tell the story
I’ve been reading about writing, if only to procrastinate.
I find it hard to actually sit down and begin to write a story. Except for a short one I wrote in Austin, which was fun but not particularly good if I may add, and the odd composition in school, I have not delved in to fiction very much. You see the scientificist ( 
) in me won’t allow it.
Excuses, excuses.
So I came across a tips-for-amateur-storytellers type website out there. It said: Open a book at random. Write down the first sentence you see. Now tell the story from there.
Here goes then.
The loneliness was still there, but it was getting louder and easier to dance to.
Wow.
great PSA
Public service advertising can be so amazing. Check this one from Television Espanola out, it’s totally precious.
Translation: If your best friend doesn’t want to stay with you anymore, maybe you are watching too much TV.
If an NBC had released this ad instead of a TVE, it would have fit the “corporate responsibility” bill perfectly!
making it work
Back to work culture like I said I would.
I think one of the most important qualities to engage in the work place is flatness. By that I mean – a strong check on hierarchical behavior. Everyone has contributions to make and worrying about what the boss might say/think/feel is the best way to bring about clamming up of employees, or even worse – them expressing thoughts they believe will be favored by those “in power.” This creates a space where people are motivated by fear, leads to a fake consensus, and culminates in a non-progressive environment. What we need are work cultures in which people are intrinsically motivated. Every job is a self-portrait of the person who does it. Autograph your work with excellence. Sucking up is not conducive to this kind of sentiment.
A facet related to the first is this: companies must be very careful to inculcate an atmosphere that is not idea-killing. The role of two-way communication needs to be deeply underscored. It’s easy to be dismissive of thoughts that are not articulate enough or stated confidently enough or are perhaps slightly tangential to the topic at hand. But true respect is always due to input offered – so value all that is said, dig a bit deeper to get at the essence, certainly don’t discount anyone. Someone once said: The paradox of innovation is this: CEOs often complain about lack of innovation, while employees often say that leaders are hostile to new ideas.
The next thing I can think of is affirmation of who employees are – in a holistic sense. It is not often that people feel known/understood where they work. (There is plenty of research in organizational psychology showing that verifying people’s sense of self is greatly useful.) So, for example, let’s say you have an engineer who can paint, let it be known. Perhaps a showcasing of employee’s talents outside of their job descriptions is worthwhile. People are unique and should be seen as such; cliques should be avoided at all cost. A related aspect is of giving people autonomy. Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what needs to be done, and then let them surprise you with the results.
An openness to change is vital. A great quote speaking to it: To survive in the future, every organization must be prepared to abandon everything it does. The world is engulfed in a revolution, on a social and psychological level, and this must reflect at the organizational level as well. I’m obviously not saying the focus should be on abandoning everything, but that there should be a readiness to doing so, if need be.
Money is an unavoidable but surprising variable in creating a good work culture. Another neat quote that talks to the point: There is no contest between the company that buys the grudging compliance of its workforce and the company that enjoys the enterprising participation of its employees. You could pay people a ton of money and not have their faithfulness. (Employee turnover rates are not as muted by high salaries as one might like to think.) Or you could value an employee tremendously and have his loyalty forever, even if you couldn’t pay him the best that is out there.
Management must develop a clear ideology and let it be implemented by all – from the guy who wheels the coffee and croissants in to the conference room to the one who heads the table. It is more than vital! A powerful quote that I believe gets at it most thoroughly: A visionary company creates a total environment that envelops employees, bombarding them with signals so consistent and mutually reinforcing that it’s virtually impossible to misunderstand the company’s ideologies and ambitions. This ties in inextricably with giving meaning to the work employees do. A vision is exceedingly important.
Finally, a thoughtful and honest Corporate Responsibility policy is imperative today. When institutionalized right, it can cover almost all of the points touched upon above – and more! The idea of Corporate Responsibility is NOT anti-profit, as many like to believe; it is just a more long-term orientation than the short-term one to which we are accustomed. Ultimately, CR is about nothing but profit, actually. I will write about it some more in another post.
deck the wall
I have a friend, a highly talented art director, who’s created an amazing series of Dubai cityscapes. It’s not glamor-and-glitz but down-to-earth and often gritty stuff that he captures. Most of it is done on used, flattened cardboard boxes, although he does have a fruit paper-tray or two in the mix! Click on each for a closer look at these two pieces of his art, now happily mine. He has more, so if you like what you see, let me know and I will gladly get you in touch with Fabo.
ditch it
I’ve grown certain that the root cause of lack of fulfillment – and the sense of futility that goes with it – is fear. (Needless to say, I’ve been in a contemplative phase for the last couple of weeks.) To live life with authenticity is tough, especially in the smoke-and-mirrors world this often is. And underneath the fear of being true to yourself lie the fears of failure and rejection. They make us give in to the status quo, to not speak our minds, and to not bring to any situation what we might uniquely bring, in their absence.
