To give or not to give - that is the question

I recently stumbled across an article published in the Harvard Business Review (April 2013 edition) that struck an instant chord with me. Innocuously titled ‘In the company of givers and takers’, the article dealt with the sticky subject of employee collaboration – and how it can be both boon and bane for organizations. Given the nature of work I do ranks high on the collaboration scale in delivering most of its work-product, I felt compelled to provide a succinct recap of the major takeaways from the article here.

To hit the nail on its head, the author Adam Grant (Professor at the Wharton School of Business, Pennsylvania), broadly delineates employees into exhibiting workplace behavior that characterizes them as either ‘givers’ or ‘takers’. Givers are the ones that offer assistance to their fellow colleagues (sometimes even unsolicited), share knowledge, make valuable recommendations– in short contribute to others without seeking anything in return. Takers, on the other hand, seek assistance from their peers for most jobs, often only with the intent of getting their own work done, or in an inane attempt to ‘protect’ their expertise. Knowledge management ‘silos’ are a direct consequence of employees demonstrating ‘taker’ behavior.

These two workplace-personality traits – to ‘give’ or ‘take’ – can be linked to the two great forces that govern human nature: self-interest and caring for others.  In choosing to exhibit either type of trait, employees are merely extending a portion of who they are, as humans, in an environment they come in contact with the most – their offices. Adam views the collision of these two ‘forces’ at the workplace to be potentially damaging for organizations – neither collegian generosity on the part of the giver, nor continued reluctance to contribute on the part of the taker can help in fostering effective collaboration at the workplace.

Organizations are fully aware of the need to encourage ‘giver’ behavior in their workforces – the article quotes several real-life examples where givers have been at the heart of teamwork, innovation, quality improvement and service excellence in their respective groups leading to as much as a 50% jump in annual revenues (in selected instances). However, there is a perceived cost to the exercise in the minds of the employee – studies reveal that most are discouraged from exhibiting such behavior by ‘relative’ performance evaluation mechanisms (or ‘dog-eat-dog scoring systems’ as Adam puts it) that reward competition, not collaboration. The evidence available seems to suggest exactly that: in a study of salespeople in one company, it was found that the ones who had brought in the least business were often ‘givers’.

However, this is where things get interesting - the same study found that the salespeople who generated the most revenue were also givers. These ‘super’ salespeople were consistently outperforming others while also helping their colleagues succeed. How were they doing it? Adam identifies three qualities that hold back the under-performing giver from succeeding:

• Givers need to become more assertive – overcoming timidity and not sacrificing self for fear of disrespecting others is essential in not being taken for granted.
• Givers need to define boundaries for their assistance – including what, when, who and how they provide help. It’s even better if they act as ‘matchers’ instead of merely giving help – by expecting something equally obliging in return from the taker.
• Givers need to avoid the ‘empathy’ trap – instead, they must change their frame of reference to that of the person they are assisting. This change in perspective can hugely influence giver behavior for the better – in terms of cost, quality and time.

In conclusion, Adam Grant re-emphasizes the need to exhibit ‘productive’ giver behavior for the benefit of his/her organization – giving that isn’t unconditional or conscience-easing but assisting colleagues in a way that empowers them to do the same in return. The full article is available online at: https://hbr.org/2013/04/in-the-company-of-givers-and-takers.

As I come to the end of this piece, I realize that writing this article for the benefit of the ‘greater good’ does not make me a giver – it makes me one only when I know how to extract favors in return too. J

Lessons from life

This is not a birthday blog – let me make that clear upfront. This is, if one has to necessarily pigeon-hole the piece, a studied recollection of the past year of my life more than anything else. Indeed, one could even call it my first online ‘diary’ entry and they wouldn’t be too far off the mark. Call it what you want, I have always maintained that I write this blog merely to serve as an instrument for fond recollection in my sunset years.

2014 was a landmark year for me – one filled with both peaks and troughs – including the successful completion of my post-graduate degree, landing my first ‘management’ job and also, quite belatedly,  having my first road accident. If I have to describe the past year with one word, I would choose ‘erudition’. For, I have never learned more than what I did in the past year.

