**Integrity : Percept Vs Practice**

What is to act with integrity?

Why play by the rules?

Why let ethics make a hard task even harder?

No one seems to care, why should we?

Should profitability not come before proprietary?

We’re too small for such high ideals, don’t you think?

Survival comes first, we will see, what to do with such 'nice' things later, now is not the time.

We have to live today to fight another day.

And many more.

The realisation that ‘integrity is still largely considered ‘optional’ speaks for itself. Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying people consider talking in favour of the virtue ‘optional’. We speak about it all the time: from boardrooms to board games. It is in ‘practice’ where we find inconsistencies and that is what we are attempting to uncover, today. Organisations big and small brag of being culturally superior to their competitors without batting an eyelid. You look up at the value section on the websites of any organization of any sector of your choice - you are likely to find integrity there in 8 out of 10 cases and yet a vast majority of their staff fake one or more of the below, listed items in filing for their returns.

• Medical bills
• HRA (Rental)
• LTA
• Shoddy Loans statements.

What does it say about us? Why do we not come out in the open and proclaim that we are petty cheats, that we willingly lie on oath (a signature saying the information that you’ve furnished is correct is indeed an oath), to save a few bucks? Why do people extent each other the courtesy of looking the other way, in the corporate setups? Why some form of wrong is considered less wrong than the other? If it is practised so widely, why don’t we recognise it formally as an admissible norm?

Reluctance in social acceptance of such practices, gives away, the most fundamental truth: that there is no confusion on the definition, whatsoever. Everyone knows what is the right thing to do. So in that sense, propagation of the ideal has been fine, we as a society can pat ourselves on our backs for it. Why does practice fall short, though? Is financial weakness the sole reason for widespread corruption? Or is the root of the problem deeper. It is a complicated and complex matter, it is as much societal as it is personal as much moral as practical as much important as inherent. Our character is shaped by the slab of stories that we hear as a child and by what we witness happening around us. We pick both good and the bad from our immediate surrounding, and then a fuller version of the idea that we believe to be better constitutes our character. Accord me the liberty to take you to a common story that is a part of the childhood of a vast majority of living souls.

The story of Robin Hood; the guy who steals/robs from the rich and distributes the loot among the poor. He is hailed by the common man and hated by the rich and the powerful. The establishment leaves no stone unturned in hunting for him and common people let nothing come in the way of their desire to hide him, to side with him. It is a fascinating story, which has a number of layers, which we can use, to further our argument. Let’s go over them one by one.

Stealing is glorified as long as it is not done to serve self-interest (Robin does not steal for himself, alone).

Charitable intent seems to sanitise what is clearly an illegal act. Take a closure look you'd find that morality trumps legality, in this case. Because it is noble to help the poor the criminal act of stealing is excused. Popular opinion is shaped around 'heroics and courage'; don't take my word for it, conduct your own little research and you'd find that irrespective of the era and geography someone brave is fighting the mighty for the rights of those who can't fight for themselves. In the process, the protagonist kills, lies, cheats and whatnot but, but all his means are relegated to the footnote of history. What remains in the front and centre of annals is the fact that brave X helped poor Y by fighting the mighty, evil and wealthy Z.

In the modern world, however, the scope for a horse riding lone hero is scant. So society normalises tax evasion to save anything between 5% to 20% of the earning, in absolute value the amount could be a few thousand for one and crores for another; depending on who is scooping from the plate of the government. Society suffering from the Robinhood complex obliges to make it chastely, it paints the Government as a cruel force. To propagate by implication that it is ok to steal from the state, which is inherently dishonest and self-serving.

Distribution of the loot among the poor washes the immoral stain of stealing from it. The underlying assumption here is that the rich have exploited the poor to become accumulate property. Which may or may not be true. Not every person of wealth is a crook and not every popper is proper; such generalisation is as misguided as saying that every Muslim is a terrorist because a few Arabic names have been associated with nefarious acts of terror. Let's blow the cover of morality here, by saying that the size of the loot does little to its legitimacy, all stealing is corrupt and must not be done. A salaried man steals all that he can keep, that is his Med bills, LTA claims and odd insurance claims, some creatives jesters even bring in loans in the mix. On the other side of the spectrum, the bent politician, as the popular belief goes, lifts in hundreds of crores. A crore is certainly more than a few thousand; but here we need to see that both, an average man and the politician stripped all that they could. And if you look at it, they are stealing from one another in an endless loop. We steal from tax and the politician bags from that, which goes around in the cycles of funny economics. Much like the air that we breathe has once also gone through the nostrils of Bapu, the rupee that we kept at some point has also been in the cupboard of a corrupt Government official and by extension a politician too.

Social and economic inequality legitimises hurting the rich and the powerful elite.

