How many meetings do you attend?

A meeting is basically an assembly of people for some purpose .eg. a company board meeting or a town hall meeting; or for no purpose at all .eg. a get together of friends for a drink or meeting of elected members of state in the parliament. Then there are meetings which happen by chance .eg. friends bumping into each other at the county fair and meetings which happen between opponents .eg. clash of boxers in the ring or a football match.

In this blog, we will discuss about the meetings which happen in a corporate setup. Am sure a large portion of you either work in a corporate or own one, which means you most probably attend meetings or call them as the case maybe. The rest of you are the lucky ones who don’t care a plug nickel about login time and shifts.

People invest a lot of capital and time in setting up companies, meticulous effort put in to build the best infrastructure, recruiting the right people for various jobs and not leaving any stone unturned to keep the machinery of logistics well oiled and running so that the money tills keep clinking. Well, community initiatives, corporate governance and social responsibility have all become part of the setup in the recent past, but predominantly all corporates are profit and loss sheets in brick and mortar or a cloud server, as is popularly the case these days. In the process of running these corporates, it is but imperative to convene meetings.

These meetings maybe face to face meetings or through the digital ether, namely telecons and videocons. The reasons maybe various – performance is good, performance is bad, there is no performance at all, Mrs.Shukla wore a pricey kanchipuram saree for the party yesterday night, the kid next door is constipated, Trump got elected, today is Wednesday and so on. How these topics actually concern our work and progress and whether they actually turn out a fruitful result is not our concern, but meet, we have to! It has come to a stage where convening meetings has become a psychosis to the point of people not getting an assurance that things in a going concern are actually going pretty well unless they hold meetings. We phone somebody up and we are welcomed by an automated message informing us that they are in a meeting. To share the blame, it goes both ways. We also occasionally do the same to someone whose call we do not want to entertain.

So, are these meetings actually required? Especially in an age where information is available on a real time basis, with Enterprise Resource Planning systems assimilating, compiling and disgorging any information, report or analysis we want about our enterprise. It is true that human intervention and supervision is required in this system, but what I am trying to emphasize here is the fact that CEOs /CXOs /COOs or managers at whatever level of the corporate ladder they are, need call meetings only based on exceptions. In simple words, they need convene meetings only when things are out of order and not when everything is running smooth and slick.

Calling meetings based on exceptions has its own advantages. Firstly, it saves time and resources as unfruitful congregations are avoided and only meetings which culminate in demonstrative results are called. Secondly, it will allow people to actually attend to their work without getting diverted into wasteful meetings which most of the time turn into gallery tickets to an uneventful elocution of statistics or discussion of matters where they contribute nothing. Thirdly, we can use our time for better pursuits, which does not mean going for a movie to the mall next door. It means refining areas at work which were hitherto left unattended because of the zillion meetings, thus enhancing efficiency and output for oneself and the company. Lastly, it will allow us to finish our work better and attend the social meetings which we talked about in the first paragraph above without being plagued by thoughts of unfinished work or preparation for another slew of meetings the next day.

I summarize by saying that your entire working life should not be about meetings. Rather, whatever meetings you do convene should be full of life.

P.S: Any names referred above are purely for narrative purposes only and do not represent anybody dead or alive. We can probably hold a meeting to discuss that separately.

Apocalypse

I know it has been quite a bit since my last blog on Food For Thought, so I would like to borrow from Glenn Frey of the Eagles when they were performing live after a 14 year hiatus. I didn’t break the blog, I just took a four month vacation!

Well coming back to the topic on hand, I would not be entirely wrong if I assume that the first thought which comes to people’s mind when they see the word Apocalypse would be that of the end of the world. Truly so, with the lamentable events that we see in the news every day. The incidents span from your back alley across to all the continents on the planet except maybe Antarctica, probably because an average temperature of -50⁰C is too cold for even evil and negativity to pop its head. It has reached a stage where we are not sure where we will be safe. Europe as a favoured tourist destination has become a hot bed for radical elements and laid back destinations are also seeing an up-rise of terror like what we witnessed in Brussels and Nice a few months ago. The violence has stepped beyond the geographical and religious barriers as we see the deluge of refugees moving out of the Middle-East. In addition to having a social and emotional impact, the above also has economical impact because countries are forced to increase spent on security which seems to be ever elusive these days. This in turn is capitalized and exploited upon by defense contractors, security agencies and such. Billions of dollars are spent on preparation of an inevitable attack and people live in constant fear.

If we step back and observe, we will realize that such incidents are happening with an alarming increase in propensity, notwithstanding the fact that media has definitely become more active over the past decade. As for what anybody gains from such gruesome acts of violence, even those propagating them don’t know. Will all this peak up to a destruction of the world? It is anybody’s guess.