Now how could that be, you might ask? After all, I did spend a majority of the past 22 years of my life indulging in one form of learning or other, be it as a (reluctant?) participant of a rigid education system or otherwise. There was one important distinction that set my ‘education’ last year apart – almost all of it was experiential and not-so-inconsequentially, visceral. It is important to note that I am not belittling the significance of knowledge attained from the written word here (of which I had a lot last year), when I talk about my education. Rather, I’d like to shed some much needed light on the other side of the learning paradigm – that which is fructified first-hand via life’s existential nuances, those seemingly minor quirks of fate which lead to moments of absolute mental clarity.

Such ‘eureka’ moments are often brought about by the most trivial of circumstances and result in blessed comprehension that makes you wonder, ‘Oh wait - here’s something I’ve always known but never realized before!’ Hence, in keeping with my well-defined penchant for bullet lists, I shall go ahead and list my top three lessons from the last year, gained as a result of a few such ‘quirks’:

•         The first one was the most unpleasant of the lot – the road accident near my office. It was a case of he-said-she-said when it came to apportioning blame and I quickly realized the situation was getting worse by the minute – my victim had a nasty-looking gash on his right forearm and the kerfuffle had attracted a few curious lookers-on. It was the moment I realized what real confrontation can feel like – and how a little bit of tact can help in extricating oneself from an unpleasant situation.

•         This second lesson was something I had known all my life – but only recently completely understood. Financial prudence has always been one of my top priorities – be it my own or that of my near and dear. It came as a rude shock to me when, as I sat reading the morning newspaper, I realized how naïve I had been investing in debt alone. Diversification of one’s asset class, I realized, was of paramount importance if one intended to inorganically grow their money. This is one life-lesson I don’t regret learning early.

•                 Out of all the ‘lessons’ I learnt last year, this one is perhaps the most interesting – and a tad bit embarrassing. Given my cloistered, orthodox upbringing and decidedly anti-social household, I had grown with nary an inkling about the machinations of a woman’s mind – what is their thinking process,  how do they differentiate between what is cool/uncool, how do I approach one without setting off all the wrong signals? Understanding girls was one of my top priorities for the last year and I am happy to report I’ve made considerable progress in this regard – special thanks to a select few for helping me on that particular journey.  

Somewhere along the line, I have come to understand that these lessons may not mean much in the short-term but possess the potential for leaving a profound impact on my thought-processes, my psyche and as a result, on my way of life itself. And for that, I am eternally grateful.

Adios Luisito!

Straight off the bat, I’m going to admit that I have been negligent. Of what, you ask? I have been grossly negligent of my first true love, oblivious to the need for lettering about my life’s biggest passion, unmindful of the very rubric under which I christened my personal blog. Being a wannabe blogger, I am guilty of being utterly neglectful of the need to nourish that most precious of personal motivations, Liverpool Football Club. It’s time I set the record straight – and talk about the elephant in the room when it comes to LFC these days, the one and only Luis Suarez.

Luisito - fondly referred to as ‘El Pistolero’ - is the man who everybody loves to hate in football. I’m not going to sit here and rehash every sordid detail of his antics during the recently concluded World Cup, or any of the various other ‘extra-curricular’ activities that he’s been involved in as a Liverpool player – it has been done to death by the British media, every television program ranging from Sportscenter to Family Guy, as well as by every self-righteous Liverpool hater on Facebook. 

I write this blog instead to revel, one last time, in some of his more glorious moments in a red shirt (bearing that most celebrated of numbers on its back, 7), to quantify the import of his presence on the pitch for Liverpool, to forgive him for his deplorable behaviour on the pitch but most importantly, to try and come to grips with his departure from the club. I have no shame in admitting that in all my years as a Liverpool fan, barring Steven Gerrard, no player has become an object of my affections quite like Luis Suarez had.

