What got you here...

Read an amazing book by Marshall Goldsmith, "What got you here won't get you there." I have been recommending it to everyone in our office who will listen. For those who don't truly enjoy reading, it is also available as a graphic novel, a comic-book format if you will.

Anyone who has been working for the last few years and identifies with the ambitious type, ascribing their success to diligent, nose-to-the-grindstone hard work would do well to read the book.

It lists 20 habits of the ambitious, self-motivated, high-potential rapid risers that, while they might have been instrumental in bringing about the growth of the individual all the way to middle management, become not only ineffective but actually counterproductive in the next-level journey from management to leadership. Two of these habits stood out for I have probably been guilty of indulging in them.

The first habit is the need to add value. Notice how MBAs have a tendency to listen to a great idea and then feel compelled to add their two bits 'to make it even better'. Well, people don't like it. It sucks the joy and the sense of ownership out of the person or team who proposed the idea in the first place. It now becomes the boss' idea.

The second habit is the need to win all the time. We had a senior at B-School, a guy who had to win all the time. While this might be a valued trait in a consultant and to his credit he did go on to work for a top tier consulting company, it was quite tiresome on campus. Even in the washroom, he would grab the wash basin with the best working faucet or the one closest to the soap dispenser. He would make others wait, and wouldn't be caught dead waiting in line behind someone. If this can be tiresome in a campus environment where our camaraderie control is usually set to 'high', imagine the angst perpetrated in a corporate setting where people see career success as a win-lose game.

Perhaps both of these habits are indicators of the Alpha-Male gene. As much as it might boost the ego of a Big Swinging 'Dude' at an investment bank, it might probably be a good idea to take a good hard look at how obnoxious one might just be. Time to read the book.

Phishing and Nigerian scams

There was a piece in the Times of India Pune edition yesterday about a woman who has lost about 40 lakh rupees to a conman. Recently widowed, her daughter encouraged her to consider matrimonial sites. Online, she met a man claiming to be from London who told her a couple of weeks into the relationship that he had sent her a package with gifts and a surprise. Enter Priyanka from Delhi who called her to advise her of the arrival of the package and that she needed to pay Rs 15000 towards customs duty. You know how the rest pans out.

While we were discussing this story at home, I heard another story about a man conned by a 'tantrik' who promised to cure his cancer. All he had to do was fund the tantrik's various exercises which naturally got ever more elaborate. I have been wondering if there is a difference between these two cases. Would we call the woman gullible, but forgive the man his desperation?

There are a number of people who, in the course of business trust their customers and end up losing surprisingly large sums of money. I personally know someone, who used to do business with a liquor baron who had started a new venture in the transportation business. After a few years of paying this young businessman, the liquor baron, one day stopped paying all his vendors. Like most hopeful businessmen, this young man continued to provide services to the transportation company, spending good money after bad, until one fine day, he realized that he was being duped.

Since I know this businessman extremely well and know him to be a fairly intelligent, prudent and sane person, I have been unwilling to label him gullible. Yet, is there really a difference between his case and the two stories listed above? Is this person as gullible as the people who fall for honey traps and the Nigerian inheritance scams? Is there really a difference between the scams on one side and losses in the course of regular business on the other, or is it just a difference in degree of gullibility?

What we do well, what we are paid to do, what we want to do

I chanced upon this Venn diagram by Bud Caddell on the internet; and I could not help but admire how succinctly it sums up the secret of happiness in life.

Think about people we idolize today, say a Sachin Tendulkar or a Bill Gates or a Warren Buffet.

What does Sachin do well? Play cricket. What does he want to do? Play cricket. What does her get paid to do? Play cricket.

Before he 'retired' from Microsoft and got involved with philanthropy, what did Bill Gates do well? Write software. What did he want to do? Software again. What did he get paid to do? Write software.

Some people are born with a combination of genius, drive and passion that bless them with life in the Hooray zone. For the rest of us, I admit that finding the Hooray spot in the diagram above is not easy.

What is dismaying however, is how many people have stopped looking for it.

More on Value and Profit

My daughter sent me this matrix she chanced upon at her B-School. 

Given that most MBA students graduating from premier B-Schools aspire to careers in consulting, investment banking or in tech- startups, one could reach the conclusion that MBAs are a clear-headed bunch; wishing to be paid well, regardless of the value they create.

Why homo sapiens lead the world

Watched a TED talk by Yuval Noah Harari, who presents an interesting concept on why homo sapiens have come to rule this planet; that it is our ability to collaborate equally well at individual and at large group level.

