Creating Value

For any company to run, you need two kinds of people - Men-of-action and Men-of-the-mind. In other words, you need those who do and those who plan. People who can do both - constantly, effectively and modestly - are difficult to find  don't exist.

There are people who start off implementing their thoughts energetically, but like a Coke bottle, their effervescence dies out after the first few moments - there is no constancy. Most people think of themselves as both good thinkers and great doers, but sadly they are effective at only one of these, at best. And finally, there is the small issue of 'modesty' - a word which seems misplaced in the context - which usually proves to be the biggest stumbling block for people. Human beings and their insatiable egos yearn to 'rise' continuously in the eyes of others. Somehow, this prevents people from doing the things they did themselves a few years back - not because they no longer have the time to do them, but because they think it is 'below' them.

Think of the last time you asked a subordinate to prepare a presentation for you, or better still, think of the last time you asked the office-clerk to bring you coffee from the machine which is ten feet away. Surely, you have the time for that little walk down the aisle? You can jog if you want to save time, but certainly, you can do it yourself. But you don't. Not because you can't, but because you think you have graduated out of that stage in life when you had to get your own coffee.

If all this was only a matter of coffee, I wouldn't waste any time on it. But sadly, the coffee example is just that - an example. Our lives are replete with thousands of such incidents that we choose to overlook them completely. In fact, we have integrated ourselves so beautifully into the system that most of the value we 'create' during our entire lives are during the initial years of our careers. Most human beings in this world  start off as Men-of-action, and then make constant choices and career decisions which transform them into Men-of-the-mind. We all want to stop doing things so that we can start to plan on doing things.

You look at any career path and it gives you the same result: the formative years are hard when value is being created in the world, at the grass-root level: the postman delivers posts, the mechanic fixes the radiator, the software engineer creates actual code and the farmer grows wheat. As years go by, people gain experience; they grow older and wiser. Soon, the middle-aged postmaster is responsible for assigning young postmen to different circles, the chief-mechanic conjectures as to what problems radiators normally face, the manager of the software firm is busy streamlining the process of recruitment in the company and farmer lies back as his sons toil in the sun.

What is common in all these cases is that your net productivity as the years go by is declining. You will make more money and you will earn more respect, but your usefulness in absolute terms hasn't really increased, has it? Of course, the world needs planners to prevent absolute chaos from setting in, but these planners are not creators of value. They merely manipulate value which is produced.

And that is the absolute truth: everyone's ultimate goal is to move as far away from the creation stage as possible, to a point from where you can abstractly manipulate value. Highly respected professions such as Law serve to uphold a certain system which is there only to support other systems, which in turn produce actual goods and services. Politicians discuss policy and make legislation which enable other industries to perform. And then there is the vast and convoluted world of Finance, where people redefine the meaning of 'manipulation' on an everyday basis. These are people who sell concepts such as futures and options, rather than tangible real-world objects. How much money can I make from the fall of that share? How much can be gained from A acquiring B? How to I boost returns for this given estimate of risk?

These systems and professions have distanced themselves from the actual world of value, and have housed themselves in their own comfortable cocoon on the roof of the penthouse. No wonder then that almost 10% of the World's Billionaires derived significant portions of their incomes from hedge funds!

It's funny, but it's true. The farther you are from the job of actually creating something directly useful to the people around you, the richer and more powerful you are. And today, you don't even have to work your way to those positions. Education offers a lazier route for those who think the path is too tough. Education catapults you to one of those high places from where you can use great words and plan greater actions.

You end up with a larger phone-bill. But who complains about that? The company foots the bill, doesn't it?

October Post

 I'm blank.

After aeons on this blog, I'm finally out of ideas to put into this Rich Text Editor window! It's something to do with work-life, I'm sure. Almost every blog I've followed ardently has met its bitter end once its author has gone through a major life-changing event, and I'm afraid that the this one too might go mainstream. Combating for survival and to retain this tiny speck of space I've got on the www, I embark upon this blog-entry, brilliantly and innovatively titled 'October Post'.

I'm sure that you, dear reader, are wondering what major life-changing event I might be going through that I'm pondering about sacrilegious acts such as abandoning the blog. If nothing of that sort crept into your head, you should probably stop here.

Since you are here, I'll let you in on the deal - it's work-life. And no, I'm not changing jobs. But work-life started over a year ago, you tell me. What's so life changing? Well, it just kicked in.

With the immense experience of one year at work, I've concluded that there are three important days in any employee's life: (1) The day you join, (2) The day 'it kicks in' and (3) The day you think you can't/won't do it any more. Today's probably the day 'it kicked in'.

I walked out of work today at 7 pm, as opposed to the routine 4:30, beaming joyfully at everyone I crossed. Many claim they hate morning-people, but let me tell you what people hate more - someone who leaves the office beaming. Anyway, having deftly evaded the watchman's cold stares, I went to the spot where I was supposed to have a bus waiting to whisk me away to sweet oblivion. But alas, there was nothing there save for the remains of a few cigarettes someone had smoked before they had boarded the bus .