Reminiscing is hard – it makes one long for what was once theirs, and wish what followed later never transpired. Here are my top 5 moments from Luis Suarez’s career at Liverpool:

The 40-yard goal against Norwich: Suarez has scored a number of difficult goals during his time at the club, but none quite like this stunner against Norwich in the Premier League. That the Canaries were Suarez’s favourite opposition was well-documented (he scored an astonishing 12 goals against them in just 6 games) and something about the sight of their yellow and green home kits elevated his game to stratospheric levels. This goal is particularly memorable for me, given the absolute audacity and technical precision with which it was executed.

The opener against Tottenham Hotspur at WHL: This goal typifies all that is good about Luisito: vision, pace, tenacity, deception and the most deadly trait of them all, accuracy. When I watched this goal at home, I was struck by the speed and clarity of Suarez’s decision-making. To think that, from producing the pass unlocking the Spurs defence, making the run to give Henderson the option to dump the ball off in his path, and then evading not one, not two but three defenders (one of them with a delectable pull-back) to finish with surgical precision beneath the despairing hands of Hugo Lloris, Suarez did all of these things in a matter of seconds beggars belief.

The free-kick in the Merseyside Derby: How can I not include a trademark Suarez free-kick in this list? One of the most potent threats in his arsenal, Suarez possesses this uncanny knack of scoring vicious goals from outrageous positions on the pitch. I chose this particular instance of his set-piece prowess for three reasons: one, because of the amount of curl he generated on the ball to get it around the Everton wall, yet unerringly find the bottom corner; two, because of the circumstances in which it was scored – Everton had equalised with a Kevin Mirallas strike, and had their tails up; and three, because it was scored with Tim Howard in goal. Now, that’s one thing that won’t feature in a #ThingsTimHowardCouldSave meme.

The solo goal versus Newcastle: This goal… wow, there are times when I still scratch my head ape-like and marvel in bewilderment - did he just do that? In fact, when it did happen I simply refused to believe that Suarez had scored – I kept waiting for the referee to blow his whistle for a ‘foul’ or for the offside flag to be raised unflinchingly in the corner…or something. Words won’t do justice to the sheer difficulty and technical complexity of this goal - a golazo to crown every other he’s ever scored for the club.

The amazing dribble against Manchester United: It’s ironical that the moment that sealed my unmitigated affection for Suarez was in fact, a goal which he did not score. But that’s about the only thing he didn’t do - even today, when I look back at the grainy footage of the goal on YouTube, the way Suarez twisted and turned and completely bamboozled the United defence to lay it on a silver platter for Kuyt sends a shiver down my spine. Back then, I knew I had just witnessed the birth of a modern-day footballing genius.

Numbers usually do not do complete justice to a player’s performance, but in Suarez’s case, they only serve to embellish his aura. There are too many to pick from, but sample these:

·              82:   Number of goals he scored in 133  games for Liverpool (a games-to-goals ratio of 1.62)
  50.4%: Liverpool win percentage with Suarez in the team.
  20.3:   Average no. of games taken to score a hat-trick in the Premier League.
  0:  No of penalties he scored for Liverpool.

All of these stats are rendered meaningless when juxtaposed against his dubious on-field behaviour that is the cause of much heartburn for Liverpool supporters. It raises doubts about his integrity and exposes him to questions ranging from the innocuous (“Why would a great striker resort to cheap tactics such as biting a fellow professional?”) to the pejorative (“Is Luis Suarez racist?”).

If history has taught us anything, it is the supposition that genius and eccentricity are inextricably linked representing two sides of the same coin. If I have to come to terms with his behaviour on the pitch, I have no choice but to believe Suarez is also a victim of this quirk.

Hard as it may be to digest, Luis Suarez’s departure from Liverpool was a foregone conclusion much before his shenanigans vis-à-vis Giorgio Chiellini at the World Cup – his latest ‘hickey’ (if one may call it that) only served to hasten it. Which raises the biggest question of them all: Can Liverpool reprise the heights they achieved during the 2013/14 Premier League season without their talisman?

