When blogging is not on your mind

After so many months I am blogging. And I am having this feeling of uneasiness. A year ago, when I was pursuing MBA, blogging came naturally to me. May be, I had a lot of time to think, relax and structure my thoughts. But today, I am feeling as if I have to learn riding a bicycle again and keep in mind how to maintain the balance while driving.

It seems, life has become transactional these days. No new thoughts, opinions or ideas are coming. In a way, life is giving so many experiences so fast that before I gather them and put it in a structure, some new thing would happen and it would override the previous thought. Anyway, let me share with you names of my recently read books. In past couple of months, I read a book "Career Dynamics" by Edgar Schien. Its a wonderful book in which the concept of career anchors amazes me. One of the classics, you can say. These days I am reading another book titled "Winning" by Jack Welch. Warren Buffet says "No other management book will be ever needed" and I am finding it true. The book is full of Jack Welch's experiences which he had during his 40 years of corporate life.

So thats it. I shall post more soon.. Keep reading !!

Stress fosters superstition

There was an article sometime back in The Economic Times with somewhat similar title. That time it may be referring to stress at a person level. But in recent scenario it may refer to stress at global level. This stress is caused by the feeling of insecurity and no one knows when the ending of this dark tunnel. Last Diwali, the BSE sensex was at the 19k mark and the same sensex is today, just before Diwali, below the 10K mark. So we can presume that life is becoming lesser and lesser predictable with each passing day. As i read at one of the blogs the morale and loyality to the company are lat all time low across the globe...

If even in good times some successful people are superstitous with regards to letters, numbers and stars. Then in this turbulent times the reliance on such things is likely to increase. People just want some miracle to happen. Hang on people ... things will stabilize.. but it is for sure that twister in the form of economic slow down is becoming stronger and stronger day by day...so please find a safe place.. befor you consult an astrologer etc. and save yourself befor worrying about other lesser important things. ..

This is the time when survival of the fittest is in the real sense the name of the game and the change management concepts shall be put to acid test.

Baat samjaa karo

I was listening to this song "Baat samjaa karo" from the movie "Kyon ho gaya na". I have not seen the movie, so I guess the song is picturized on Amitabh Bachhan, as the male singer's voice in the movie suggests. Its a very happy kind of song, with all band baajaa and all.

Few days back I was not feeling good about my interactions with one of my colleague in the company. The thought of his/her bossing over me, even though not being my boss, disturbed me. Then I thought that why such thing was happening. The cause of problem was me and not him/her. I get busy with my daily work so much in the company that I hardly get any time to share the work in progress with him/her. So when its a "do the work" kind of situation then she/he has to tell me promptly as he/she is also busy.

So I told to myself that talk to that person atleast once in a day and exchange updates, which will result in a healthy relationship between both of us and will not cause the situation of "digging the well when the house is on fire". Hence baat samja karo ... c'mon Charlie !! :)

Organization as an organism

Yesterday I had gone for a general quiz. (Though no quizzer here.. going for such activities to have something new). In that quiz there was this question where we had to connect 3 pictures. One of them is as seen on the right hand side. This picture depicts the Gaia Theory where entire earth is referred to as an organism. This is a wonderful concept.

There were many questions but this one specifically lingered in my mind. Why is that so? This is because it resonates with my idea of organization as an organism. From past week I was thinking of organization as an organism. ( A huge one).

Lets compare an organization with none other than a human being. It goes through all the things that an individual experiences. Birth, growth, maturity and death are life stages of all the living organisms, so how then organizations be compared to an individual? This is where the differentiation comes in picture, in terms of the business of the organization. Well organizations marry (joint ventures) also but then it can be many times. Kindly note, I have mentioned joint ventures and not mergers and acquisition when referring to marriage. To me after marriage two individuals maintain their separate identity and continue to live life in each other's company. Mergers may be compared to a new child as the new entity has characteristics of both the parents. Acquistion I am not able to compare with an individual.. any one out there any creativity?

Goal Posts

Chetan Bhagat’s well circulated (through emails) and well acknowledged speech (provide hyperlink) at the convocation ceremony of SIBM Pune has a very powerful message mentioning that let there be continuous generation of sparks in you. They drive your life and make you excel at things which you are good at.

There are hundreds and thousands of stimuli in environment. You react to these stimuli according to your characteristics (brought up, education, reading, movies etc). And that in turn determines your personality. It’s a feedback loop here.

Once you reach certain goal post of your life, the spark generation rate decreases for a certain period of time and then you start hunting for next goal. This is not the ideal and healthy way to move ahead. As is with the heart beats for the healthy physical life so is with the spark generations for mental life. Both need to be regular. The number of heart beats is determined by the Supreme power of this Universe. The destination here is death. The number of sparks shall be determined by none other than you. The destination here is goal of life.

The feedback loop will contribute to the quality/type of spark generations and the clear cut path to reach goal posts will determine the number of spark generations. Hence good quality supply at regular intervals shall be responsible for a successful life, if to be successful means to achieve once goal.