Bees can collaborate as large groups but are unable to trade one-on-one with each other. Chimpanzees on the other hand might be willing to trade a banana for a coconut but they are either unable or unwilling to work in groups larger than tribe size. Humans are the only ones willing to trade with complete strangers and also collaborate in group sizes as large as corporations or armies.

Yuval goes on to suggest that our ability to do this is a result of our vivid imagination and our ability to convince and be convinced. All of us seem to understand and appreciate that a piece of paper with a number printed on it is worth 10 bananas. This system will work, indeed does work, only when all of us agree. When humans disagree, there is upheaval or war.

I have been thinking about this and I would like to propose one more pre-requisite that is a necessary but not sufficient condition for us to collaborate. It is our ability to think beyond might-is-right.

What makes humans special is our ability to decide on what is right and what is wrong beyond what we can snatch by force and more importantly, our ability to live by these decisions even when it might be inconvenient.

As a corollary, if we look at all the places on the planet that are beset with strife, it is where we revert to baser instincts of me-over-you that prevent collaboration. My God is better than yours; my tribe is better than yours, my system is better than yours. I shall not be satisfied until you see my truth and surrender before me. Let us see who has the bigger muscles or the bigger guns; let's see who can inflict more harm upon his opponents.

Profit and Value

Wall Street appears to yield profit without value and Silicon Valley, value without profit.

The curse of humanity

Most people don't want to work.
Most of those that are willing to work aren't good at it.

Those that are good at what they do want to do something else.

The middle class curse

Stuff I can afford right now, I don't really like.

Stuff I really like, I can't really afford just yet.

Intelligent, honourable or a communist

I read a piece some years ago that said that people can be intelligent, honourable or communist, but not more than two out of the three.

I have often depicted this 'truth' as a three-circle Venn diagram with the triple intersection labelled as a null set. Leonid Brezhnev would be an apt example of a person who was intelligent and a communist, but honourable is in question, for he had a penchant for owning flashy expensive cars like Ferrari s while he espoused the virtues of communal ownership of all goods to the plebs. The outer party workers of his time could be the honourable communists, but their intelligence is in question, for they worked very hard to get Brezhnev his Ferrari s.

As for people who are intelligent and honourable, well, most of us are not communists are we?

I realized after reading this piece that the same Venn diagram could hold true even when we replaced 'communist' with a number of other leanings or professions. 'Politician' comes to mind, and so do a couple of other professions.

Of flipkart and facebook

I have stopped shopping at flipkart of late and to be honest I am a little saddened by this. I have always wanted flipkart to stand up to and beat amazon in India. There are times I have bought products at flipkart even though they were a little more expensive.

But flipkart has been getting excessively pushy of late. It was one thing to receive an incessant stream of email messages with special offers that appeared to be suspiciously similar to list price, but it is another level entirely when flipkart insists on saving my credit card details without giving me a choice to save them for faster one click processing. As soon as I realized this, I went to ‘My Account’ and removed my credit card details and then called the bank and got a new card.

Paranoid? Perhaps. But the next time I read about a hacker or an insider stealing credit card details of a million people, I know I can grin while others bear it.

I am astounded that flipkart would try this stunt when their users are getting ever savvier about data security. They are not quite facebook, who can dare to change their privacy policies without giving users any choice in the matter. After all, flipkart only sells stuff; books and kitsch. Facebook on the other hand provides us with a platform to show off our perfect selfies with our plastic pouts and Patel-shots (the spell checker offered this term). Perhaps even more important, facebook provides us with a vent for our withdrawal symptoms from app addiction. Facebook has figured out that our twitchy fingers need to do something when they feel the need for a new hit. We can now hold out our iPhone and take a shot next to our new car, type in "My new ride," or "My new wheels", upload it and bite our fingernails while we wonder if the number of likes will reach a respectable level. There is no way that reading an Isaac Asimov or a Salman Rushdie is going to beat that achievement.

What were you thinking flipkart?

German engineering

I have been having a string of not-so-great experiences with things German. In a previous post I have written about my VW Polo which sounded and shuddered like a diesel tractor on start-up. And the parking-brake had a tendency to jam when clouds appeared.

Now I have a new German car and there appear to be gremlins in the software. It starts with the Infotainment system. In most cars, if you are playing a CD and you stop the car and then return a few hours later, the CD player remembers the position and starts playing from that point onward; a useful feature if you are listening to an audio-book. In my new car, the CD resets to the start of track 1. This in itself could be a programming oversight - but there is another bug at play. The display which usually reads Track 1 /12 (presuming the CD had 12 tracks) displays Track 0/0 when I get back in the car and restart. I have to switch the Audio system off and then on again for it to display the correct information. I have no way to get back to the point where I had stopped. I have to move forward a few tracks and listen to the last track all over again. Then this morning, the volume control did not work on the audio system. But I know the fix. Switch the system off and then on again and voila.

