What will I be?

Hi readers,

This article is by person in Mind tree consulting.

Its worth reading!

what will I be?

I see it in their faces when they report to work on the first day, after being selected from an engineering college or an MBA institute. I see spark and innocence and a desire to win the world, laced with a kind of confidence only youth has been granted. Then I look beneath the veneer. In to the recesses their minds and I swim with their thoughts. Below the exuberance and the self-confidence, I sense uncertainties – I sense worries about what lies ahead?

Flash back 1976. In the post-graduate class at the Utkal University, at all of 18-years of age, it occurred to me that I was wasting my time. My father had retired. I was living off my brothers. It had been only a couple of months before, that I had graduated with a first-class honors degree and was eligible for a national scholarship -enough to pay the mess dues at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) - the place I had wanted to go to. But the scholarship got disbursed only twice a year and mess dues needed to be paid every month. I went to many banks, they would not listen. At that time, you did not get a loan to study humanities. So, instead of going to JNU, I took admission at the local University and I did not like it. So, what did I do? I walked out of class and took the job of a lower division clerk in the Secretariat. It paid me Rs 305 a month and in the bureaucracy, I was senior only to the dhoti-clad, elderly peon.

My job started as an intern with the "upper division clerk" - a very dignified man who looked like a teacher. I would reverentially call him "Khuntia Babu". He taught me to file letters - something taken with great seriousness in government departments. One day, I was given to draft a letter of regret on behalf of the Secretary - it ended up being so sophisticated that both Khuntia Babu and the Sectional Head Clerk who was called "Bada Babu" saw great risk and thereafter, I was given a very light load. Given a lot of free time, I found myself often dragged to mediate among warring senior clerks who would suddenly start a furious debate over subjects like whether Sanjay Gandhi was good for the country - the debate often led to verbal violence but like receding waves after a crash, they would head back to the brown piles on their respective desks. One day, the dhoti-clad, elderly peon who had a permanently glazed look invited me to a secret club on the roof of the Secretariat building where a chillum was being passed around among his fraternity. In my life, it was the most exclusive, 'invitation-only' club I have ever entered.

I worked there for a year before the DCM Group selected me as a Management Trainee. In a sense, the job at the Secretariat had taught me to brace for what was coming my way at the seventh largest industrial house in India at that time. Management Trainees at DCM were considered to be God's special people. Except that, I got posted to the oldest textile mill run by the group. There, my induction started at the "time office". At the gate of the Mill, at the blast of the siren, thousands of workmen - some bare-feet, some semi-clad, would march in with their "attendance cards" in hand. The smell of bidi and sweat from hard working and tough talking workmen interspersed with the noise of the clerks with thick glasses sliding down the ridge of their noses. I was the odd man out.

Cut to 2005. In my office in MindTree, today I peer down the screen of my laptop, my thoughts are atomized and satellite links move them as bits and bytes across the world. I begin my day looking into the eyes of twenty-something engineers. By mid-day, I have spoken to customers in different parts of the world. By afternoon - I have sat in review meetings and spoken at training programs. Finally, ending the day with dinner with a visiting IT delegation.

I time travel and step into the mind of a young man of 1976 and search out the familiar images. I ask myself - did I know that things would happen the way they did? What way my first job is linked to where I am today? I don't know. In some explainable and mostly unexplainable ways, it is. Sometimes, instead of looking for that link, it is probably better to simply do an outstanding job of whatever one has on hand. The rest, falls into place.

happy reading!!!

Job Satisfaction

Jobs are not meant to satisfy us. Jobs are not animate things that have knowledge of who we are, what we are seeking and what our special needs could be. You may say that I am just making a philosophical statement. To the contrary, I believe that it is the most practical and rewarding way of looking at many things in a professional career. When I see scores of successful people around me, I believe that their achievements are largely because of such a perspective. It also occurs to me that developing this perspective is eventually beneficial in every way possible.

Let me go back a century and tell you a story. My grandfather was a medical practitioner in the Bihar of 1920s. He had a brood of children who were orphaned due to his untimely death. Two of my uncles had just about finished high school when he moved on. Their older brothers could not afford to send them to college. The two had to be gainfully employed, somehow, as soon as possible. They were taken to Tata Steel, an hour away from where they lived. Tata Steel and the government of Bihar were the only two employers you could think of in a five-hundred mile radius of my uncles’ hometown. The possible work one could get at Tata Steel was that of a technologist-engineer or of a manual worker. So, what could be done with the two boys with their high school qualifications? They were neither fish nor fowl. “Take them to the lab,’’ someone said. A German technician who ran the place was looking for a few hands. The burly German took a hard look at the two. Then he showed them a broom standing at one corner of the lab and asked them to sweep the floor. By the end of day, one of the two just ran away. To him, it was too much to handle. The one who stayed back retired as a chief foreman of Tata Steel. The difference between the two? The one that stayed on was not trying to seek ‘job satisfaction’. Instead, he focused on satisfying the job.