Shall post on a regular basis...

Yes dear readers, the title of the post, as you can see, is my quarterly resolution. Here I go. Did you notice any thing peculiar in the first sentence? Well...Well…I have used the workplace jargon “quarterly" to qualify the word resolution in that sentence. Words used in one’s language inform about the surroundings/environment one is part of. And as, I have transitioned from being a student only to a working professional and a student (which I will try to be throughout my life), hence the use of this jargon. “Quarterly” is most commonly used as quarterly result, quarterly goal etc at workplace.

My intentions to post were to reflect upon some of the things that I have so far experienced as a working professional. Communication is very important at workplace. You are as good as your communication. It is a very broad term which covers written and verbal communication, presentation skills, negotiation skills, conflict management skills, selling skills, interpersonal skills, body language etc. Hence the way you communicate things determines your image in the organization. A professor in one of the training sessions that I recently attended, shared the following nugget of wisdom, “People in this world do not relate to the information with you.(Like education, age, etc) but rather the meaning they draw out of you. (The way you occur to them).” It seems very true to me.


Another thing, is one related to the organization. It is the implementation of the theoretical frameworks. It is very good to conceptualize things and come up with nice looking models. But models should finally concretize in to realities i.e they should be implementable at the end of the day. Implementation becomes easy and fast when they are simple and in sync with various other functions of organization and more importantly with the organizational strategy.

I shall post many more reflections in the future posts. So readers watch out this space.
You all are my customers and I shall try my best to cater to your interests. So may I request to you all to leave comments on my posts (no problem even if it is posted as an anonymous). Until next time, keep thinking !! :)

The Fallen Tomato Cart !! by Subroto Bagchi (Co-founder and CEO of Mindtree Consulting

Came across this wonderful article ....

I pass through this very intersection every morning with so much ease. Today, the
pace is skewed. There is a sense of disarray as motorists try to push past each other
through the traffic light. The light here always tests their agility because if you miss the green, you have to wait for another three minutes before it lets you go past again. Those three minutes become eternity for an otherwise time-insensitive nation on the move. Today, there is a sense of chaos here. People are honking, skirting each other and rushing past. I look out of my window to seek the reason. It is not difficult to find because it is lying strewn all over the place.
A tomato seller’s cart has overturned. There are tomatoes everywhere and the rushing motorists are making pulp of it. The man is trying to get his cart back on its four rickety wheels and a few passersby are picking up what they can in an attempt to save him total loss. Though symbolic in the larger scheme of things, it is not a substantive gesture. His business for the day is over.
The way this man’s economics works is very simple. There is a money lender who lends him money for just one day, at an interest rate of Rs 10 per day per Rs 100 lent. With the money, he wakes up at 4 am to go to the wholesale market for vegetables. He returns, pushing his cart a good five miles, and by 7 am when the locality wakes up, he is ready to sell his day’s merchandise. By the end of the morning, some of it remains unsold. This his wife sells by the afternoon and takes
home the remainder, which becomes part of his meal. With the day’s proceeds, he returns the interest to the money lender and goes back to the routine the next day. If he does not sell for a day, his chain breaks.
Where does he go from here? He goes back to the money lender, raises capital at an even more penal interest and gets back on his feet. This is not the only time that destiny has upset his tomato cart. This happens to him at least six times every year. Once he returned with a loaded cart of ripe tomatoes and it rained heavily for the next three days. No one came to the market and his stock rotted in front of his own eyes. Another time, instead of the weather, it was a political rally that snowballed into a confrontation between two rival groups and the locality closed down. And he is
not alone in this game of extraneous factors that seize not only his business but also his life. He sees this happen to the “gol-gappa” seller, the peanut seller and the “vada pao” seller all the time. When their product does not sell, it just turns soggy.
Sometimes they eat some of it. But how much of that stuff can you eat by yourself? So, they just give away some and there is always that one time when they have to simply throw it away.

Away from the street-vendor selling perishable commodity with little or no life support system, the corporate world is an altogether different place. Here we have some of the most educated people in the country. We don the best garbs. We do not have to push carts; our carts push us. We have our salary, perquisites, bonuses, stock options, gratuities, pensions and our medical insurance and the group accident benefit schemes. Yet, all the while, we worry about our risks and think about our
professional insecurity. We wonder, what would happen if the company shifted offices to another city? What would happen if the department closed down? What would happen if you were to take maternity leave and the temporary substitute delivered better work than you did? What would happen if the product line you are dealing with simply failed? In any of those eventualities, the worst that could happen would still be a lot less than having to see your cartful of tomatoes getting pulped
under the screeching wheels of absolute strangers who have nothing personal against you.
All too often we exaggerate our risks. We keep justifying our professional concerns till they trap us in their vicious downward spiral. Devoid of education, sophisticated reasoning and any financial safety net, the man with the cart is often able to deal with life much better than many of us. Is it time to look out of the window, into the eyes of that man to ask him, where does he get it from? In his simple stoicism, is probably, our lost resilience.