These are seemingly minor issues and I hope the dealership will upload a software patch when I take it in for servicing. There are a couple of other, bigger issues that really bother me though. During the rains, moisture condenses inside the headlamp units and refracts the headlight beam into a fuzzy dispersion. And here is the real kill-joy. When I sit in a hot car and crank the air-conditioner to full, the plastics in the car seem to protest by contracting rather violently and I have to put up with crackling sounds for the first few minutes of the drive. It is like sitting with a nice glass of scotch and listening to the ice-cubes crackle in the golden liquid. Except there is no scotch and nothing golden; only the maddening racket as I start to push random pieces of the dashboard and roof mounted consoles to try and get it over with.

The other day, I received a warning on the multi information display telling me that I needed to check my tyre pressure. Two of my tyres were at 210 kPa, one was at 205 kPa and the fourth at 215 kPa. Impressed, I went to a petrol pump to get my air checked. The attendant set it to the recommended setting and I was off. But the warning would not go away. I then had to travel for a few days and when I came back, the warning was gone.

'Big deal,' I hear you say, "so you have a few issues with your car. That is not reason enough to blame all things German."

Okay then, let's talk about German airlines. I tried buying a ticket on Lufthansa.com last month. I wished to fly one class of travel in one direction and a higher class of travel in the other. Most airlines, Jet Airways included, will allow you to choose the cabin class and fare class for each sector separately. Not Lufthansa. You have to buy the whole ticket in the lower class and then call their call center to upgrade. Unless of course, you start your flight search with 'Premium Economy' as your choice. Then the website offers you the choice of Premium Economy or Business Basic (restricted) or Business Flex on the same user interface and allows you to choose different classes for each direction of travel.

So I bought the lower fare and tried calling the call center. They said I would have make payment for the upgrade on an IVR interface, for which I had to call another number. When I called this other number, a recorded announcement said, "Please try again later," and disconnected the line. I called the call center and they could not help me make payment on the website or in any other form. I thought I would try at Bangalore airport. I handed my e-ticket to the agent at the airport ticketing counter and said that I wished to upgrade and asked if he could tell me how much it would cost. This is where things get surreal.

He said I could upgrade for miles, but not for real money. I stared at him long enough to make him uncomfortable, after which he said he would try. He fought his system for about 25 minutes before giving up and calling his supervisor over from the check-in counters. His supervisor then fought the system for another 20 minutes before they both decided that the agent was right in the first place. There was no way Lufthansa's systems would allow the airline to accept my money.

I shook my head and proceeded to check in. On my return from Europe, I figured it would be easier to fly to Pune via Delhi rather than Bangalore and tried to change my routing. I tried making the change on the website, but by now, and I am not making this up, the Lufthansa website allowed me to change the class of travel but not the sector. I called the call center again and they gave me a fare difference. I agreed to pay and was directed again to the IVR number which predictably told me to, "Please try again later." I called the call center again and then sent me a credit card authorization form that I needed to print, sign, scan and email back to them. Since I do not usually carry a printer with me when I travel, this was a little difficult to do. They finally agreed to charge my credit card upon receiving an authorization by email.

I could narrate a few stories about German appliances that a friend of mine has had so many problems with, that he has now decided to buy Japanese or Korean .

Thank you for putting up with my rant. I realize that I could have said my piece in one sentence.

German engineering is not all it's made out to be.

Sense of fairness. And retribution

I was at a car dealership a few days ago and got chatting with the service manager. He was recollecting the story of how a luxury car owner called the dealership and started screaming about how his car had stalled right after he had topped it up with fuel.

The dealership had towed the car to the service station and initial diagnostics revealed the presence of water in the engine. This had caused the connecting rods to buckle and the engine to seize. It appears that water had made its way into the petrol bunks and this car happened to be the unfortunate one to get filled with water instead of fuel. When they informed the owner of the cause and tried to provide the cost estimate for him to file an insurance claim, this owner threw a fit and threatened legal action and more.

The dealership wrote to the manufacturer and as a special case, they did the work gratis. This is where things start to get interesting. After the engine work was done, the big-shot owner then insisted that all four tyres should be changed for free as one of them had developed a crack on the sidewall - clearly from being driven against a curb. The dealership declined politely at which point the big shot threatened to write to the company headquarters in Europe.