My head says no, and yet, being the prejudiced Liverpool supporter that I am, my heart says it is possible. Whatever may come to pass this season, one thing is certain: I’m going to miss Suarez’s dancing, twinkling feet take the pitch for Liverpool. Adios amigo – you’ll never walk alone!

Being Gulliver

Gulliver’s travels, a popular classic of English literature written by Jonathan Swift in the year 1726, is a tale that describes the adventures of Lemuel Gulliver as he voyages across uncharted waters to arrive at the island of Lilliput. Upon being washed ashore, he finds himself taken prisoner by the inhabitants of the island – none of whom are over 6 inches in height. What follows is a comical series of events that chronicles the troubles that Gulliver is made to endure as he desperately tries to convince Lilliputians of his noble intentions, before eventually turning out to become its knight in shining armour.

 

There is one common thread that ties this unlikely book-hero to me – we are both considered to be ‘taller’ than average by our respective audiences.  While that may be an understatement in the case of Gulliver (at 6’, he was 12 times taller than the tallest person in Lilliput), and an exaggeration in mine (I’m merely 6’4” tall, but I live in India where the average height of its citizens is a more humane 5’3”), it is nevertheless, a point that stands. I find this singularity especially telling juxtaposed against the context of the book, as some of Gulliver’s hassles living life in Lilliput reminded me of some of my own living in India – so much so, that I felt sufficiently piqued to chronicle my travails in being, well, not very unlike Gulliver.

•           Question No.1: There are certain things in life that are inescapable: death, taxes and, in my case, being asked the question, “How tall are you?” Some people even forget to ask me for my name – all they are interested in is how much taller I am than their own diminutive selves. Even the few celebrities I’ve had the good fortune to meet have fallen into this trap – former Governor Surjit Singh Barnala, Cognizant CFO Gordon Coburn, and Tata Sons chairman Cyrus Mistry all popped the question. While I appreciate the acknowledgement, being confronted with it every time I meet a new person does start to get on your nerves. It may be hard for some to believe, but there is more to me than my imposing frame.

•          The rancid jokes: Once introductions are made and the preliminary ice is broken, comes the next phase: being made the butt of ‘tall-people’ jokes. “Hey, how’s the weather up there?”, “Have you always had your head in the clouds?”, “How much Complan did you drink when you were a kid?” are some of the most common ones I’ve had to suffer through over the years – in three different languages. And while we’re at it, I’d like to quash any inkling of the notion that my height is a result brought about by a breakfast health-drink, once and for all – no, I did not drink Complan as a kid.

•           Being a consumer: Sometimes I think airlines across the world conspired to develop seating standards with the express intent of punishing people like me for growing unabashedly tall – I am yet to travel in an airplane with enough leg-room for anyone over 6 feet in length. The injustice is only aggravated when I’m made the middle passenger in a three-seat troika – trust me, it’s the modern-day avatar of the erstwhile straitjacket. And it’s not just plane seats – climbing into and out of matchbox-sized cars, getting a haircut, even buying shoes can be a traumatic experience. I mean, how hard can it be for stores to stock one more size in 13, when they can hold everything from sizes 4 to 12?

•      Using public transport: Yet another instance of gross disregard for the vertically-gifted. I’ve used metropolitan buses for local commute in 6 different cities, and banged my head in the roof of every single one of them. Couple the lack of head-space in buses with the preponderance of pot-holes on Indian roads, and the likelihood of a head injury for the big guy is all but certain.

Ok, rant over. If I’m being completely honest with myself, I’d have to say being tall also has its fair share of advantages too, some of which include:

·         The accompanying physical advantages - walking faster, playing sports such as basketball and badminton etc.  

·         Never having trouble getting spotted in a crowd – my length enables me to be a veritable lighthouse in a sea of humanity.

·         Temple darshan is never a problem with me – not unless enterprising fathers hoist their infant children on to their shoulders and block my line of sight.

However, the most important advantage that I believe has been bestowed upon me by virtue of my height was aptly summed up by my 90 year old grandfather – self-confidence. So, I guess, I have nothing to complain about after all.  

