is what had happened, this is what we did to fix it and this is what we have planned for tomorrow because this is what we expect! Well needless to say, it is instances like there that even turn disasters into fodder for news channels and media to utilize the moment for their fame to glory for showing how dumb a particular individual was- well as a matter of fact they never wait another second to do a rethink- I mean; wait why would this person behave the way he is doing so- he isn’t that dumb really? had he been done so dumb- he wouldn’t reached where he is now – A position of power and control to dictate terms through a crisis! So whats the missing part?! Well we will get to this bit once we have seen some other examples of how things are really done and what Leadership in Crisis really looks and feel like!

Unlike the above two manifestations (certainly there could be many more- given this is a blog, trying to keep it a bit truncated), when one sees Leadership in action through a Crisis- The whole equation changes dramatically! The very first manifestation of Leadership in control through a crisis is visible by the knowing “who is the face of the leadership”. As long as the face has enough depth in terms of credibility, acceptance, appreciation and connect with the audience in concern, rest assured the masses are at once assured that things are in control and you will find that people are ready to agree, abide and go ahead with the decisions taken by this type of a leader. The second important aspect here, which must be read together with the first point is that the quality, swiftness, clarity and transparency of the decisions and the rationale also are required to go hand in hand along with the face of the leadership. You may have a very pleasing face but if the quality of the following decisions and the content falls through, you will possibly end up finding a new face before you find answers to the pressing challenges at hand!

Effective leadership through crisis is almost and always accompanied by a sustained and ongoing communication dissemination in a measured manner wherein the communication reaches where it should and provides ample clarity about what is expected form the received of that message- like does the person need to take some action, or just be ready for the next instruction or it could be about being provided with details on the progress that has been and what the outcomes seem like over the next few days or weeks!

Leadership in Crisis may be aggressive or may be passive in terms of style harnessed by the leader in question, but unless it is proved to effective through its presence and through its actions; all purpose risks being  eventually lost and can easily slip into the depths of becoming another case of study of Crisis in Leadership!

I will leave you with your thoughts now, see around you depending on where you are on the planet and observe what is that you are witnessing- at the government level, at your office level- what do you see around you- Leaders managing the Crisis or Crisis being complicated further by the Leaders who have been entrusted to steer the ship!

Ciao for now, I will be back soon with another article, until then navigate well, stay safe and if you are locked down, stay in and let your mind wander with thoughts that empower you and help you deciphering some hidden mysteries available in your plain sight! By the way – What type of a Leader are you- what do you think!

 

Dealing with (Mis)Information Warfare.

~ PA ~ 1 Comment

Never before has it been more important to check- cross check and re-check everything that gets played on to the television set, the channels that you subscribe to, the search results that come to serve you and not to mention the endless, forwards, messages and what have you! This piece is about trying to make some sense of the information or rather misinformation warfare in which we get drawn day in and day out at times knowingly and other times unknowingly when we tend to forward that last message on whatsapp without bothering to check if the content made any sense to begin with! So let’s try and unravel what really is going on here!

The later part of the last century, was rightly known as the Information Age- If one had the right information at the right time it gave the person/ business or the government of the day phenomenal advantage to lead and race ahead no matter what the subject would have been- whether it was about path breaking research, or best practices adopted over factory floors, or it was about business or governance strategies- You name it and you will find that the last 50 years has always been about “The Best way” of doing things, “getting things done”, “being the best”, individually or collectively by harnessing the power of Information. Till this point it was a linear fight for supremacy – Whoever had the right information at the right time would be the winner, but with technology and the dawn of the digital age- information became available  at amazing speeds simultaneously across the world and there was never a question of any lag or delay and then it started to boil down to who had the first movers advantage, who got ahead first, how fast and what tools and resources were made available for them to make that rapid progress. Well even this was fair, considering you give the whole world community the same information at the same time and then it boils down to whoever has the maximum matter and money to spend and build on an idea! The real drama unfolds now, once people saw that information based challenges are becoming accessible and rapid progress is possible and the concept of  dominance on sectors/ ideas and approaches to lives problems is beginning to get into the shredders, the real game got started – the game of information dominance through spread of misinformation! This is how we have, according to me ushered in the age of misinformation- The age of Information Warfare- A testimony to Human Dominance and never ending Greed for power (all types) and Opulence!