By this time, the manufacturer had also gotten wind of what this person was trying to do and they wrote back saying that they were unable to replace the tyres.

I am amazed at how people will lose all sense of fairness - especially after someone has gone out of their way to do them a favour. In hindsight, it appears that the car manufacturer should have politely but firmly stated that damaged caused by water entering the engine.

The story does not end here however. A few years later, this bigshot wanted to buy a new car of the same make from the same dealership. When the booking reached the company, they said they were unable to deliver the car of his choice for at least a year as they would be unable to import it. When he tried changing the model and specs, interestingly the company was unable to import that too. He then tried to order a model assembled in India, the company said they would look at allocation time frames and 'would get back to him' when they were able.

I love this company. It is not very often you see someone truly mean it when they say that their people are their most important resource. This company was clearly protecting their people from an unsavoury customer.

Kudos.

On shopping

Why is it that most men consider shopping a chore while most women consider it retail therapy?

I have a hypothesis here. If you try and establish where men tend to hang out in a mall, it is usually in the Electronics shops or in the section of the department store that stocks supplies for their hobby - golf kits or DIY stuff or if they are like me, they might spend time at car dealerships.

Women, on the other hand, spend more time in the clothing section. Women seem to enjoy buying clothes, or linen, and shoes and home decor stuff.

It occurred to me that there might be another way to classify these expenses; on frequency of purchase and further, that men appear to have capital expenditure items on their minds, cars and such, while women appear to enjoy purchasing items that fall under operating expenses - clothes and such.

Try and get either side involved in purchases of the other kind and they will try and wiggle out. My better half hates going to car showrooms and I quite dislike going clothes shopping.

There. I have it figured out. Unfortunately however, figuring out the cause of the problem, is not the same thing as having a solution. So, if you will excuse me, I have to go curtain shopping.

Again.

Weird inflight movies

I am still trying to recover from the strange experience of watching two bad movies on the flight back.

First, I watched 'The Wolf of Wall Street', which I had missed when it was first released. To my surprise and the rather apparent horror of the senior gentleman sitting next to me, the airline had the uncensored version on board. The foul language was bad enough, but the nudity was really crass. One could be charitable and say the producers were trying to depict in full reality the lives of Wall Street's 'Big Swinging D***s' during their successful years. At least the movie had a happy ending with the protagonist going to jail.

The other movie was bizarre. The Beach is about a young American tourist who goes to Thailand and hears about a secret beach on a remote island with an unlimited supply of dope and a perfect hippy life. This is supposedly only an urban legend, until a crazy guy in the neighboring room at his flea-bag hotel hands him a map before committing suicide. The protagonist and two others make it to the secret community and then things get really weird. There is a great white shark in the lake on the island. The shark attacks a couple of the community members who are moved out of the commune and left to die as the community will not allow doctors in and they find it too painful to watch the injured suffer.

Either I have missed some metaphor or simile completely, or Leonardo Di Caprio might want to read the script carefully before he signs his next movie.

Just desserts

The two things on my must try list on the recently concluded jaunt were the Almdudler and the Sachertorte. While I loved the Almdudler, I have to be honest and say here that the Sachertorte did not quite float my boat. No matter, for these folks have perfected a wide array of dessert items that have helped make my sculpted body go rather portly in just a few days.

You must partake of the apfelstrudle mit eis, apple pie a la mode for the anglophiles among you; but then one can get a mean apple pie in Mumbai too at Theobroma. The item that had me in rapture was their biscuit cake with vanilla pudding prepared with just a dash of rum and a hint of banana cream.

I had once heard a description on a travel show of how to enjoy a good meringue and I believe those instructions are so apt here, that I am going to reproduce them here in preparation for the time you chance upon biscuit cake with vanilla pudding.

You take small spoonful of the pie and place the spoon upon your tongue; at which time you close your mouth and slowly extract the spoon leaving the warm vanilla pudding swirling around your tongue. To truly enjoy the experience, it is mandatory to close your eyes, roll up your eyeballs and go, "Mmm - mmm - mmm." Then you appreciate the delicate aroma of the vanilla and try not to get distracted by the rum as the flavor of the fruit lingers on your palate. Swallow very slowly and repeat.

Are you salivating yet?

As a courtesy to your fellow passenger, may we suggest...

Some of us might be able to complete the sentence in the title of today's post; we have seen it so often on a label stuck to the mirror in aircraft lavs.