Statistics suggest shorter people live longer, while their taller counterparts lead more successful lives. If I were to be born again and be given the choice, I know what I’d pick.

Five Point MBA

It’s funny, how quickly time passes. For me, it only feels like yesterday when I was sitting in a cubicle plodding through my workload with  decided indifference, when I received ‘the mail’. It was the mail that I had been waiting for, for longer than I cared to admit; the mail that had possessed my hopes and dreams ever since I had given my selection interview; the mail that would trigger a course correction in my career trajectory; the mail that would change my life, for the better (I hoped). It was March 21^st, 2012 and I had just received the mail that confirmed my admission at IMT Ghaziabad.

The next year and three-quarters have been but a flash – I have gained more knowledge, met more people, given more presentations, completed more projects and cleared more exams than I have ever before in my life. To crystallize all that I have learned over the past 20 months from IMT in one blog is a difficult, nay, impossible task – nevertheless, I shall make a stab at it.

MBA Lesson 101: if you have more information to present than is manageable, break down the content to its very essence – and use bullet points (because everybody loves bullet points). So, in keeping with true MBA tradition let me offer the five key takeaways from my time at IMT:

·        

•       Listening: The most vital piece of learning that I take back from my MBA is the realization that it is more important to listen than to be the one listened to. People tend to trivialize the import of having exemplary listening skills but I have been reminded time and again of its benefits and cannot stress this enough: ‘active’ listening is crucial for progress – be it academic or professional.
•            Economics: It is said that ‘one of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know’. Well for one, I do know that of all the different subjects I studied in management, economics was always the most revealing. The subject is not only about making one conversant with terms like GDP and the fiscal deficit – it also provides a clue to understanding and predicting all of human intent. In short, it endeavours to provide answers to the question: ‘Why does man behave like he does?’
•            Peer-to-peer learning: Being a member of an institution with over 500 other students has its pros and cons. However, there is no mistaking the fact that it makes for a vibrant and stimulating atmosphere to learn in. Working with people from a variety of backgrounds and cultural upbringing melts away a person’s social inhibitions and does wonders for one’s self-confidence. And I haven’t even started on the concomitant network effects that it brings in conjunction.      
•          Team-work: If you work with different people, on different subjects, with different timelines resulting in very different outcomes, term after term after term, you shall know more about team work than you can possibly imagine. 
•            Knowing thyself: More than anything else, I realized that after doing my MBA, I have a clearer vision and understanding of who I really am, as a person. I now know more about my strengths and weaknesses, my hopes and ambitions, and my thought-processes and opinions than I did before I set foot at IMT. If that’s not learning, what is?

If I have to describe my experience of doing an MBA with one word, it would have to be ‘transformative’. Not because of the fact that it has made me a better and more-rounded individual (which it has), or because it made me realize how much I knew and, more importantly, how much I did not know about the world I lived in (which it did). 

It is because of the comprehension that the learning I have gained over the course of my management education is not cumulative or complete, but is only the beginning - and shall only grow exponentially from here on in my career. And for that, I shall be eternally indebted and grateful to my alma mater.

#ThankYouIMT   

26 and counting.

Birthday blogs always leave me feeling philosophical about life. As each day passes and every moment fades into the next, never ceasing, never waiting, an overwhelming sense of perspective envelops me and my thoughts. Questions that I had not paid much attention to earlier, questions that I had always earmarked to be answered for when I was ‘older’ seemed to come back and haunt me now. What has my life meant to this world? Has my existence on the planet made it a better place to live? Or has it made it worse? What is my true purpose, my calling? And, most importantly, what do I intend to do with my time ahead?

As soon as I begin to ask myself such questions, several things became apparent to me almost at once: one, the fact that I was in a condition to worry about stuff like that meant I was already a privileged citizen – someone who was well fed, clothed, educated and had access to most creature comforts, unlike the majority of the country. Two, it meant that I was quickly becoming more independent about my decisions, unfettered from familial endorsement or reliance. And three, it also meant that I was growing older – a process the Indian audience is particularly fond of describing as becoming ‘mature’.