There is no denying that economic and social inequality is a product of policy more than the choices that an individual makes as often the universe of possibilities is controlled by the policy itself. It is also equally true that the greed of some has resulted in the misery of many and that this is the work of millenniums and not just a few generations. But what we can't also rule out that, those who acquired inordinate wealth some 400 years ago in their lineage did something different from those who do not have it, today. The haves and the have nots do make different choices every day. It is true that in modern democracies it is the prime responsibility of the state to ensure that through administrative intervention this gap is reduced. Levelling of the field is a work in progress, since independence we have made major gains in that endeavour. But, can we actually take cover in widespread inequality to say that we steal because someone else is better off? The honest to God truth is that we steal because we think we can and in that those who do the stealing at a much larger scale are no different from us, they also plunder because they can.

The act of robbing, (a metaphor for every form of wrong) alone is neither good nor bad, it becomes one or the other based on the ‘motive’ of the act and what is done with it after the loot.

Ends do not justify the means, Bapu has demonstrated it to the world with great eloquence and transparency. I do not think I have either the capability or the courage to add even a dot to it. The best that I can do is borrow from him to say that, imagine a world in which everyone did not care about the 'means' in an arbitrary degree; how will then the resulting world look like? Won't 'might' become right, much like in the animal kingdom, in which every argument of the tiger will always be correct and the goat will invariably be on the wrong side? We have to admit that there is no right reason for doing the wrong thing.

I do not know how to say this without sounding facetious: dishonesty is rewarded in corporate settings, blatantly. You might find this remark immoderate even disagreeable, but I implore you to indulge me.

Here are a few common precedents.

1. ‘Ability to spin’ is preferred over ‘detailed insight’ and 'truthful confessions' in review meetings with the clients.

2. Scheme/offer that deceivingly hides the ‘truth’ (true cost to the customer) is considered ‘smart’.

3. Speculative exaggeration is not just an accepted but also an honoured sales practice; though it is pure lying.

Think about it, have you unknowingly encouraged such traits?

If so, you do not need me to tell you what is the right thing to do.

Disliking corruption will not free society from it, purification will begin, when we start acting collectively in the interest of integrity, disregarding the proposition of personal gains.

Think, about areas in which you can make a change today to create a better society and then make it.

We do not need Robinhoods as much as we need ordinary and honest Robins to prevail. 

Good luck and take care.

Antidote to insecurities

Do you know what is the funniest thing about insecurity? That it is a good thing and also a bad thing at the same time. Yes, you heard me right. And this my friends is not just an academic argument but also a practical one. Your disagreement with me at this stage of the article is normal, it will cause insecurities in either of us if we do not come on the same page, by the end of it, ok, it was a bad joke, let’s put it behind us. We are the sociable species in the animal kingdom, which enables us to mingle with people in our immediate surroundings. We spend time and effort in becoming like others, you see we descended from monkeys. Aping is our first nature. What makes things rather complex is that we are also living animals with ambitions and from it stems everything positive as well as negative. It is counter-intuitive to give away one of the key conclusions right in the introduction paragraph. But let the instinct take over the reasoning for now. Insecurity in your growing years is more useful than it is in years when people see you as grown up or expect you to behave like one. It is ok for a front line executive of an organisation to be insecure but not for those who sit from higher to highest chairs. When I say so, do I forget that even the C Suite executives, CXOs or another dude/gal from across the street who kept getting lucky over the years masquerading as a big deal leader, is also made of flesh and blood and therefore will have the tendencies that are prevalent in people who have just begun. But if both the grown-ups and the infants behave in the same manner; what is the point of growth? You get the point I hope. Education, well, quality education is a rare privilege in our society, sadly. I really wish for it to change but till it doesn’t it will do a great deal of damage to us, in ways more than one, it cripples the potential of our collective evolution. 

All undesired and unhappy outcomes like poor performance, lack of equitable culture, poor infrastructure both physical and logical, regressive approach to change, the tunnelled vision of future, unskilled manpower etc, even organisational insecurities can also be turned around and corrected. But while other deficiencies require rather simpler framework change, insecurities take longer to go away. It is chronic in nature. I have said, a few lines ago, that it is a good thing in junior staff. Why do I say so? Let me answer, irrespective of the industry and the geography, that you choose you’ll find that bottom of the pyramid is occupied by the workhorses, the real people, the real deal: if I may say so. These are the people who work with their hands, efficiency from these groups is often valued more than anything and perhaps everything else that they bring to the table. This class of workers ( we are all workers, don’t you take off on Mayday?) are generally young, in their early twenties, beaming with energy and at the pink of health. Full of desire and hopes. The design is thus laid out to make this section compete with each other fiercely. You would notice a plethora of reward and recognition being organised. People are made to compete in useless disciplines, the idea is to keep the animal at the boil. If they get easy with their life, the wheel of progress or let’s just say production will come at a halting stop. Therefore, it helps overall progress. When young people are insecure, they mostly take it sportingly, also because they haven’t build anything which they consider worth protecting from intrusion. It is like a fresh start when age is by your side things look easier than they actually are. Your neurons fire and you learn to hop, skip and jump, it is all in the good spirit. Things are not quite the same though when the grown-ups become insecure. Their fears cost heavily on them in the long term and catastrophically in the near term on the area that they control. Some of the symptoms of the big boys and grown-up girls surrendring to insecurities are.