It struck me when I was on board two days ago, that Europeans take this suggestions far more seriously than we Indians do. I was waiting to use the washroom and getting impatient as time ticked by for some time after I had heard the flush. A minute later, a European gentleman stepped outside, giving me a nod and a smile on his way out. As I closed the door behind me and looked around, I noticed the washroom was in immaculate condition, as if a cleaning crew had just departed. There were no water droplets in the sink nor anywhere on the floor. The toilet seat cover was folded down, the mirror spotlessly clean and no paper towels half-sticking-out of the waste receptacle.

I could now 'see' what the gentleman had been doing for the minute or two after I heard the flush. He was being considerate to his fellow passengers.

I am not going to present in graphic detail, the washrooms we find ourselves in, on some flights in our country, but lets us suffice it to say, that most components in the little lav are not dry. And the condition of lavs at railway stations and bus stations - well some things are best left unsaid.

Here is another example. Imagine that you are in line at a buffet for lunch at a nice hotel. You grab a dinner plate from the stack and then place a bowl on your plate for the dal. The bowl will slide in and settle down about an inch from the sloping edge of the plate. Now you ladle the dal into the bowl. How often do you manage to fill up your bowl without dropping any dal onto the plate? I have to admit, I have not been very successful at this exercise.

Contrast this with my experience at lunch yesterday. We were in a workshop all day at a client office and lunch was scheduled for 1 pm in the corporate dining area. There was a long table set up for us with white table cloth and napkins and the silverware laid out. We went through the soup and salad course, then the main course and then dessert, going back and forth between the buffet and our table each time. A server cleared out plates after each course. And here's the thing.

The table was pristine every time we came back to it. There were no bread crumbs, no odd pieces of salad and not even water droplets anywhere on the table cloth. I struggle to remember the last time something like this happened at a buffet in India. Let alone the dining table, there is a bit of a mess even at the spread after a few people have been there - spots of dal, water and flecks of salad all over the place.

Why is it that Indians are always in a hurry? It think it is this. Doing things quickly seems to take priority over doing things well. Products made in India need another statement on the product label. "Made in a hurry". We need to change this mindset if "Make in India" is to succeed in any meaningful way. Perhaps finishing schools might be a good start.

Almdudler

I am traveling again and I had plans to to try at least two new things here. The first is the local chocolate cake and the second is a drink called the Almdudler. Turns out I got to the second one first.

I have not seen the Almdudler sold anywhere else, had not even heard of it, but it is the second largest selling drink here. By some counts, second only to Coke and by other counts, second only to beer.

It tastes like a cross between lemonade and ginger ale; and if like me, you have grown up on a diet of Enid Blyton, then you know that just the description sounds amazing.

The name Almdudler is derived from a term that means yodelling in the mountains. I remember seeing an ad for a scotch that claimed that after a swig of the smooth stuff you could hear a hundred bagpipers. Sounds like quite the cacophony,  for I find even a single bagpipe difficult after a few minutes. The Almdudler, on the other hand agrees with me quite handsomely. I could picture myself holding a bottle and letting loose against the towering alps. And did I mention, the stuff is delicious? I am addicted.

Time to go look for another bottle.

Gervais Principle

Thinking some more about the question, "Why do corporations appear to operate in a way befitting low IQs when they are filled with high IQ people", I did some more digging on the net and chanced upon something called the Gervais Principle.

This one is far more cynical than the Peter Principle - which states that in any hierarchy, an individual will rise to his level of incompetence and then stay there - thus doing more damage. An example would be an efficient line worker who gets promoted to foreman so that he can instruct other line workers on efficiency. He does well as a foreman and then gets promoted to production manager. He has neither the skills nor the education or training to do a production manager's job and falters, thus making no more promotions and staying stuck at his level of incompetence. The organization has thus lost a great foreman and begotten a bad manager who is there to stay.

The Gervais Principle suggests that most organizations are comprised of three types of people. The first type is the ambitious, driven, individualist, usually the entrepreneur who starts the business for self-serving outcomes, profit being the most common. The second set is the set of workers, people who are paid not quite enough in compense for their effort. They are the types who have given up their upside in return for a steady paycheck. The third set is where the principle gets most cynical. It calls them the clueless. These are the incompetent among the worker bees who get promoted to middle management. They believe they are on track to upper management, but that is not to be.

The problem manifests itself when the number of 'Clueless' starts to grow, seemingly driven by the need for administration during the growth phase. From this point on, the organization lives to administer rather than to deliver what the customer wants. Carried too far, this growth in clueless-ness then causes the company to falter or even implode.

Why the Gervais principle believes that most middle management people are in the 'Clueless' category is something I am trying to wrap my head around. Perhaps I am trying to read way too much into what is meant to be a cynical humourous take on corporate life.