With the advent of the digital age, everything is a binary digit in the internet ether, whether it is our entire personal information or our bank balance. This is a boon and a curse. Boon because everything and everybody is interconnected and readily available such that we can contact anybody anywhere in the world with the click of a button and also accomplish anything at the same speed. Curse because everything we are, including personal information, eating patterns, darkest secrets all seem to be readily available to any discerning stalker. As for the bank account, one hack and all that money flows to somebody else’s account in the Turk and Caicos Islands. Further, if you note carefully, everybody has an opinion about everything on the social media because trolls on even life threatening issues come out faster than a soda through a vending machine. We are so hooked up to our smart-phones and iPads that we could do without a kidney but not without these gadgets. What if something causes a shutdown of this digital ether? Apocalyptic?

Taking a slight detour, let us look at an indirect effort by man to bring forward the date of the apocalypse. Other than the tendency to destroy each other as discussed in the second paragraph above, the human race also somehow seems to have an animosity towards nature. The very nature that gives life to us and nurtures us. With indiscriminate urbanization, excessive pollution, chemical effluents, deforestation, unplanned industrialization we have managed to wear down the earth far beyond what she deserves. Well the fallacy of man is to assume that he has control over nature and not the other way around. Nature is like a tensile spring which will coil under the pressure man puts on it, but will finally spring back to its original form. When that happens on a global scale, it is bound to be cataclysmic for the comparably minuscule human race. Imagine a mega earthquake which shakes the very core of the earth! Apocalyptic?

Where does this word Apocalypse come from? It is Greek and has that chic phonetic attraction to it like all old Greek words. But the interesting part is in Greek, Apocalypse does not mean end of the world. It simply translates to disclosure of knowledge or lifting of a veil. So when we interpret Apocalypse through Greek spectacles it can also mean the end of the world “as we know it now”. Well that takes a positive turn, doesn’t it? If every human on the face of the planet decides to make a change in the current course of things, stop violence and care for each other, protect privacy and integrity in spite of developing technology and care for nature so that it does not have to retaliate to protect itself, we would end the world as we know it today and build a better one.

Therefore, an Apocalypse need not necessarily be a mega earthquake that eats the whole human race up. It can very well mean little quakes in each of us and a shake-up of our thought processes so that we can coexist with each other and nature in a better way!

How aggressive are you?

This blog is inspired by an event that happened during a review meeting that I was a part of at office. The Managing Director of the company was very vociferously reprimanding the sales team (read: breathing fire and spitting venom) for the decline in sales and fall in market share during the just ended quarter. The Operations director explained to her that he had appointed a new Sales head to improve the situation, which was met with another litre of venom and a comment “How can you give that responsibility to him? He is not aggressive enough!” 

‘Not aggressive enough’. The word Aggression was coined somewhere in the early 17^th century from the Latin word Aggressio which in turn lends its origin to the word Aggredi which means ‘to attack’. That way, English is a very tolerant language with words adapted from various other languages like Ginger from the old French Gingivre, Juggernaut from the Hindi Jagannath, Anaconda from the Sinhalese Henakandaya or Sugar from the Arabic Sukkar.  Anyways, though the word aggression was initially used to represent an overt behaviour with intent to inflict harm or unpleasantness upon another, these days it is used indiscriminately irrespective of context.

‘Polish minister says Russia preparing aggression against NATO’.

‘Liverpool manager Klopp wants a new type of aggression in the Merseyside derby’.

‘The mother bison aggressively defended her calves from a grizzly’.

‘The new CEO of ABC Pvt Ltd is not aggressive enough to push through the merger with XYZ Ltd.’

Let us try and understand the above four quoted sentences. The first one talks about an outright attack or physical aggression and takes the form of the primary definition of the word. The second sentence talks about a goal oriented or instrumental aggression. The football team’s manager wants the team to perform better and hence his need for his players to be more efficient on the field. The third sentence refers to a defensive behaviour on the part of the mother bison triggered by maternal instincts which doesn’t exactly fall within the definition of aggression. If it did, then all mothers would be called aggressors and that would sound really weird. The fourth sentence shouldn’t have been in this discussion at all because the word assertive should replace aggressive in the said sentence. The poor tolerant English language!

Psychologists say that aggression can be physical or mental. They also say that aggression can be goal oriented or reactive/impulsive, though I personally don’t agree to the latter. This is simply because I consider aggression to be a predominantly negative behaviour and a far cry from creative tendencies of a person. Aggression usually sprouts out from a feeling of insecurity, despair, anger or insufficiency. Curiously, the human mind tends to send signals to the sensory organs that reflect the exact opposite of how we feel. If we feel insecure, we behave aggressive and controlling and when we feel confident, we behave calm and composed. That is why wise people sometimes ask us to stop thinking and start feeling so that we behave right in circumstances and take apt decisions.

Therefore, aggressive tendencies need to be curbed and its alter ego assertiveness nurtured.

I summarize by saying aggression is not all about shouting at the top of your voice at everybody in the room, it is about taking tough decisions at the right time in a calm and composed manner!

How much do we know after all that education?

