Monday, January 20, 2014

Reading between the lines - loud and clear!: The Art of Corporate Survival Part 3


Corporates pride themselves on being open, transparent, fair, egalitarian, democratic, driven, ethical and working towards all kinds of objectives which have no relation to making money or merely advancing individual agendas. The reality of course is far different. What they perceive themselves to be makes them speak in a particular way. Reality however makes us interpret it differently.

After working for many years in corporates, this what I understand when this what I hear:

What I hear: We encourage diversity
What I understand: Please come dressed the same, talk the same, walk the same, and we have made sure all your cubicles look the same.

What I hear: We encourage individual initiative
What I understand: We expect you to spend all your time on projects the Company considers important


What I hear: We are all for Work-Life balance. We endorse it fully
What I understand: Your Company is your Life. Now balance your Life and your Work.

What I hear: We encourage independent thinking
What I understand: The boss is always right

What I hear: You should follow your heart
What I understand: If your heart tells you to do what is in our Top 10 initiatives, it is in the right place

What I hear: We want you to be bold, courageous, independent and chart your own destiny
What I understand: How come this plan is not feeding exactly into what H.O. wants? By the way, the font you are using is not as per Company policy

What I hear: We want you to give full expression to your creativity, and we want you to speak your mind
What I understand: Please ensure you adhere to our 'political correctness policy', 'no mention of politics, sex or religion policy', 'no offending any race, group or religion policy', and get your presentation cleared by the Communications Department before you send it out

What I hear: We want to give every individual the means to advance in their career
What I understand: In our Company, career ladders go vertically, horizontally, laterally and randomly. HR will prove that you have advanced in your career path. Congratulations on your advancement!

What I hear: We want you to think freely, innovate
What I understand: Please contribute at least two ideas by next week. You have not met your innovation targets

What I hear: We work for the Stakeholders
What I understand: They hold the Stakes - they can nail you to the Cross

What I hear: We work for the Stakeholders
What I understand: Look, this is what MY boss wants. And you report to me. So get it done!

What I hear: We allow you to pursue your heart's desires
What I understand: Provided it aligns with Company priorities

What I hear: The Company will take care of your family
What I understand: You are so busy taking care of the Company that you won't have the time to do it. We will send the cheque home

What I hear: We believe in always being connected
What I understand: Why the *&!*!& was your phone switched off last night?!

What I hear: You can follow whatever religion you want
What I understand: Do you know by heart the Company's Vision statement, Mission statement, and key catechisms? Can you recite the Gods in the Company's pantheon? What have you done to appease them yesterday? Can you tell me the favorite offerings that each God likes? 

What I hear: The Customer is king
What I understand: Find out what the muppets want

What I hear: Scrapping this project will help us better align with our stakeholders
What I understand: That's what you said last year when you introduced the project



Friday, January 17, 2014

The Son Rises


So the Congress has finally "announced" RaGa as the PM candidate. A development that was foreseen years ago. When the Prince is born, there is never any doubt that he will one day take over the throne. 

The Son Rises

The Son rises, or is rising,
or will rise, or has risen.
Look, there he is, bright and shining,
Point the coterie of sycophants.

They crowd, they point, they clap and cheer,
All Hail the rising Son, savior!
They cheer, they wave, point in wonder,
"He will ensure we rule for ever!"

The people crane their necks to look,
They shove and strain, so they can see.
But they can't see any light, nor splendor,
The Son is dark, meek and insipid!

His effulgence is seen to none,
He hides it, and he hides it well.
He simpers, and points to his crown,
But for that - clothes, the Emperor has none!

PS: This is what I had written after the 2004 elections when Madam gave the throne to her trusted deaf-and-dumb retainer to guard

Post Elections 2004

 

A queen raised to the throne by marriage,

Prefers to steer, but not drive, the carriage;

Holding the wheel of the gravy train,

With the driver, singhing in the reign!

 

Spurning the throne that is unstable,

While still at the head of the table;

Looking down, from a high moral standpoint,

At the turncoats, who would have her anoint!

 

Waiting for the Hand to become stronger,

And the whip to become somewhat longer,

The ringmaster removes herself from the scene,

While directing the circus from within!

 

Sardar ko saunp di gaddi sambhaalne,

Aur chali gayi bacchon ko paalne,

Phir aayegi apna haq maangne,

Aur saunpegi bacchonko, sambhaalne!