1. Fear of getting exposed.
2. Difficulty accepting change.
3. The inability of accepting the mistake.
4. Killing the messenger without reading the message.
5. Forming allies to counter the force.
6. Ugly politicking.

The number one mistake that these smart men and women make is falling in the trap of believing that they are too clever and they can go undetected. Let me bring it open to you; people who have the eye for it will see it even if it were to exist between blinks and those who don’t have an eye can always borrow binoculars; so it is just unwise to think you can pull it off. You can’t so face it.

Let me also say this that I sympathise with you, it is not easy to let go of things. We are all control freaks, in ways we do not even recognise. For instance, don’t each one of us have a certain way in which we prefer our drinks (both hot and cold, both intoxicating and toxic). Ordinary people call it preference and psychologists categorise this tendency as the desire to control. And at some level, one has to concede that we are not only social, ambitious, but also combative and above all animals. To learn, we must make mistakes. But because we are the most intelligent animals, we must quickly detect our own problems and correct them to get better. And there is absolutely no shame in the minds of the wise in accepting their follies because they know to err is human.

Let’s look at possible ways to ward off the demon of insecurity. Before we move any further let’s accept this that we are all good people deep inside and wish to remain that way but when challenges appear insurmountable we sometimes lose our judgement and do things which we initially are not proud of but because we have difficulty accepting our own errors we start defending those errors and in no time to create a smoke screen of evidence, repeat it so many times that it becomes our natural response. But it is never over .. should you wish to change, you can do it, right now. All it needs is a sacrifice of some ego, courage and above all conviction.

Here are a few things that you can try: Antidots to insecurities.

Be discourteous to yourself: If you happen to spot any of the above symptoms, stop, take a reflective pause and tell yourself that you would not let yourself getting reduced to a sulking looser and will make amends. You have built something worth protecting but what is sensible is to better it, open it up for others to collaborate. Your signature will not evaporate if you show a larger heart and get people involved in your mission. The only way for you to not become history is by letting others make your creation a part of their present; it is a great way of giving yourself a lease of life.

Bring objectivity: You’ve to be your own worst critic. Detach yourself with your creation and also yourself. You must know that you are not as important as you think you are. You are just as ordinary today as you were the day you started. Day one innocence and day one ego is worth gold, preserve it. Your hard work, dedication, grit has got you all that you’ve and if you do not learn to let it go you will lose it in no time. Things change, the grandeur of the past is your legacy it may and may not impress others. In fact, you shouldn’t even expect others to find your story awesome. Remember this, if your story is good .. it will be told and re-told. Has Mirza Galib died? Not really, even today, you and I relish his work. Very little do people know that he was receptive to feedback ( Read Diwan-e-galib) you’d know. Look for problems and when you find them announce it to relevant people and correct them quickly but not quietly and certainly not secretively. Coward hide mistakes and you are not coward, or so I hope.

Re-count your victories: You’ve won, there is no one who has not won! Some victories are bigger than the other, some attract more applause than the other but at its core every victory is important and it shapes your character. Every action will be judged on the plains of morality, ethics, law & performance (social, business and financial). Victory is achieving your goals; if you plan to wake up at 5 AM and run 4 miles every day, every single day that you manage to do it you win. Remember, you fought illiteracy, if your teacher went insecure and did not pass on the knowledge of letters to you, your life would have ended before it even got off to a start. So the act of giving is core to success. Every time you have won, someone willingly, gave up something for you; recognise it and make that pool bigger. Don’t be another ‘I-me-myself’ fool.

Commit to renewing: Promise yourself that you would not get old. Well, you will get chronologically, your body will get tired, organs will give up slowly on you, but your mind must not get old. Your commitment to stay mint should not get dusted ever. Day one mentality, for as long as you can keep, it will serve you well. Remain agile, keep learning newer and better ways of doing things; make yourself uncomfortable - the need to grow and way of it do not change. In doing so you will need partners, welcome them to join you in your quest and achieve together.

Whatever virtue helps you appreciate people, make the group better and bigger is a good one to champion and in doing so your insecurities will fade, almost automatically. 