The more prosperous the industry, the higher the number of people looking for this elusive thing called ‘job satisfaction’. Similarly, the more qualified some people are, the higher is their need for ‘job satisfaction’. Sometimes, it is as elusive as seeking ‘true love’. There are times when we get lucky deservedly or otherwise. But we also get used to it and conclude that it is the responsibility of the organization to maintain a continuous supply of job satisfaction.

Whenever I think of job satisfaction, I remember all those who have to work at night—policemen, airline pilots, nurses and doctors, ambulance drivers and hotel staff, and of course the sentinel of the snow and the desert and the mountains. Do their jobs ‘satisfy’ these people or do these people satisfy the jobs with which they have been entrusted? Are jobs living things that can ever ‘satisfy’ us?

In the corporate world, like any other place, when we open the bonnet and look under it, we find a whole bunch of tough, dirty but strategic tasks that must get done for the bacon to come home. Sometimes, they are so tough and so dirty that they overshadow the strategic nature of the job. So, all such jobs have to be ‘sold’ to prospective incumbents. More they are sold, fewer buyers they attract. Often, the man who takes up the job is either a loser who has no other choice, or someone who just views it as a transit camp. For many potentially high-performance individuals, a false sense of survival, desire for glamour or just the need for creature comforts make these jobs undesirable. “I would rather be in Kolkata than be posted to Mungher.’’ “I rather have the corporate planning job than be collecting bad debts.’’ Or, consider this one here: “Give me a cerebral job, I do not enjoy handling transactions...’’

Few of us ever ask the boss to be rewarded with a tough and dirty job. We only look for the ‘plum’ ones. Yet, there are people, who given a tough and dirty job, make it strategic: they transform the job in unbelievable ways. In a typical career span, there must be at least four such solid stints in one’s life to make the person a solid professional. All the great people I know have been in the trenches for much of their lives, and their inventory of bruises outnumber the commendations they have received. The occasional commendations stay on the wall. It is the bruises that these people carry with pride.

Happy reading!!

Fake Encounters

The Times of India’s Bangalore edition had it on its front page a few days ago—Intel’s India operations had asked some of its people to leave for forging their leave travel allowance (LTA) claims. Intel refused to furnish details except that it affirmed its standards of integrity were sacrosanct. I can well presume what would have happened there. A few people would have made a seemingly innocent conclusion that if an employee fudged an LTA claim to deny the Income Tax department their dues, as long as such an act did not hurt the company’s cash flow or bottomline, there was nothing wrong with it. We all know when the concept of LTA as a tax-exempt perk came up, in New Delhi travel agents sprang up. For a small fee, they gave people fake receipts for travel not undertaken with which they could submit a claim. It is quite commonplace in some organizations for someone to claim airfare while they travel by train. What’s wrong with that? After all, some politicians and film stars, cricketers and businessmen and bureaucrats routinely falsify their income tax returns to save on taxes? Well, companies like Intel do not agree with that reasoning. To them, both the means and the ends must be justified when it comes to workplace ethics.

Cut to MindTree. A young engineer applied for a job with us. He had a passable degree in engineering. But, he cleared our difficult-to-get-through entry test and started his work in right earnest. We found him to be as good as any other in the organization. Then the worst happened. When his past employment history was checked, it turned out that he had forged the salary certificate to show that the last salary drawn was Rs 20,000 a month whereas his real salary was Rs 9,000 per month. In reality, he did not have to do this because our salary fitment does not depend on it. We look at education, the skill and our internal equity and then decide the compensation based on a competence grid. We fired the man. This isn’t an isolated case. Last year, in MindTree alone, we had a dozen cases where people were asked to leave after a month or two of joining when employment verification raised traces of forgery. I understand that in larger Indian companies where intake is significantly more, the size of the problem is even greater. But if found out, the consequences are as severe. The question is, to what good use?

Why do people do things that bring them humiliation? Well, in the first place, no one told them that it was wrong. The truth is that a new breed of Indian companies are here who place value on integrity compared to the past. In addition, thanks to globalization, we are seeing companies like Intel coming to India who make no compromise on the seemingly small violation of workplace ethics.