--
Posted By Dinesh Gopalan to Personal Finance, Investments, and other things at 1/17/2014 08:13:00 AM

Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Moving to the Next Level: The Art of Corporate Survival Part 2


You are always doing something that is going to take you, and the company, to the next level.

 

Please write this down in bold letters, and hang it by your bedside. Just as Krishna saw Arjuna sitting at the foot of his bed on waking up, every day on waking up you should see this sheet first. As you get up you should say "Whatever I do today will take my company to the next level".   Don't think too much of what the next level might be; it will confuse you into irrelevant detail. Also, don't ever acknowledge the fact that you have been working in the same position for the last three years, have seen several bosses declare that the department is going to move to the next level, have yourself declared several times to your subordinates that you all are moving to the next level, but in actual fact, you have been in the same position. For as long as you can remember you have not moved an inch; both mentally and physically. All you have been doing is hauling yourself from meeting to meeting declaring that in the next six months you have to move to the next level; and you have put on a paunch in the meanwhile. Don't think about such things – self doubt is the enemy of all things corporate. So repeat after me "This project <name the project> here is going to take the company to the next level!".  Practise saying this with a rising inflection in the tone.

 

Also remember, whenever you are asked, and several times without even being asked, you should say "We have made tremendous progress in the last six months". Why six months? Because it is short enough to be counted in this year's appraisal cycle, and long enough for you not to be challenged. Saying "one month" is an invitation to disaster, because everyone remembers what you actually did in the last one month. Say six months, and the listener will be vaguely impressed, after all, you seem to have been quite busy in the last six months, and there is something you must have done. So you must have made some progress, if you say so. And why does it matter that you say it? It matters because all companies take pride in having "SMART Measurable Actionable Realistic Time-bound" goals (note how "SMART here is recursive!),   but no one really has a clue what the goals are and how to go about measuring them. One of the ways to make people believe you have done a lot of work is to keep reiterating it; if you keep splattering it around, some of it is bound to stick.

 

Look at the downside. If you don't say that you have made tremendous progress, who will say it for you? People will start having nagging doubts about you – have you been to the zoo and looked at a cage full of gorillas? What do you expect the gorillas to do? Beat their chests of course. If all the gorillas are beating their chests and snarling at you from inside the cage, but for one, who stares self-deprecatingly and looks at his feet, what do you conclude? You conclude that he is a wimp, and write him off. The same thing happens in the corporate world to those who don't thump their chests loudly once in a while. They get written off, and come next appraisal, they will see their peers walking away with all the bananas (sorry, increments).

 

All bosses like to see you aspire for something above and beyond. You need to constantly give the impression that you are striving, and thus doing your best to maximize the boss' welfare. How better to do this than constantly trying to move to the next level? Giving too many specifics like exact numbers and quantified goals are quite dangerous; a very confident assertion of movement (to the next level, just to make it very clear) is sufficient. However, be very sure to say this with utmost confidence while looking people in the eye. A shifty-eyed mumbling that "we are going to move to the next level" along with lots of shuffling of your feet just won't do.  The right body language is very important.

 

As to the "we have made tremendous progress" bit, it is also like one of these self-affirmations that they tell you to repeat, like, "day by day I am becoming better in every way". It is a self-fulfilling assertion, self-fulfilling not in the sense that you actually have made progress because you said so, but in the sense that if you say it enough times, maybe you start believing it yourself.  Such a belief serves to keep your self-esteem intact.

 

As to how it is possible that everyone in the company is constantly striving to move to the next level, everyone has made tremendous progress in the last six months, and yet everyone seems to be collectively in the same place, is a mystery worth pondering upon. I have pondered upon this many times in my career but have not reached a conclusion. I guess it is best left unsolved as one of those eternal mysteries of corporate life!



Sunday, January 5, 2014

The Art of Corporate Survival

After working for twenty-five years for large corporations, I decided to do something else and got out of the rat race. That was about nine months back and I am enjoying every moment of my new-found freedom to do the things I've always wanted to do. What use is working for so long in an environment so rich with all kinds of characters if you can't pen down the lessons you have learnt for posterity? In that spirit follows this guide to working ( or not working as the case may be) in a large modern corporation.

 

Once you have worked for long, unreasonable deadlines don't faze you – like your boss telling you on a Friday evening at 4, "Can you work on this report and let's review it on Monday morning as soon as I'm in?" He normally comes in at 8 (bosses have this nasty habit of doing that) and he has just told you yesterday that he is off to Kabini shooting elephants (with the camera of course) for the weekend.  Does this faze you? Not at all.  You will drag yourself to office over the weekend, along with your entire team, and then get over it later by devising a devilishly convoluted project for your team that will help you extract revenge for the whole of next week.