It is very early on in our lives that we become afraid of being wrong or looking stupid or feeling inferior. These are very real and very human fears, and once they set in, discovering who we really are becomes an uphill battle. We lie to ourselves and others, we hide and we hurt, we deny and we demean. We all do; it’s not a question of if but how much.
Now consider the flip side. Is courage the absence of fear? Seems to me it’s more like courage is simply the acknowledgment of fear. Once you admit to a fear, it tends to lose its bite, which is liberating. You gradually become free to be aware, free to not unthinkingly conform, free to be and believe in yourself. (One of my great fears is of being perceived as too idealistic and only very recently have I begun to confront it.)
I recently came across a related and rather neat quote by Nietzsche: Fear is the mother of morality. That got me thinking about how rarely we find ourselves doing what feels right – not what we are told is right, or what is generally considered right, but what intuitively feels right deep down to us. If we could make more of a habit of it, then we might have no use of the so-called morality that often leads to brashness towards ourselves and others. I deeply believe that being gentle is part of being brave, and requires even more of those proverbial guts. Think not just about us as individuals, but also about how we behave collectively – for example countries that are at war…
I know I am rambling, guess it’s because I’m not used to doing this. I tend to avoid getting too personal on this blahg – perhaps in the fear that I will be judged as childish and over-emotional or even worse as boring. (All this fear, my being a psychologist notwithstanding!) But this is how I feel and this subject is at my core. So hear hear then, here’s to facing fears. Slowly but surely, even if just a fraction of one at a time. Good night. =)
think like a kid!
We sometimes use a cool creative tool to brainstorm at work. Basically, you each pull one of a pack of cards. (Every card bears a different anecdote and an associated technique.) Then you play the role that the card suggests within the team for a bit, until it’s time to pull the next card. It’s a fun and remarkably useful exercise! Here is one I especially like…
dissatisfied?
Consider the following aspects of job satisfaction.
1) The EMOTIONAL (i.e. people are doing work they personally enjoy and when they know that the outcome of their work is meaningful)
2) The SOCIAL (when one works with people one likes and respects, where feedback is appropriate, and where the motivation to perform is positive)
3) The PHYSICAL (whether it be manual labor that is not abusive or about a comfortable, easily accessible office for a white-collar worker)
4) The FINANCIAL (I realize how subjective the phrase “well-paid” is; but let’s say that “well” implies a cool savings of at least a fifth of monthly pay.)
I have a feeling that a strong fulfillment of just one or two of the above could lead a person to say they are pretty satisfied at their job overall. For example, let’s say you are getting remunerated at a high level; that might negate the ill effects of all other aspects. Or for example, if you aren’t, but you adore your colleagues, you may grin and bear the fact that you don’t absolutely love your work either. This might be a tad simplistic, but you get the drift…
And yet, the percentage of people who are extremely dissatisfied at their jobs these days is spectacular. Well, why?
It would be easy to primarily blame issues with the last factor on the list – inadequate compensation is indeed a major concern in most economies today. But how about we focus on the first two for a bit.
The kind of work you choose to do obviously influences to a great extent how much you enjoy your work. Do your aptitude and abilities match your profession? If not, you are probably not alone. People are often socially pressured to take up jobs they are doomed to dislike. Many of us have heard things like: “Don’t do music, you won’t get a job doing that!” or “Where’s the money in studying art?” or “Whatever would you do with a degree in language when you grow up?”
Sir Ken Robinson has given a remarkable speech (Do schools kill creativity?) on what the consequences of discouraging kids from their natural affinities are. I do not blame society for putting pressure on their children to become engineers and accountants. I see that the advice is well-intentioned – but it is not necessarily right. And what ends up happening is the creation of a world where people are not synched up with their jobs, which then contributes significantly to job dissatisfaction – and ultimately reduces commitment and productivity at personal and organizational levels.