Brand and Brand Builders

Brand gurus and marketing geniuses have defined brand comprehensively, leaving little scope for ambiguity or confusion for a postulant like me. Everyone is a consumer, we buy articles from sources we consider authentic within the reach of our presence and also in the grasp of our financial means. Every interaction with the product or service either creates a new impression in our minds or emboldens the perception built in the past: this applies to both good and bad experiences alike. You are not going to win the adulation of people by saying that consumers of our age live on an overdose of information, they have passage to reviews: real consumer feedback, success stories and matching products, all within the reach of a few taps. Someone determined to find out the positives or the negatives of your brand will succeed with trifling effort. The world has yet not seen a product that hasn’t failed, we are also yet to come across a brand that doesn’t make poor choices, from the perspective of its customers; yet we consider some brands better than the other. One can talk about the appeal of a product/service, its usability, price, availability etc to establish the brand and its identity, but it is not something that I’d like to explore in this article. What I’m trying to, and let me admit, audaciously superficially, the underlying reasons; or should we say what builds the character of the brand? Proof of the pudding lies in eating it; the brand is nothing more than the sum total of its user's perception, so if customers are a carrier of the brand, it’s true ambassadors, who are the brand builders? Who gives the brand character flesh and blood and brings it alive? No prizes for guessing, it is employees like you and I. Brands are built by what you and I do on our work desk and elsewhere in our work hours. Apple is not a person, Hyatt is not a singular object, the virgin airline is not lifelessly flying these are a result of real people working day in and day out. 

Desires, apprehensions, fears, motivation, commitment and conviction of employees manifest itself in the shape of a product and service that end consumer experiences and pays for. It is a misnomer that only great brands sell, there is a market for absolute garbage too. Everything retails, real measure of success of a brand is how popular or let say dominant it gets in the medium to long term : one quick test could be to figure out if its customers are willing to pay a ‘premium’, if so, you’ve done things right, at least those which matter the most to the customer. If the price tag is the only hook that you have on your customers, be rest assured, you will soon run out of business. Someone with a will just a tad bit better than yours to work on ‘features’ and the efficiency to keep the costs in check matching your levels of control, will suck your customer leaving you dry and unhappy. Therefore single most important objective for you should be to create a brand that is liked by your customers not only by the price tag at which you sell but also something else, something perhaps much more important than price itself. Let me quickly bring the Apple example here, for a quarter of the cost of a full spec iPhone you can buy a OnePlus which is as much a phone like the iPhone if not better, but customer stick to the iPhone knowing fully well that they are paying exorbitantly for a set of features which are not unique because iPhone is much more than a phone, in the Apple ecosystem, it does many things well without failing, which the cheaper Android counterpart can’t simply deliver. Apple has managed to create a phone which is more than a phone for its customers.

And that precisely should be the objective of the brand .. you have to be ‘more’ than what you must be in the most minimal sense. Lowest common denominators do not create history .. don’t aspire to be them. That truly in my view is what a brand should be, let’s turn our attention to the brand makers, the creators of the brand, the employee you and I. Or what should people in the leadership team do to help shape the character of the organisation to deliver a brand, below three things come to my mind ( that has a hell lot to learn on this subject and everything else)

1. Find that one thing you wish to be.
2. Be willing to sacrifice everything for that one thing
3. When you achieve that one thing ..look for the next big thing,

Let’s go over these individually and briefly.

1. Find that one thing you wish to be: A ton of researchers have proven it beyond reasonable doubt that it is utterly foolish to even fantasise being multiple things, it is just not wise. On the contrary, if you can be one thing and really good at that, you’ve made your mark. But it is easier said than done. In an organisation there are hundreds if not thousands of things that happen, every number mean something to someone; in choosing one, are we saying that we have to ignore the rest? Well, not quite, the ‘one thing’ philosophy says to choose one thing that makes most business sense to you. And you do not have to be austere in choosing what you wish to be. Let’s say choosing to be a 1 billion dollar company is a good target and so is getting high with 98% customer satisfaction. Both are brilliant targets to go after, please understand, everything that you would do, well, in one way or the other tie into everything, but by choosing one thing you basically, channelise energies in a certain direction of your choosing. So for instance, let’s say you are an ITES ( BPM, BPO, contact centre.. choose the phrase that you like) company and you had to choose a target, what should you choose? You can aim at a certain gross margin and say I wish to end this year at 23%, or you can give yourself a people target, saying I have to become a 40K people strong organisation or simply say that I will be on the number one spot on the partner scorecard for all my clients. Choosing to be on the number one in all client scorecard is a wise goal to elect, let me tell you why. Being number one the scorecard means you have not only met but also exceeded performance expectations substantially, in doing so you’ve given your customer a very strong reason to stay with you, one even stronger than your rate of billing. And to be number one, you’ll have to have the best talent onboard, a culture that retains skills, effective performance management, stringent cost control, satisfied set of employees etc. So to achieve that one thing you’ll end up doing all the right things. Choosing an indirect sensible goal will get you better results than a direct cost or number goal.
2. Be willing to sacrifice everything for that one thing: Temptation and temporary setbacks will set you off course. Distraction is everywhere, scattered so brilliantly that you’ll find it at every turn, even when you are not looking for it. You will need to resist the urge to do over midway. Remember shifting the goal post in a running match leave not only the players but also the spectators confused and confusion we can all agree doesn’t end in anything positive. Let’s take an example, let’s say the one thing that you had to choose happens to be ‘being the most preferred employer’ and in order to do that you’ve started reviewing your policies with the intent to make them lucrative and particularly employee friendly; what does that mean in the short term? Providing better couch and a better sofa, we know, comes at a cost higher than the ordinary. So it will mean that you’ll have to spend a little more, in bettering the benefits of the employees, giving the physical and the IT infra a facelift. This is real money and will go out of the limited reserve that you’d have built with years of frugality and conscious corner cutting, what you need to do is conduct a cost-benefit analysis. You do not have to hire a consultant for it, look at the cost of attrition (the opportunity you lose for not having people), cost of rehire, wastage caused by learning curve (new people take longer to do things, if the experienced lot took 5 minutes per task the new employee would start with 10.. you are losing money on every transaction), higher the churn more distant BAU gets, cost of chaos is 15% on an overall basis, per the research conducted by Harvard. Critical talent leaving robs you of your competitive advantage. So now that you have a view .. of what you should look at, do your numbers how is the cost of reform placed against the cost of ongoing leakages? Analysis done right will tell you that even with the additional cost of reform you’ll end up adding anything between 5 to 8% to your margins in the medium to long term alongside creating a strong, motivated, engaged organisation that you’ll be proud of. Remember when going gets tough it is the character of the organisation that comes to rescue.