While I continued to ponder where the answers lay to the questions I sought, I began to realize something else – maybe the reason why I had kept procrastinating facing these questions was because I already knew the answers in the first place – and didn’t like them for what they were. Sure, I was an honors student with excellent habits; had a trusted circle of family and friends; and fortunately, had not deviated from the straight and narrow (at least, not yet). But, if I were to be asked to describe how I had made the world a better place, I disappointingly drew a blank.

In times of self-doubt, one's conscience automatically swings into overdrive and starts assuaging our fears and qualms – the mind's reflex action, or defense mechanism if you will. Mine told me that I was probably over-thinking things; that I was way too young and ingenuous to be worried about stuff I had no business being worried about. That may be true, but it did not change the fact that I still had no answer to my central conundrum. 

What was the point of writing all this down? Ultimately, I realized that while I may have been a model son, student or employee at different stages of my life, it still did not absolve me of the responsibilities that lay ahead for me. After all, I was a resident of the earth too, a unit of society, a citizen of the country - and that meant I had to do more. Coming to terms with it was the first step towards that realization – and it provides for a strangely sobering start to my 27^th year on earth.

When satisfaction needs an echo...

There are a lot of things that are wrong about me – but if there is one thing that irks me the most, it is my apparent apathy towards contributing to social causes.

I am not sure if my South Indian roots had anything to do with it, but I remember always being warned to think twice before indulging in, quote unquote, “helping people”. This cynical attitude towards altruism was drilled deep into me from a very young age, lest I be conned into doing something I regret later (the fact that Indians are among the most uncertainty-avoiding people on the Hofstede Index lends credence to my earlier suspicion).

It is said that a weakness can only last as long as you let it – and I was determined to correct this enervating character flaw of mine. Hence, when I was presented with an opportunity to visit an NGO in the region to observe how they “make the magic happen”, I jumped at the chance.

The NGO, called ‘Goonj’, was a 14 year old institution based in Delhi/NCR that had pioneered the notion of providing clothes for the needy as a means of remuneration. They had a track record for producing and completing a string of rural projects across the country with the help of their flagship program ‘Clothes for Work’, under whose aegis they enabled the local populace to productively employ their time in building something of use (be it a makeshift hut, a small school or even a 240-metre long footbridge) for the inhabitant population. In return, Goonj provided the workers with pieces of custom-fitted second-hand articles of clothing.

When I visited their local sorting centre in South Delhi, I was immediately struck by its abject surroundings – cramped, congested and crawling with donated clothes, utensils and other discarded refuse, the place resembled a battlefield sans the arsenal. Yet, as I listened to what our tour guide had to say on their work processes, I realized that there was a method to their madness. 

Donated articles, be it clothes, books or otherwise, were meticulously sorted and classified according to their degree of degradation. All sorted items were then packed into coded gunny bags with military precision, bound for the regions that needed them. At Goonj, local requirements at villages that fall under their support programs are determined and analysed before being serviced – they do not do charity for charity’s sake.  

The level of product innovation on display at the local factory site was fascinating – bags made out of used car-seats; old, worn-out jeans converted into snazzy handbags; used paper re-cycled to become entirely new drawing books for children and even audio-cassette reels of yore re-cast as pen-stands. The place was a little fantasy island that produced the most endearing allures from the smallest, most ordinary of items.

More than anything else, the thing that struck me the most from visiting Goonj was the people – they all seemed so happy, but in a simple, non-invasive sort of way. Right from our tour guide who greeted each of our myriad queries with cheery enthusiasm to the phalanx of workers that were employed at the sorting center making it run like clockwork, there was not a long face to be seen anywhere in the premises. And therein, I realized what a monumental mistake I had made all this while. 

True satisfaction comes not from knowing if that donation you made to that charity last week was ‘worthwhile’; or if all the precious old clothes that you took the pain of ‘donating’ reached the right hands – it comes from the knowledge that you are doing what you can to give back to society. 

Eliminate the cynic in you – and open the doors to real happiness.