Amartya Sen has called us an ‘argumentative nation’. On matters of workplace ethics, we can have particularly long arguments on what is right and what is wrong, who truly is at fault and dwell on the quantum of punishment. After all, should all these people have been warned and let off as against being shown the door? The truth is that companies like Accenture, IBM, Intel, Infosys, MindTree or Wipro and many others have no appetite for such discussion. Matters of integrity to them are always a black or white issue. The human eye is trained to distinguish between 108 shades of grey. The moment one gets sucked into analyzing the many different shades of grey, it becomes unending. So, to these organizations, white is white and black is black. You either play by the book or, you opt to stay out. It’s that simple.


So, the next time your nephew asks you to arrange for a fake experience certificate, tell him it is not a good idea. If someone tells you that no one would notice if you claimed first class train fare but travelled by bus do not submit a false claim. If someone says, “but, everyone here does it,’’ ask yourself, how comfortable would you be to explain your conduct to your own child if she ever asked you if what you did was the right thing? The concept of workplace integrity is going to grow in importance. However, it is not about policing people’s behavior. It is about making conscious choices based on conviction about what is fair, transparent and above potential scrutiny. It is about closing one’s own eyes in a dark room and listening to the voice of conscience.



Happy Reading!!!

BJP : How to come back?

This blog is specially for those with interest in indian politics. Though my understanding of politics is few years old, but the current crisis or revival of BJP, suit to say has forced me to write my views on the patty having 'Hindutava' as core ideology.

With the current election defeat, BJP has now gone into crisis  in regards to the Leadership. BJP has been in question for not having great leader since Mr. Vajpayee left the active politics. Mr. Vajpayee has been a great mentor for BJP. There were days when Mr. Vajpayee, Advani along with Govindacharya ( Former BJP president) took BJP to the new heights.

It is true that BJP had won the election in 1998 with its ideology 'Hindutava'. But now BJP can't hold that for long as people in India voting not based on relgion. BJP needs to understand that gone are the days when elections could have been won on the basis of religion. People of India now want development of their social life, more security, good future and not Ram Mandir.

Another thing BJP should do is to resolve the conflict the party top brass has. All the top leaders in BJP are fighting. They do not have any clear agenda of what they need to do to resolve the conflict. Party's top leaders should decide the leader with consent of all and support that leader (RSS may hep). BJP should try to project a secular face to lead the party. Shivraj Chauhan could be one.

Third but most important is the RSS. If BJP wants to be the party of todays generation, it needs to show that it is for all not only for Hindu but for Muslims also. That can then be agaist RSS who is not in favour of equal rights for Muslims. So, BJP cant leave RSS as 80 % of BJP workers are from RSS) and RSS will never allow BJP to move to secularism. Theory of 'soft Hindutava' is failed. BJP should move to 'Manavta' i.e humanity. I hope RSS is ok with this. Hindutava to Manavta.

BJP should also encourage young faces to step in and must form the peripheral of BJP. As more than 50 % of India is young, making this step would allow BJP to look young (image makeover). BJP should also come as strong oppostion with the issues such as inflation, development are hot today.

I hope you like it.

Happy reading!

What makes you happy?

What makes you feel Happy?         

 

                                                                                     

Without happiness life is just incomplete. You can not enjoy what you are doing and if you are seeking happiness in result, every time you will wait for happiness and that happiness will be short living. So it’s really important to know what makes you feel happy:

1. Is it your good health which makes you feel happy; start making good health, no one is there to stop you except your procrastination?

2. Is it spending some quality time with your family and friends who makes you feel happy: Take some time for your family and friends everyday and you will feel more energetic?

3. It is traveling which makes you feel happy: Go for fortnightly, monthly or yearly tours; have weekly picnic in your home town or nearby area.

4. Is it listening music or dancing which makes you feel happy: Just take time for listening music and dancing, no one is stopping you.

5. Is it making new friends which make you feel happy: Make new friends anyway?

6.  Is it learning a new skill or language which makes you feel happy: start learning it, there are plethora of free resources available on net what ever you want to learn.

7. Is this reading a book or magazine which makes you feel happy: go and buy it; read it.

       Your success is directly associated with your energy level and your energy level depends on you mood (whether you are happy or sad). So it’s really important to be in state of happiness every single day.

Action Points

1. If you are not feeling happy every single day; you might not be on the right track.

2. Just think and analyze what makes you feel truly happy and start doing it again and again. (And remember getting happiness from anything about which you don’t feel good inside is never a really happiness. So the key is act should make you feel good at doing and later on)

3. Start doing things which makes you feel happy and create your energy.

Good day ..................