On to our last item

1. When you achieve that one thing ..look for the next big thing: Goal setting is of paramount importance and must be done extremely carefully: intellect is put to use here. Fine minds create a meaningful plan; all organisations have all three kinds of people.
   1. Fire Fighters: These folks shine at transactions, they like moving from one problem to another, they are so used to fighting the fire that a period of peace makes them uncomfortable. They are the first line of defence.
   2. Sailors: The old and loyal guard, a very important section of people, scars that they carry hide many ugly struggles that the organisation had to go through. These are good people, with a desire to remain there. Their field of vision is wider than the firefighters and are generally calmer in their personas, they do not react easily, but when they do they do it with all the might. They have everything going for them except for one critical item, their exposure. Thanks to their long tenure in the same organisation their story of growth become the story of the organisation and so if the organisation is not the best yet, their acumen is also not top notch. These good souls become close, their visions get tunnelled mostly limited by past.
   3. Think Tank: This is a crazy lot, and perhaps the most valuable one. These are people with razor-sharp intellect, the best education, superb background, fearless outlook and they crave revolution. They are addicts for change, they keep struggling and propelling to better the environment for themselves and for the rest. This lot is seldom satisfied; for them, the road to success is always under construction and quite literally. They are courageous to the point of being impractical, they set for themselves inhuman targets and are mostly full of passion. Erudition, oratory & taste for fine things in life are their characteristics. They are persistent to the point of appearing nagging. They are dissatisfied with slow progress but never disappointed and end up being the agent for change.

wrt. the percentage, you need 60% of your staff to be firefighters, about 30% as sailors and 10% think tank. It won’t harm to have more think tanks but the problem is that there are not very many ‘good’ people and retaining this talent pool is not easy at all. You have to be wary of the sailor group; with tenure what also grows is complacency you gotta keep them in check otherwise, they will make their disability, limitation of the organisation; attrition in this group is desirable. Think tanks are not good for anything else, they can only be part of strategy and direction setting, so use all of them, have at least a few firefighters in the group and make sure you keep sailors out of the ground tasked with finding the next big thing for your organisation, it has to be one thing.

Lifting the victory title takes the pain of the practice away in the very moment; so keep running these and other thought experiments that you find fitting to your taste and your business. Wishing you well! 

Decide like Mahatma!

Defining a decision is easy, let's take the task of putting what is a good decision in a frame and how are they made, shall we?

What separates a good decision from a bad one? Is it the richness of the information that is considered while taking the call? Or the ability to see the future more clearly? Or the purity of intention? Or the morality being on the side of the decision? Outcome sure is the ultimate yardstick with which all decisions must be measured and then the tone of the outcome should then be picked to name the decision one way or the other. But when we have the outcome in front of us, with it, we also often have the benefit of hindsight, which we may, not have when we're in the moment in which decision was being made. And this awareness makes a big difference. Like it is rather naive and one thing for Modi who carries a Mont Blanc pen and yet call himself poor to criticize the policies of Nehru to say that he wasn't as great as Congress makes him out to be but not quite the same thing, leading a nation when it was born and was grappling with a literacy rate of 17% and a life expectancy of 27yrs with over 90% of its population under the poverty line; leading a society which was burning in the communal hatred and lawlessness was being personified on the border like nobodies business. What Modi and his supporters forget that admits all that visionary Nehru not only led the foundation of creating an India that considers education paramount, germinated the seeds of healthcare, made institutions that hold our democracy together a reality: Let's not forget he was a first time PM, with no experience of his own or someone in the country to learn from. He led on principles of plurality, social justice, and inclusiveness and thus we grew into a country what we are today, which allows for a chai walla to grow into a PM.