Interesting times

While doing my weekend reading, I chanced upon an article called 'The Interesting Times Triangle'. The article posits that if we do indeed, as the old curse grants, 'live in interesting times', most of us are forced to choose at-most two out of three of the following choice set. 1. Make money 2. Make sense, and 3. Make beauty.

To my way of thinking, Apple appears to have managed to do all three. So has Ferrero, a privately held company that makes Ferrero Roche.

It is not difficult to think of examples where, indeed, a number of people or corporations appear to be confounded by the interesting-times curse. Politicians in India seem to be making only money. Penniless artists make only beauty and philosophers in penury perhaps make sense.

Some engineering enterprises make money and beauty; Bang and Olufsen comes to mind. To me personally, a wireless PC / iPod speaker that costs Rs. 200,000 makes no sense at all; but then, I am tone deaf and cannot tell the difference between budget Panasonic speakers and a Bowers and Wilkins set.

Most of us are possibly examples of the Make money + sense brigade, presuming that the products and services we make or market for a living make sense for us and for our customers. I am quite certain that we do not even consider the beauty for the most part. Most engineering, these days seems to be all about, 'Does it work?' and 'Can I push it out the door before the deadline?'

I have to admit that I am still struggling to come up with examples of the last remaining option - making sense and beauty without making money. Clearly, without the money, these entities do not last long and their very ephemeral nature prevents strong examples from coming to mind. The author of the article proposes Intellectual Dictators as examples of the Making beauty + sense set, but if they make sense, why do they have to be dictators?

The part that I am struggling with most is why is this the curse of living in interesting times? What other times are there where most people could get to choose all three?

Corporate IQ

I met a classmate from B-School a couple of days ago. He is the BU head of 2 Business Units at a large company and doing rather well. He mentioned something a board member was pondering over at a certain meeting."Why is it that companies seem to have such low IQs even when they are filled with people with exceptionally high IQs."

Fascinating. Perhaps even true.

I decided to do a little research and chanced upon this article. It suggests that strange things start to happen in corporate environments when at a certain point in time, output quality cannot be measured objectively. Beyond this point, personal goals cannot be fulfilled by purely improving one's competence. But people will still aspire to rise and competition must be decided on something else. That something else is often politics when objective competence matters less than subjective competence.

It is at this point, where the founders of the company need to put up a sign that says 'Slippery Slope Ahead".

Crop Circles of another kind

I have been meaning to write this piece ever since the trip to Las Vegas. Got distracted by all the other curious stuff in the world and by getting to ride my favourite airplane I guess.

Some of the strange views out the porthole as we began our descent into Las Vegas were sights like these.

My first inclination was to wonder if we were flying over Area 51 or if there was a new cult of crop circle cutters in Nevada.

The answer is  far more prosaic, however. Circular farms are a result of an irrigation technique called Center Pivot irrigation, where the source of water is at the center and you have a boom anchored at the center that rotates around the source while delivering a spray over the farm. The equipment looks something like this.

The technique was invented in the 1940s and supposedly uses far less water than surface irrigation and furrow irrigation techniques.

So why do we not see more of these in India. Some of you are way ahead of me I am sure.
Center Pivot would appear to be viable where land is relatively cheap and you could afford to ignore the corners of each square and more importantly, water and its delivery mechanism is relatively more expensive. In a culture where we see water as free and the delivery mechanism, read electric motive power, also free, the corners are more valuable than the water.

Given the depleting water table and the looming fresh water shortage in India, we might want to consider how we educate the population on the value of water and electricity.

Direction without motivation or motivation without direction

I have been reading 'SWITCH', a great book on how to implement change, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, authors of 'Made to Stick'.

One concept in the book draws on the premise of 'The Happiness Hypothesis' by Jonathan Haidt.
Haidt likens our conscious rational mind to the rider of an elephant where the elephant symbolizes our emotional, impulsive self.

We believe our thinking rational self is in control of the elephant and this might be true for the most part, but we all know what happens when we let our emotions get the better of us, when our impulses decide that we really need that piece of Godiva chocolate. The rider is only in control as long as the elephant is willing to go along.

One of the challenges in trying to bring about any change is that often we appeal only to the rational, thinking mind with our spreadsheets and powerpoint slides. The audience sees the logic and agrees that the change 'should  be made'. Then, nothing happens.

The book suggests that we need to focus our effort on both aspects. Trying to provide logical arguments is like providing direction without motivation. On the other hand, there are times when the motivation clearly exists, such as when a mother is worried about malnutrition in her child. In such cases, providing the direction is more important.