 

If you are smart, you will know in advance what your boss is likely to ask.  You can never be sure of course, but at any point in time there will be three or four topics that seem to occupy precedence in the minds of senior management.  So you devise a procedure to be ready at all times by having reams of data and dozens of Powerpoint graphs at your beck and call.  This is of course easily achievable since you have a team reporting to you – you have to be smart enough though to never let them know that most of their work is never used.

 

You will be asked to make presentations at the drop of a hat.  Like when you meet your boss at the Rest Room and he says something like "Why don't you drop by at our Leadership Team meeting at 2 and take us through that stuff you are working on?"  By now, you have gotten used to this.  What you have to remember in such a situation is that the people sitting there don't really know what you are up to, and don't really want to get into the details. So you put some numbers together - don't worry how relevant they are - convert them into some fancy graphs, the more colourful the better, and put those in the Appendix.  For the body of the presentation you don't use any numbers. You put some stuff involving words like strategy, alignment, vision, goals, immediate priorities, long-term focus – the list goes on – in fact, I used to maintain a list of such words in a small book that I carried in my pocket.  You enter the room at 2 p.m. with a sang-froid that befits a person who is in full control of what he does.  You spend your allotted time stringing a story around the words that are put up there.  When it comes to question-answer time, liberally flash the slides in the Appendix – don't worry, no one will catch any errors – that proves that you are a details man (when required) and you have gone down into depths which leadership team will never reach.

 

You have your own ways of handling emails.  You first look out for mails from your friends which are unlikely to have anything to do with work.  You read them with interest. In fact, this is the part of the day that you most look forward to.

 

You don't want your mail box to be cluttered too much. So you have figured out your ways of deleting stuff. Out of long years of experience you realize that most mails are just cc'd to you out of spite.  The organization likes to keep people busy reading mails.  The trick is to scan the title and decide without opening the mail, if it is of this kind.  You have to be somewhat psychic to do this, but you develop that ability over time.  You delete these without reading. Then there are those mails from these particular individuals which are always configured to go automatically into the Delete folder.

 

Whenever you are out of office for a few days you find your inbox cluttered with a couple of hundred mails on your return. The trick here is to just delete them without any mercy.   Don't worry, nothing will happen, just do it!  If it's important, it will come back to you. Mostly, it never does.

 

Now that leaves you with a few dozen work related mails that you have to do something about every day. Here is where the art of email delegation comes in. I am assuming that the organization is paying at least a couple of individuals to attend to your every need – it's called Direct Reports in modern parlance.  You forward these mails to them after giving them a cursory glance with comments like "Please handle", "Please see", "Please speak to her and find out what she wants", "Please complete and review with me", "Please submit", "Please file", etc.  There is also the "Please discuss" which brings your Direct immediately to your table with his notepad in hand.

 

There are certain things which you have smartly done of course.  Though you handle your email in this batch fashion not more than twice daily, no one comes to know.  You achieve this by setting your alarm clock for random hours of the night.  When your alarm goes off at 3 a.m. you go to your PC (it's already booted) and forward a couple of mails – the more people who are cc'd the better.  This technique immediately places you high on the dedication scale.  Every one in top management, especially bosses, likes to see you working round the clock.  You also have  this nice app from a friend of yours which rings the alarm on your mobile every time your boss sends you a mail. 

 

Occasionally, one of the deleted mails will come back and bite. "What happened to that thing you were supposed to revert on – the whole project team is waiting only for you to respond".  There are several ways to slip out of this one – most of them involve one of three things – saying you delegated it to that manager of yours who is getting increasingly lax nowadays, something needs to be done about him; somehow getting him or a friend on the project team to forward the mail again to you; and reminding the questioner about something he has not done.  This one comes with experience – you will hone your techniques over time.

 

There are several other things one can talk about when it comes to corporate survival.  But I've reached my word limit – and anyway the trick is, never deliver completely on a project – always keep the audience waiting for something more, else how will you survive?


The Art of Corporate Survival

After working for twenty-five years for large corporations, I decided to do something else and got out of the rat race. That was about nine months back and I am enjoying every moment of my newfound freedom to do the things I've always wanted to do. What use is working for so long in an environment so rich with all kinds of characters if you can't pen down the lessons you have learnt for posterity? In that spirit follows this guide to working ( or not working as the case may be) in a large modern corporation.