I pull the Nehru argument to underline the importance of siding with principles when precedents are unclear. Well, most of us are inconsequential and do not even come close to the magnanimity of the job that Nehru did then with a supreme degree of sincerity and what Modi does currently with all his ability, intention & hard-work. Both are great men, part of that 0.5% of humanity; this article is about the balance us, the ordinary people who have a day job, set of finite responsibilities and limited aspirations from lives. The goal is a good indicator of the decision too, someone who wants to make Mars a tourist destination will quite possibly take different kind of decisions than someone who has to worry about how to get more visitors on their website or increase footfall in a certain retail unit of their organization.

Some decisions are more important than the others; to give you a stat, roughly about 73% of the decisions that an average person makes every day is for things that do not matter, not in the least bit. Let me give you a few examples; which suit to wear, what tie, what to eat for the breakfast, which route to take to work, where to order lunch from, which elevator to take, to smile at this person or say hello; these are small decisions and things as silly as these take over 70% of our cognitive bandwidth; yes, our ability to take decision is limited. One of the reasons why many successful people bring defaults in their life is to conserve their cognitive bandwidth for more meaningful things so that they take better decisions at things that matter. Let me give you a few examples, reason why Mark Zuckerberg took the habit of wearing the same combination of cloth every day from Steve jobs is to limit the number of daily decisions that one is required to make.  People argue and harshly criticize Apple products, call their ecosystem a walled garden and yet they are most popular and arguably the most successful brand of all times; because they offer minimal and streamlined experience. No matter which iPhone or Mac you choose, in their default mode they all look and feel the same, there is no other kind of iPhone experience that exists, there is just one kind, and because it is just one, people find it simpler and so it becomes popular to the point of becoming happy loyal cult. On the other side of the wall, there is variety, richness of features, price classes a hell lot to choose from, so much so that there is clutter. A Samsung phone, is feature rich, cheaper, and perhaps better looking too, yet doesn't sell very many, reason, within the line of Samsung phones, there are so many variations that it gets confusing. As a result, despite Apple making fewer kinds of products every year, they sell more. They have been doing it for over two decades now. Lesson: Simplicity shines!

We can, therefore, say to make a better decision we should:

Declutter – Look at only those things that matter (preferably in the long run).

Simplify – Decide to make things simple, what is understood easily is followed better.

You can use the above two in a situation that you control but there are also going to be setups that you do not own completely, like situations where your interests overlap with others or are in conflict, an environment that demands you to open yourself up to the complexity of the world. You must have a tool kit for that too. The thing that we said about hindsight earlier in this article must be usefully reiterated here. You will not always know for sure, there will also be situations where you are pressed against time limiting your ability to spend time on learning intricate details, the information at your disposal itself could be wrong, you may have your own strong opinions and biases for or against a certain matter. The unknown and the unclear will dwarf your courage, one argument is to say let's take the risk and see and another is to say, why rock stable steady boat? Both viewpoints have merit. Ours is a huge world, one in which both academic success like Dr. Tharoor and semi-literate like Mayawati get to taste success and gain prominence. College dropouts like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs & Mark Zuckerberg create magic just as successfully as people like Neil Degrasse Tyson, George Smith, William Nordhaus, Raghu Ram Rajan who not only did brilliantly in their schools and colleges but also went to become popular educators and inventors. You have to decide what works for you!

When dealing with the unknown, the unpleasant and the unclear: data and gut, will be of little use. Let me give you an example, not too long ago in history, our nation was reeling under the brutal, most inhuman and immoral rule of the British empire. 200 years of extortion, degradation, depredation, loot, and plundering had left the country, weak, ill, demotivated and decapitated of strength. Everyone knew that driving British out was the solution not many knew which of the various methods known to mankind should be applied and in what precise force. The problem was not just knowing how, but getting mass support for it, so that the oppressor is forced to notice and then pays heed. The challenge was of finding a method that required resources which could be fed with the scarce reserves that Indians had then, communicating it to the masses effectively and then winning them over to the idea for life; so that the movement gets critical mass and then keeps on growing steadily as time progressed. A huge amount of respect for everyone who tried their own methods .. irrespective of the success that they met with. That is when our country got the gift of Gandhi, the son of the soil had returned completing his education from the very west he was about to take on most ferociously and having tasted failure in his career as a barrister in South Africa. He like everyone else knew what the problem was but did not for sure knew the way out. Of course, contemporary events unfolding in the rest of the world did come handy and Bapu used them smartly to sharpen his attack. But then when he started, he was looking into the unknown which was unclear and scary.