The issue above is a huge one and needs much attention. Even so, let’s say you chose to do what you want to, or even if you chose to do what you can at least tolerate doing. Unfortunately, there’s a bigger hurdle that often creeps up. Typically, after the initial novelty of a work place has worn away, you begin to grapple with a work culture that is far from ideal.
It’s not often that workplaces elicit the kind of sentiment that companies like Google do…
More on work culture in an upcoming post.
grim
I was on vacation in South India this last week. My cousin and I traveled a few hours from Mysore to a beautiful resort in Coorg. Coffee plantations, elephants roaming free, lush greenery, and plenty of rain-induced relaxation later, we decided to return by bus. It was a charming ride through tiny villages that made me feel connected with India again after years – even as we were at times tossed a foot off our seats by monsoon potholes galore!
That was all until about a hour and a half in, when we heard a sickening crunch, as we rumbled through a village called Kamalapur. The bus ground to a halt and there it was, plain for all to see, a 4 year-old kid splattered on the street. Words cannot describe the feeling and I will – for my peace of mind and yours – omit gory details.
What was almost more disturbing was the reaction of the villagers. They gathered around in hordes within minutes, all looking for someone to blame. Apparently, drivers of all vehicles involved, whether directly or not, were considered criminals. The driver and conductor of our bus simply ran away in a jiffy. Perhaps they thought escaping in to a neighbouring village would be safer than facing the wrath of the mob that had gathered. And what a mob it was! A buzz spread through our bus; we were strongly advised to get away as soon as possible, owing to a good chance that the bus would be stoned by people provoked before the arrival of cops. We left and walked a few kilometres down the highway, where we eventually hitched a ride to the nearest town.
What I could not get past is that, in all this, the remains of the child were ignored, with no one to simply cover him up with a piece of cloth. In fact, it seemed like people wanted to keep the terrible sight there, in order that the anger that was seething would not wane. Were the incident to be covered by a foreign press, it would be easy to portray India as a brutal land of ignorant people. We somehow could not blame the dirt-poor and vastly uneducated villagers for their reaction however. All we could hope for as we brisked ourselves away – on the eve of Independence Day no less – was more of a drive towards literacy.
more on outsourcing
In a brilliant article called Revenge of the Right Brain in Wired magazine, Daniel Pink brings a fresh perspective to the outsourcing issue. I first read it about 3 years ago and highly recommend it even today. Here’s a synopsis, with a few of my own thoughts thrown in.
Pink first establishes how our left brains help us with linearity, logic, literal thinking and analysis while our right brains are more about emotion, synthesis, creativity, context, and meaning. So while left-brained thinking dominates in professions like accounting, engineering, and programming, the right brain manifests more strongly in artists, care-providers, and others professions grounded in holistic thinking. We obviously typically need both halves to function. For example, a judge would use both halves of his brain in delivering a verdict – the left that knows the rules that apply and the right that understands the context of the case at hand. And like we use both sides to process this picture below.
There is debate over how stark the dichotomy in brain function is, but there is certainly something to it. Here’s something interesting I learned in neuropsychology: research on patients with localized brain damage has shown that relying primarily on the left brain (which is more straightforward and computer-like in function than the right), we would likely see the picture above merely as “a bunch of fruits, flowers, and veggies.” And if the activity were situated mostly in the right brain (which gets the ‘big picture’ and dwells in metaphor more than the left), we would see the picture above as “a colorful man.” How cool is that!
What does that have to do with outsourcing? Pink’s contention is that as left-brained work gets outsourced more to developing countries, the rest will have to enhance the use of right-brainedness in business – a phenomenon that will shape significantly the progress of our world. (Do read his article if you fancy this drift.)
I see outsourcing as leading to a shift in balance. And, I firmly believe, it’s not about the balance of power – a lens through which many, rather unfortunately, tend to view the issue. It’s bigger than that; it’s much more about how we evolve rather than who gets to rule the world. Here is an excerpt from Pink that speaks to the point…
If the Industrial Age was built on people’s backs, and the Information Age on people’s left hemispheres, the Conceptual Age is being built on people’s right hemispheres. We’ve progressed from a society of farmers to a society of factory workers to a society of knowledge workers. And now we’re progressing yet again – to a society of creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers, and meaning makers.
