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!

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?

Lessons from the Khobragade case

There is such a big ruckus about breaking the law in the Devyani Khobragade case. One could easily say that the law that has been broken is one that is not practical and was made to be broken. Most laws in India along with their attendant rules are of this nature.

 

The minimum wage in the US is about $8 per hour in most places, and in New York from what I read in the papers it is about $10 an hour. How is this figure computed? By taking the cost of living, I presume. What is the cost of living for a live-in maid who comes from India and stays at her Indian employer's residence? Effectively zero. From what I read, she was being paid handsomely by Indian standards. If she wanted to, she could send most of the money home. Who has that kind of savings in India? Not even a mid-level bank officer after expenses can save so much.

 

Coming to the employer in this case, if she had actually paid the minimum wage, the salary of the maid would have far exceeded her own salary. So are we really expecting her to be paying that kind of amount? To add to this, there is the problem of "overtime". If she is asked to sleep with the kids (don't know if that is true in this particular case) it can be construed as overtime since she is on duty! 

 

There has been a request pending with the Finance ministry for long now from the Foreign ministry to revise pay along with suggestions to change the visa category under which the domestic help for consular staff travel. Meanwhile, a US posting which was much sought after is now sought to be avoided by foreign service staff. Who wants to go to a country which so highly curtails individual freedoms even to enter into mutually beneficial actions? In fact, the more one sees how US officials act, the more one comes to the conclusion that it is a police state where the might of the state is wielded with disproportionate force against every puny offence. The list of "crimes" is long, the enforcement is harsh, and as with every other country on earth, it is the poorer sections of the population that always face the brunt of these laws. What is worse is that these actions are cloaked as being for the "protection of liberty, freedom, equality, human rights, sexual equality...etc. ", all motherhoods which can never be questioned!

 

There is a law in place, agreed. How practical is this law especially in its applicability to this case, where plainly the employment was a consensual contract and not by force, paying wages which are far in excess of what that maid could expect in her home country, with a comfortable work atmosphere without any harassment (no complaint of that nature has been voiced)? Should the law really apply to her employer, a consular official? She does not enjoy "diplomatic" immunity but the definition of diplomatic immunity can be stretched as in the case of Raymond Allen Davis,  the US contractor for the CIA who calmly shot two people dead on a Lahore street in 2011. The US government had him flown back by stretching the argument of who is a "diplomat"! Apparently, he was one. And Devyani, who is actually a consular official is not? But then, the US has always been known for its double standards. We in India also have double standards but we are not so sanctimonious about it. The US in spite of all its contradictions is always pristine and holier-than-thou. 

 

There is another mistake which the US made in this case. They arrested an upper-middle class Indian lady and subjected her to strip search and all such unspeakable atrocities. The problem is, she is "one of us". She could be the daughter or niece of any of the ministers or  IAS officers (she is actually the daughter of one). She is not of some distant pedigree (like the maid in this case) like the bonded laborers in the Gulf whom we can choose to ignore. The establishment in India obviously bristles at this and reacts with vehemence. If this can happen to Khobragade, it can happen to me or my family. The idiots could also have handled it better. By handing over the arrest totally to the US marshals, they let the cold heartless "system" take over. The US marshals know how to arrest, strip, and search. They don't distinguish between different people. They should learn from the Indians in these things. Every prison has prisoners who get food from home, "special visitation rights" so that they don't lack for the other human necessity apart from food, and even special "parole" (a la Sanjay Dutt) to keep visiting home for months at a time before sauntering back to prison. By making a virtue of "everyone is equal before the law" they are digging their own graves. Like I said, they should send the US marshals to India for training - they will go back with a heightened sense of appreciation for all kinds of class distinctions!

 

And then you have the "conspiracy" angle to it. The maid disappears a few months back and there is hardly any effort to trace her. Then she resurfaces and her family is flown out of India on a "T" visa a couple of days before the incident. This visa is for the families of those people who go against their governments and cooperate with the US, to fly them out to avoid "persecution" in their home countries. Intended originally for the severest cases of human rights violations, I am sure. The impartiality of Preet Bharara (of Indian origin) is also suspect. He is possibly using this case to advance his political ambitions. 

 

In the midst of all these complications and angles to the case, it is very amusing to read the statements put forth by the US authorities. It goes something like ( I am only paraphrasing) "We are committed to following procedures", "All the procedures and rules were meticulously followed", "We value the relationship with India", " Everyone is equal before the law", "The US stands committed to human rights (please ignore their drones over Afpak!)" and all such inanities. Most US institutions and multinational corporations are masters at this kind of communication, where motherhoods are doled out in response to specific questions, and we are supposed to be happy, nay overjoyed, with their response! 

 

Coming back to laws that cannot actually be implemented, they should again learn from India in these things. We are masters at having strict laws and messy rules on paper, while allowing all kinds of loopholes for the influential (and the corrupt) to exploit. They should send their lawmakers here for some training under our Babus. And their politicians could do with some instruction from ours too!

Fwd: Chasing Mammon

Chasing after something that the world

has decreed is good for me;

even in fullness never enough,

for someone had more than me!

Higher, faster, stronger. Move!

for what is stillness, but sloth?

For that which we value we need more

though all else may be lost!

In pursuit of demanding mammon

all my days till now were spent.

In the race, I left life behind

clutching at empty recompense!