In our own lives we often face situations which are excruciatingly difficult, mind-numbingly taxing, shitlessly scary and dangerously deafening: none of us are freedom fighters, our causes are also not as meaningful or historic but in the small personal world that we live in sometimes things do get intense, harsh and complicated; there we could use lessons from the principle that Mahatma applied to pick up his weapons; He choose truth and non-violence, as all of us know. What happened thereafter is a pleasant history.

Father of our nation, decided to act in accordance with his value systems, principles that he held dear to fight the mighty challenge and came out victorious. He had the skill, he could have chosen to remain in the confine of the comfort that his western education and the degree in the bar gave him. He could have led a luxurious life with grandeurs of wealth and safety. But he elected, instead to, remain half nacked for the second half of his life, got beaten, jailed, humiliated and even mocked but because he was sincere, consistent, truthful and honest he pursued what he thought was right and emerged as a winner.

If he picked the simpler path he would have lived longer and better life remaining: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi but he wasn't meant for the ordinary; he live the tough life, made uncomfortable moves, which many wise men then called foolish choices but in the process, he became Bapu, the Mahatma, father of a nation as glorious as ours. He earned a place in the history of mankind forever.

We can, therefore, say to make better decisions in strange unknown circumstances, we could look at.

Principle and Values – Hold your principles and your values dear and remain consistent with it.

Tough is cool – Should situation get nasty do not shy away from taking the tough call.

With that I shall end this, you have a lovely Sunday, ahead!

Civility pays!

“Civility in the context of business is, first-world-feel-good bullshit”, is what I maintained, in the early part of my career, in the years when I was new to tasting success (promotion meant success to me back then, nothing more and nothing less. It doesn’t anymore though). As I bagged my first few elevations, I became responsible for a team and not just my own output, things started to break a little. My razor sharp belief started cutting in the tranquility of my team and there came a point when I just did not know how to make do and proceed. It all seemed impossible, everyone in my team was elder to me and agreements were so seldom that I thought that my views and ideas weren’t made for collaboration. The library has been the place for finding answers, for me, for a majority of my life, so faced with this difficulty, I applied for leave and headed to British library to find a solution. There I got introduced to the legend Mr. Thomas hobs and his masterful work, in 1642, he argued that the mere act of disagreement is offensive. This simple sentence in that book came to my rescue. I understood, that I will have to prepare myself to like and even in cases that appear sensible love disagreements. I returned & resumed rejuvenated with that thought, things kept on becoming simpler and in about 8 months I nailed another success. Around the same time, another writer who I revere venerably, Dr. Shashi Tharoor, wrote in one of his academic papers that for democracies to succeed, disagreements and dissent is vital, that we must strive to be a society that is fair in encouraging its people to express their differences but at same time the discourse must remain civil and peaceful for it lead to meaningful consequences and therefore it is important that we agree on the ground rules of disagreement. Dr. Tharoor said it a lot more eloquently, I’m paraphrasing it in my own words. These two writers formed the basis of my tolerance at the workplace and gave me rationals to remain cautious and well behaved while at work, a place where I compete with others to succeed, earn both fame and wealth. My reading list from there on always had writers who have written on tolerance, respect, civility, dissent, and harmony of views, one such brilliant mind is Teresa bejan who has written extensively about the long history of civility and religious tolerance and lack of it, in society in the 17^thcentury England and the US. After Trump's victory, her work broke its record of sell, one can only imagine why.

My current view is that. 

There can’t be diversity without tolerance to disagreement and without opposing views real progress in our word is impossible.

Civility is no longer a vague and fuzzy virtue to me but a cornerstone to creating a high-performance culture, in my view. Continuing my quest to learn ways to succeed in professional career I read more as organizational behavior and its implication on the economy became an interesting area of research, psychologists are dedicating a lot of attention to this subject lately, with the Intent of measuring how a certain set behaviors result in productivity and therefore create profitable organizations and what are those traits that cause people to finish 2^nd sometimes without even realizing. Christine Porath is a known name in the circuit of behavioral science and behavioral economics, she after being humiliated at her first work chose to go back to the university and join a research program to understand the concern deeply and come up with her elucidation of impact. In her illustrious work she found the below striking facts: 

After an incivil encounter, it was absorbed that: 

Ø 60% of those directly impacted cut back on their efforts.

Ø 80% of them lost as much as 1.5 productive work day worrying/thinking about what had happened.

Ø 12% left the job    

It was also seen that those who witnessed disrespectful behavior but were not directly subjected to it were also affected in ballpark figures.

The comprehensive research also propounded that, when people are treated with respect and sensitivity, below things happen.

Ø 56% of employees are healthier ( fewer sick leaves)

Ø 92% of people are more focused on the Job at hand

Ø It improves retention by 1.1X

Ø And the workforce are 55% more engaged.