Often however, we find ourselves preaching to the choir; telling mothers that they need to provide better nutrition to their children without telling them exactly what to do; or telling our teams to reduce their travel budget by 5% without getting them to connect with the need to do so.

And we truly believe we are among the top 10% of managers.

Customer friendly

I was invited to the launch event of the Honda Jazz at a dealership in Pune yesterday. The event was supposed to commence at 6:30 pm and it commenced at 6 pm. There were no VIP guests and no fashion shows. There was one short speech and they unveiled the car at about 6:45. The CEO of the dealership then announced that they had a few vehicles ready for test drives so as to encourage us to write out a cheque.

A number of us signed up for the test drive and as a result, also signed the cheque.

Contrast this will the launch event of the Audi A3 that I attended in Pune in August last year. The event was scheduled to start at 7pm, but having had prior experience with this dealership, I said I would be there at about 8. The CRM executive from the dealership called me at least twice to insist that I should be there at 7pm. I grumbled about the last couple of times when the event started at least an hour late. She assured me that this would not be the case. Ergo, I showed up at 7.

At about 7:45, they announced that the celebrity guests, Kabir Bedi and Pooja Chopra were held up at a prior event and would be arriving shortly. I walked up to the executive to tell her I was disappointed. To keep guests occupied, a stand-up comedian hired for the event made jokes in poor taste about examples of the Tata Nano catching fire and about how MBAs were  not getting jobs these days. At this point I sought out the manager of the dealership and told him exactly what I thought of the program thus far. The celebrities eventually arrived at about 8:25 and made more jokes about the state of Pune's traffic. The car was unveiled at about 8:45. I asked if I could come in for a test drive the next day. They told me that they needed to register a car before they could offer test drives and it would be a few days. "Early next week then?" "Can't say for sure. We will get back to you." Almost a year out, I am still waiting for a test drive. They are yet to register a petrol-engined car for test driver.

This situation was repeated somewhat at the Pune launch of another luxury SUV. Event started late. There was a fashion show. Car was unveiled. No test drives. Availability timelines uncertain.

I was tempted to close this piece by suggesting that the luxury automobile manufacturers might want to learn a thing or two from the Japanese. But I realize that they are being equally customer friendly. It is just that I am not representative of their customer base. I imagine their customer base is comprised of small time politicians and people who have struck gold by virtue of having owned land near the outskirts of the city. Perhaps, for this bunch, punctuality is not as important as getting an opportunity to ogle at a beauty queen.

Supervised behaviour is tiring

Ever been in charge of watching a toddler? It can be tiring - not just emotionally - but also physically.

I have been thinking about what causes the physical exhaustion and I might have an answer. Being in charge of a toddler effectively puts us in charge of their safety and well-being; which in turn means that it is our job to ensure that he or she does not get hurt.

The child, unfortunately, does not seem to be similarly concerned; and will try out all sorts of new experiences in life, like pulling on the cord hanging over the table, blissfully unaware that the cord is attached to an appliance that is going to follow the cord down.

As we watch the toddler, we move into a heightened state of alertness that causes us to use more resources. While we might believe that the stress is only in our head, I have noticed that even our muscles are primed for action during these periods of time.

We are at the edge of the seat - ready to pounce to deflect a falling object, or ready to whisk the child out of the path of danger. Our muscles are wound up - ready to release when we jump. Very often, the jump never comes. There is no immediate danger that requires physical intervention and therefore our muscles stay wound. Therein lies the cause of our fatigue.

Whenever we are being supervised, it is always taxing. We do not like working conditions when a boss is watching over our soldier. We do not always appreciate that it is tiring even when we are our own supervisors.

Things they really need to teach at B Schools - Part 1

One of the major life skills important to success in business is the ability to say 'no' gracefully.

Most of us are completely lacking in this skill. Perhaps it starts with our schooling system where we have no say at all in what home work gets dished out and what is a realistic time frame for delivery.

At B School this problem is only compounded, where were are given unreasonable volumes of readings and assignment all due tomorrow. Looking back on my B School days now, I do not believe anyone ever argued against an unreasonable deadline. (Actually, I did once, during the very first HR class, and got ridiculed for it in my yearbook:-)

When the stuff hit the fan, most students' response was to stop doing the assignments, or if their graduation depended on turning something in, borrowing heavily from their colleagues' work.

I wonder if professors realize that they might be the reason that students take to cheating and submitting someone else's work as their own.

Here's something I am going to try the next time a I teach a course. I will ask them when they can reasonably submit the assignment. In turn I will hold high expectations about the quality of work submitted and be extremely stringent about levels of ethics and integrity.