This age of Information warfare thrives on spreading information which makes sense, no sense and cryptic sense- this is done intentionally to divert, distract and keep competitors and people observing you loose their way and get entangled into a information mess in which they remain entangled and by the time they do come out of it- you would have probably achieved your objectives and then it really doesn’t matter whether they have access to the earlier original content or not- because that has become contextually irrelevant!

This new warfare front made possible thanks to the digital breakthroughs that we have collectively been able to make as humanity has proven far dangerous then any nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction! The misinformation business is responsible for almost everything that you see around- on the day to day basis- you would have come across commercials (with the small * of terms and conditions – which is next to invisible) claiming and suggesting things which are out rightly stupid, dangerous and rarely at time fatal- but as they say- the small little invisible * offers protection and the the petitions are always urged to use their collection and individual wisdom-which by itself is a challenge as that is a fast depleting asset! When things do get ugly as usually they do- you will generally have vested interest groups within nations/ communities and across nations who can collectively get into the role of spreading information in a calibrated,weighed manner to do a sinister loop and complete it’s objectives by unleashing public unrest/ strikes/ law and order situations and by the time this is all done the originator and the communication and the real essence behind the malafide act is all but cluttered into an ambiguity of trails, reports and reasons- which often heads no where and then the world is ready for another episode all over again! History is replete with examples when things have become really bad and this ability to spread directed misinformation has at times won wars at the right side of the battle and at times has ended up doing more damage to society at large! So when we know Mis-Information is as deadly as it gets to be- why do we thrive and allow it to propagate- why does it even get a hold?

The answers lie in the fabric of humanity itself- Human societies have long been far away from idealistic settings- there is a rampant inequality within societies, within different segments of a society or even within communities and not to forget the inequalities among nations and blocks of nations! Inequality that transcends all metrics normally considered for determining what should be the definition of Equality!  Inequality manifests in different ways, it could be the inequality between the rich and poor (monetary inequality), inequality of opportunities, inequality of liberty and so on and so fort. The most important trigger comes from the Inequality of opportunity for World Dominance through governance and business. This is by far the most dangerous and the most sinister of all the different malaise of modern societies and has caused more harm then good to each and everyone of us! You may be thinking this has to do with only the intelligence community and the governments- no – this has everything to do with each one of us- as misinformation gets fed into minds which are not that good at checking facts from fiction- the results and consequences often turn deadly and dangerous! So now we know that there is a problem- how do we deal with it! Well read on…

“Practice the Pause” a technique told by many management teachers, the next time you get a piece of information and decide to do anything- absolutely anything with it- think what it is- check from where it is coning- think what is is asking you to do and think about the impact that you may individual end up creating by virtue of who you are- and whether that is needed or not! There will be times when the best thing to do would be nothing! There will be yet another times when you may have to ignore/delete the message and then there will be some other times still when you need to flag the message and the content off to relevant people in time so that disasters are avoided well in time! The challenge though remains to perform any of these actions, first and foremost you must have a thinking mind – irrespective of how intelligent you are or not- doesn’t matter-what does matter is whether you have the ability to sieve through the content and weigh it against common-sense, science and facts of the world! One more golden rule is what doesn’t serve the best and larger good of humanity doesn’t need to be there- If any message that you are to pass on – irrespective of what the source and whatever it is- If it doesn’t help anyone and ends up having more anxiety and anguish to even person then that message is not worth it- might as well bury it as soon as it reaches you!

We live in an age where access to information is a sure ticket to success and hence the converse also hold true- access to misinformation can spell untold misery and chaos at times damaging individuals and at times communities and nations as a whole! The certain way to move around this in-your-face- covert enemy of mis-information is to develop filters through wisdom and knowledge and apply ample common sense to all that you receive- without the screen of prejudice and develop a way to weight the content of information in its totality and then take a call whether it serves or deserves its existence! This kind of mindful approach to content when repeated over and over again will ensure the damages caused by misinformation campaigns world over is as minimal as possible!

I will leave you here with these thought, grab your cup, check your whatsapp messages and think well before you forward the next message! Think- Is it really worth It- Does it add value to the receiver or to you as a sender of the message! If it does go ahead, if it doesn’t delete that crap!

Ciao for now, will catch up soon with another article!