Cisco was among one of the first organizations to pay heed to her study and they estimated a loss of 12 million dollars annually to incivility in their organization, what followed in that organization is history. 12 million dollars is a fortune for most of humanity & that was the cost of being disrespectful. 

I wrote an article in July 2017 on how being “nice was going out of business”, will link it down below at the end of this article for you to read, should it interest you.

One of the gifts of education and upbringing is good etiquette, civil manners, and polished behavior. It is impractical to be Victorian in conduct when situations go south of the expectation but the whole point of being nice is not when things are warm and cozy, behaviors are tested in salty waters, if you stay cool when the heat is turned up, only then can you be called halcyon, isn’t it. The point is why do organizations misunderstand the value of civility? Why is disrespect used as a tool, sometimes even strategic one to keep the situation in check? Why do otherwise intellectual and wise people resort of hurling insensitive insults to make a point? Targeting is uncool, in all circumstances, whether you do it to gender, a cast, a creed, a culture, a set of people either above or below you in whatever scale that you measure things, situations and people on. Human history tells us that discrimination of all kinds has had a disastrous impact on peace, progress, and prosperity and yet despite the common knowledge things do go out of control, all the time.

If you are a leader of any stature, both “why” does it happen and “what” should be done about it, should be of interest to you. If you are someone who understands just money, all the more, because, hey, when a giant like Cisco can get bugged to the tune of 12 million, imagine, how much this luring bad behavior must cost you? On per person, per incident basis .. chances are that if you are an org smaller than Cisco with fewer heads to handle the proportionate impact will be higher, any day. Unless of course, one chooses to decidedly and foolishly look the other way.

“What” is straightforward, let’s pick up the “why” first.

Not all experience that one might claim to have essentially contribute to expertise, likewise not all beliefs are always knowledge. Our thinking gets shaped by our experiences, our learning, our surroundings, and our hopes and aspirations, plainly put. We tend to become what we experience .. for better or for worse. The ball boy learns the rules of the game without playing it similarly we unconsciously pick up patterns as they occur around us. Toxic environments do not cause healthy outcomes. And it impacts the collective organization more than any single employee or group of people because it is always easy for the employee to look for greener pastures but orgs can’t choose to change with so much of ease and as frequently for reasons you would imagine, I assume. The problem really is that of bias. Imminent psychologists for the sake of simplicity categorizes all biases in three categories. 

1)      Confirmation Bias 

a.    Finding evidence to confirm your existing beliefs – We are all victims of it. We create a perception and then see everything though pre-applied notion. Problem is that not always all perceptions are fact-based. If you have known something or someone for a long time it doesn’t always mean that information intimating from them are always correct. They can be just as incorrect or as incapable of presenting the whole picture as something or someone you might have known for a relatively shorter period of time or may be in the process of knowing. You need to listen more and judge less.

2)    Dunning – Kruger

a.    Thinking we know more than we do- This is a rather dangerous ailment I would say, mostly seen in accomplished people, they seem to disregard things easily that do not conform with their views. What they comfortably miss is that between they have experienced a certain situation in the past and now, a lot has changed. People are not what they used to be let's say 30 years ago. Old rules won’t make you win the new game.

3)    Cognitive dissonance  

a.    New information contracting our existing beliefs – Obstinacy, is a thing it makes us hate conflicting worldviews, so much so, that we get irritated really quickly often to the point where angry public outburst becomes our second character. You need to understand that in a world as diverse as our there will be more than one method of achieving a common goal. Letting oneself adventure a little is harmless. 

Literacy wrt the subject and misinformation on account of sourcing knowledge can cause us to gain intolerance too. To make real progress and real quick, we must enable ‘free thinking’ 

For “what” part of the equation: Below three steps can be a good beginning towards correcting biases and therefore getting rid of belief systems that legitimize incivility, intolerance, and disrespectfulness.

1)    Take inventory of your own biases 

2)    Evaluate your sources 

3)    Open yourself up to new ideas, thoughts, people and belief systems.

It is rather easy to lose control: shouting, insulting, targeting doesn’t require courage, decision, skill or even intellect, it just needs you to be in a place of control and authority, being civil and yet firm and decisive is something that really needs dedicated application of skill, mind, thoughtful reasoning and above all restraint. Making people feel bad won’t ever pay you back, neither in short nor in the long term, don’t believe me listen to this lovely song! 

Ek Din Bik Jaayega Mati Ke Mol | Dharam Karam Songs | Raj Kapoor | Evergreen Mukesh Song : https://youtu.be/pGYjHQbV1KE

I, in the sphere of my direct influence, consciously try to be civil so that I get to reap personal, societal, economic, emotional and organizational benefits of being respectful. Would you too?

The link as promised earlier for the article written and published in the month of July 2017.

Title: Is being nice beyond business?

Link: https://lkstates.blogspot.com/2017/07/is-being-nice-beyond-business.html

Bye bye, have a good day!