 

Once you have worked for long, unreasonable deadlines don't faze you – like your boss telling you on a Friday evening at 4, "Can you work on this report and let's review it on Monday morning as soon as I'm in?" He normally comes in at 8 (bosses have this nasty habit of doing that) and he has just told you yesterday that he is off to Kabini shooting elephants (with the camera of course) for the weekend.  Does this faze you? Not at all.  You will drag yourself to office over the weekend, along with your entire team, and then get over it later by devising a devilishly convoluted project for your team that will help you extract revenge for the whole of next week.

 

If you are smart, you will know in advance what your boss is likely to ask.  You can never be sure of course, but at any point in time there will be three or four topics that seem to occupy precedence in the minds of senior management.  So you devise a procedure to be ready at all times by having reams of data and dozens of Powerpoint graphs at your beck and call.  This is of course easily achievable since you have a team reporting to you – you have to be smart enough though to never let them know that most of their work is never used.

 

You will be asked to make presentations at the drop of a hat.  Like when you meet your boss at the Rest Room and he says something like "Why don't you drop by at our Leadership Team meeting at 2 and take us through that stuff you are working on?"  By now, you have gotten used to this.  What you have to remember in such a situation is that the people sitting there don't really know what you are up to, and don't really want to get into the details. So you put some numbers together - don't worry how relevant they are - convert them into some fancy graphs, the more colorful the better, and put those in the Appendix.  For the body of the presentation you don't use any numbers. You put some stuff involving words like strategy, alignment, vision, goals, immediate priorities, long-term focus – the list goes on – in fact, I used to maintain a list of such words in a small book that I carried in my pocket.  You enter the room at 2 p.m. with a sang-froid that befits a person who is in full control of what he does.  You spend your allotted time stringing a story around the words that are put up there.  When it comes to question-answer time, liberally flash the slides in the Appendix – don't worry, no one will catch any errors – that proves that you are a details man (when required) and you have gone down into depths which leadership team will never reach.

 

You have your own ways of handling emails.  You first look out for mails from your friends which are unlikely to have anything to do with work.  You read them with interest. In fact, this is the part of the day that you most look forward to.

 

You don't want your mail box to be cluttered too much. So you have figured out your ways of deleting stuff. Out of long years of experience you realize that most mails are just cc'ed to you out of spite.  The organization likes to keep people busy reading mails.  The trick is to scan the title and decide without opening the mail, if it is of this kind.  You have to be somewhat psychic to do this, but you develop that ability over time.  You delete these without reading. Then there are those mails from these particular individuals which are always configured to go automatically into the Delete folder.

 

Whenever you are out of office for a few days you find your inbox cluttered with a couple of hundred mails on your return. The trick here is to just delete them without any mercy.   Don't worry, nothing will happen, just do it!  If it's important, it will come back to you. Mostly, it never does.

 

Now that leaves you with a few dozen work related mails that you have to do something about every day. Here is where the art of email delegation comes in. I am assuming that the organization is paying at least a couple of individuals to attend to your every need – it's called Direct Reports in modern parlance.  You forward these mails to them after giving them a cursory glance with comments like "Please handle", "Please see", "Please speak to her and find out what she wants", "Please complete and review with me", "Please submit", "Please file", etc.  There is also the "Please discuss" which brings your Direct immediately to your table with his notepad in hand.

 

There are certain things which you have smartly done of course.  Though you handle your email in this batch fashion not more than twice daily, no one comes to know.  You achieve this by setting your alarm clock for random hours of the night.  When your alarm goes off at 3 a.m. you go to your PC (it's already booted) and forward a couple of mails – the more people who are cc'ed the better.  This technique immediately places you high on the dedication scale.  Every one in top management, especially bosses, likes to see you working round the clock.  You have also got this nice utility from this friend of yours which sends you an sms on your mobile every time your boss sends you a mail. 

 

Occasionally, one of the deleted mails will come back and bite. "What happened to that thing you were supposed to revert on – the whole project team is waiting only for you to respond".  There are several ways to slip out of this one – most of them involve one of three things – saying you delegated it to that manager of yours who is getting increasingly lax nowadays, something needs to be done about him; somehow getting him or a friend on the project team to forward the mail again to you; and reminding the questioner about something he has not done.  This one comes with experience – you will hone your techniques over time.

 

There are several other things one can talk about when it comes to corporate survival.  But I've reached my word limit – and anyway the trick is, never deliver completely on a project – always keep the audience waiting for something more, else how will you survive?