I wonder if that will work.

On discipline

A couple of days ago I wrote about how discipline, like intelligence, might be a vector rather than a scalar quantity.

Here's another thought. The importance you accord to being disciplined at any particular activity is likely to be driven by how important that activity is to you.

If you find yourself missing deadlines, it might just be that deep down, that activity is not truly important to you intrinsically. You have perhaps only convinced yourself of its importance by dint of peer pressure or by what society will see as important or successful.

Skipping class

When I got to college for the first time and realized that attendance was not truly mandatory, unlike at school, I found yourself yearning to miss a class just to see what it was like. The very first time I did skip class was because a few friends encouraged me to go watch 'Back to the Future' with them. I still remember the excitement of having actually done something 'wrong' for the hedonistic pleasure. Okay, well, for watching a movie.

After the first time, it was no big deal; I could skip class any time I wanted.

Skipping class is like missing a day of going to the gym. The more you do it, the easier it gets.

Gym discipline

I would like to believe I am a disciplined person and that once I put my mind to something, I will deliver. I have to admit; however, that I now realize that discipline is a multidimensional thing. Just because you are disciplined at one thing does mean you will be able to stay your course on a plan for something else.

The first time I bought a gym membership, I went for a good part of a month, before I took a break for a couple of days on account of having the flu or something. After that, once I figured out that it was okay to sometimes miss going, it became easier and easier.

I signed up for another subscription a few years later and this time, I didn't even last a week. I have since given up on donating money to gyms. I have chosen other charities.

I have been wondering why I fell into the trap of subscribing in the first place. Gym subscriptions are an interesting folly of our own making. The logic goes something like this; "If I pay a large enough amount of money for something, I would feel obliged to use what I have bought, or feel so guilty that the guilt would drive me to using what I had bought."  I have realized that at least for me, it is the guy equivalent of buying a dress several sizes too small and then forcing yourself to lose weight so that you can get into it.

Let me share a secret. It doesn't work.

Where's the lithium?

On the 1st of May this year, Elon Musk announced the PowerWall. The launch event is worth watching if you haven't already done so. Youtube link. Elon Musk made a convincing case for the need to move from fossil fuels to solar power. The problem of course is that the sun shines on us only half the time and we do need electricity to power our homes at night too. To save the power generated during the day, we are going to need battery packs. Lots of them. That is where the Gigafactory comes in.

The Tesla Gigafactory in Nevada is ahead of schedule and the first years production of Powerwalls and Powerpacks is already sold out. Tesla is investing USD 1.25 Bn in the factory and they already have confirmed orders of USD 800 Mn of which, $180 Mn has already been collected, as the PowerWalls have been paid for by customers.

The Gigafactory will produce enough Lithium Ion batteries for all those PowerWalls and PowerPacks and also for 500,000 Tesla cars per year. Elon Musk has started to refer to the factory as Gigafactory1 because it is already becoming clear that its production will not keep up with demand. He also expects other companies to set up their own Gigafactories; discussions have commenced at Panasonic to set up another one in Japan.

A Nissan leaf battery pack needs about 4 kg of Lithium. 20 million cars are going to require about 80 million kg or 80,000 tonnes. The current world production of Lithium is 92000 tonnes, but here is the interesting bit;  only 26% of today's Lithium goes into battery production. The rest goes into manufacture of Lubricants (15%), Glass (13%), Ceramics (10%), Pharmaceuticals (7%) and other stuff (the rest).

The world manufactures and sells about 60 Million road going vehicles every year. Of these, passenger cars are about 40 million. If, by 2020, a substantial number of cars produced are EVs and lithium ion batteries continue to power EVs, we have to wonder, where is all that Lithium going to come from?

What's in a name

The more the number of adjectives in a country's name, the more you can sure that they are not true.

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea is hardly democratic, hardly a place for the people and hardly a republic. Here is another example; Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya during Muammar Gaddafi's day was not socialist, not the people's and it was definitely not a Jamahiriya (ruled by the masses). It isn't even on the Arabian peninsula.

An interesting twist on this theme is that it works at the other end too. Here is a list of the names of some of the most democratic nations in the world. Kingdom of Belgium, Kingdom of Denmark, Kingdom of the Netherlands, Kingdom of Norway, Kingdom of Spain and Kingdom of Sweden. All of these countries, though technically still monarchies, are hardly kingdoms.

The next time you see a banner proclaiming a small-time politician as being the 'magnanimous, principled, hard-working, and beloved Mr. ABC, you know how much of that is likely to be true.

The July short

When I grow up I want to be a client.