Education is defined as the process of facilitating acquisition of knowledge, skills, values, beliefs and habits.  From the time we hit the age of five or even earlier, we are pushed into the grind of getting educated starting with the kids’ day care facility to primary school to high school to college and even further sometimes. During all those years of growth from infancy to adulthood, we spend at the least 6 to 8 hours of our daily lives on an average at an educational institution. We are taught a wide gamut of subjects there ranging from physics, chemistry, biology, arts, history, geography, sports, political science, mathematics, computers, economics, law, social sciences, food technology, astronomy and many others; in the initial years probably all of the above and in the later stages some of those, as we specialize in specific disciplines in preparation for our graduation to the job seeking or job creating phases of our life.

As there is no limit to the skills, values and beliefs that we can assimilate in a lifetime, this process of learning continues until the time we kick the bucket. However, one question that pleads to be asked is whether we know how to use all this education. The crux of the question is as simple as the difference between raw data and information. Just like raw data is a combination of variables in its primary form while information is the refined data that can be used for a specific purpose, education in its raw form becomes useful only if the user has the knowledge of how and when to apply the same. Otherwise, it will just be theory.

Unfortunately, this subtle distinction seems to have lost its importance. College degrees or educational qualifications are treated like pegs of social status or the stripes on an army officer’s collar rather than a means to enlighten once self or use in a fruitful manner. Students are pushed to the brink of their physical and mental endurance to accumulate degrees and come out ‘first’ in their class. In this bargain, some lose their focus in life, others lose interest in their true passion and in extreme cases some lose their life when put under too much pressure in said mindless pursuit. It is a very common sight where highly qualified persons fail to perform when faced with real life challenges. It is just like a pilot who has done 500 hours on the simulator but flounders when struck with a precarious situation mid-flight. We should not pursue a discipline because the discipline is popular, we should pursue a discipline which we have a passion for. The education that we obtain also needs to be to further our passion for it.

A fresher right out of college is like a baby bird which is ignorant of flight and snug up in the nest waiting for its momma to feed it. It needs to be coaxed and pushed to discover its latent talent to fly. This coaxing and pushing can be given only by a good teacher or a coach. The coach helps us establish a link between all the education that we have obtained and the challenges that we face in our life. The coach knows that a fish needn’t be taught to swim in the same way he/she knows that it shouldn’t be asked to climb a tree. Therefore, it is imperative that some point in life we find that coach who can direct our education and talent in the right direction. The coach need not always be a person. It can be a situation or event that helps us learn and mature. Thus, the ability to use the right education in the right situation is true knowledge. Some of this comes from training, the rest comes from experience. 

Therefore, we need to remember that the ability of what to say comes from education, however the ability of when to say what comes from knowledge. Then there is the ability to shut your mouth and keep quiet, which comes from wisdom. Well that comes with age! 

Don’t live somebody else’s life

Most of us wake up every morning in the hope of experiencing a sense of accomplishment at the end of the day. Be it personal chores, work, new beginnings or the like. As we plough on with our lives we try doing things better, improving ourselves through the course of our experiences and circumstances. Though the adage ‘I only compete with myself’ is pretty popular, we are hardwired to observe and assimilate what we see and feel around us. In this process, we learn from the people around us, as to how they talk, how they behave and how they respond to situations and incorporating and imbibing the learning in how we talk, behave or respond. There is the inherent need to compare and contrast with a person better at doing something than we are and learning from them to bridge that gap with them. We even benchmark ourselves against other people and imitate their methods. Humans are experts at flattery by imitation.

Such imitation is all good as long as it satiates our intent to become better in life. However, the problem arises when this imitation metamorphoses into obsession and we start living the other person’s life. This reminds me of a couple who are our neighbours back in the town where I was born. Their whole life revolves around my folks, me and my brother. We renovate our house, they renovate theirs; we change our car, they do too; my folks have two kids, they do too; I venture into the field of accountancy and finance, they try and force the elder of their kids to adopt the same line and when he vehemently refuses, they force the younger one to go into the field. It is quite evident what is happening here, isn’t it? We as a family used to get irritated in the beginning, then the irritation turned to indifference and then to pity. I sometimes imagine what will happen to those good folks if we are taken out of the equation of their lives. They would suffocate to death, because there wouldn’t be anybody to compare with. In short, they wouldn’t have a life.

We are all born to live the life that we were meant for, not the life somebody else was meant for. We are all born with distinct personalities, strengths, weaknesses and aspirations. Speaking of personality, did you know that the root of the word ‘Persona’ is Latin for mask? It is probably derived from the Etruscan word ‘Phersu’ again meaning theatrical mask. (Etruria: North-west of Italy or modern day Tuscany). So next time somebody says that you have an interesting personality, do think it over before you acknowledge the ‘compliment’! We are all born fully equipped to live our lives and then the machinery of this world gives us a personality. So when someone tells me they are attending a Personality Development Seminar I wonder what they actually do. Do they discuss how to improve their mask, how to change it, reinforce it or expose it?  

We need to stop assimilating or imitating indiscriminately and start discovering who we actually are, because the day we discover ourselves and the purpose of our life, we will be at peace. We will start living our own life.

On that note let me borrow a quote from the eminent Mark Twain – “The two most important days in your life are the day you were born...and the day you find out why”. All of us see the former, many of us, not so much the latter!