This is the point where I'd have normally cursed and fumed. But no, today the positive forces within took me by surprise. I called Meru Cabs and the operator promptly put me on hold for eight minutes and thirty-seven seconds. I waited patiently and when the helpful executive finally came on line, I didn't abuse him. But then, he told me that the next Meru Cab would be available at my location at 9:30 pm. 'Can you wait for two and a half hours, sir?' he had the nerve to ask.

I got home using a series of auto-rickshaws, because no one would go the whole way. And when I reached, I still had a smile on my face. I think I've finally been institutionalized. I have finally accepted work-life for what it is. I think it has finally kicked-in.

Or maybe this story is something about the shiny new white-hat they bestowed upon me today, more out of pity than anything else.

The IIT Phenomenon

The entire hullabaloo about the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) has dimmed down at long last as the Indian Institutes of Technology have finally reached a consensus with the genius revolutionary that is Kapil Sibal [sarcasm sign]. While I'm quite glad that insane suggestions of doing away with the JEE altogether have been put to rest, I disagree with the way many of the 'intellectual elite' of the country argued their case.

I heard many rise up in fury, saying that the Joint Entrance Exam is the only possible way to gauge intelligence and problem solving skills, and that all other exams are doing little more than burdening the students with extra workload. They said, and I quote, 'I know people from remote villages of Bihar and Andhra Pradesh who did abysmally in their respective school board exams despite acing the JEE and making it into the IITs.' This, they said, is proof that our board exams misrepresent how intelligent people really are.

This is not really an argument; if it is, it's rather feeble - laughable, even. I can retort by saying that I know a whole lot of people who did perfectly well in both the tests and that all these cases cannot simply be dismissed as mere coincidences. Or it could be argued that a fair portion of intelligent junta do extremely well in a lot of other challenging tests but fail to crack the JEE simply because they aren't good enough on the day. Surely, there is an element of luck involved - in some cases, more than in others.

Many people who consider themselves part of the Indian intelligentsia have a ready response to this though: 'There is no luck involved,' they say. 'The board exams are looking for all the wrong qualities in a prospective engineer. There is a lot of rote involved and innovative problem solving is not something they test.' This statement if true, at least in part, but what takes away a lot of its credibility is what happens to students once they are inside the IITs. Aren't Cumulative Grade Point Averages largely dependent on how much a student learns by rote? I know a handful of absolutely brilliant students who'd derive formulae during exams and solve them only to hear from peers after the test that the professor had given them the formula in class the previous day. So, if learning formulae by rote is all that's required to make it out of an IIT with decent grades, shouldn't board exams be sufficient for getting into them in the first place?

But I suppose that with limited seats being available, it is in the interest of the institutes and in the interest of the country in general, if people who pass what is acknowledged to be a difficult test take up the aforementioned seats. What this does not say however is that people who don't make it through these tests are imbeciles who cannot discover water in an ocean. People have told me that the JEE is a greatest thing because it removes all inequalities. They say that in a nation with such economic and academic disparity, it is impossible to compare a person studying in poor schooling conditions in Jharkhand with a person who enjoys the best schooling facilities available in New Delhi, if not for the JEE. While the first part of the statement is entirely true, 'inequality' is an issue which the JEE tackles very poorly, if at all.

It is still impossible to compare students studying in IITian manufacturing centres in Kota and Andhra Pradesh with students without these facilities in certain other parts of the country. Besides, there can be no monitor for 'innate intelligence'; no matter what we do, we will remain victims of circumstance. What the JEE does tackle, however, is another issue altogether. The various boards across the country - the state boards, the CBSE, the ICSE etc - have such different standards that an even comparison cannot be made using tests conducted by these bodies. This is fairly true even if a percentile based system is used across all these boards. So a common test which everyone strives to ace is a justifiable solution.

So, while the JEE is seen as the ultimate prize for people outside the system, especially people still waiting for their chance to have a go at 'glory', IITians see it as something entirely different. It is a life-giver - a source of immense confidence and something which tells us that we are capable of doing anything. Sometimes, even in the most impossible situations, I tell myself - 'This can't be hard. This can't be harder than the JEE anyway.' What the JEE in effect does is bring together a group of fairly talented, immensely confident people. And frankly, this is what makes IITs so very special.

What is disturbing, however, is to see this confidence turn into vanity and vainglory. While it can be argued that it's one of the toughest engineering exams in the world, it isn't very smart to say that people from the IITs will be the best options for any available job profile. No, it isn't possible to argue that by putting in a few hours into 'Accountancy', an IITian could so easily become a Chartered Accountant, whereas a CA couldn't hope to get into an IIT no matter how much 'Integral Calculus' he/she studies.

I wonder if I'd be wrong in saying that a majority of the people still fresh out of one of the seven, enter the world thinking that they are worth more than someone from another institution. And I think it is deplorable that two people doing the exact same job should be paid on different scales just because one person is from an IIT. The fact that this happens only stands testimony to the point I'm trying to make.

There is still another attitude almost as disturbing as vanity, but worse for growth - Complacency. Today, so many IITians are so happy with what they have 'achieved' that they think there is nothing else worth getting in life. Sadly, these people see IIT as a goal and not as means to one. A group of institutions which has developed a reputation based on the hard-work, determination and skill should expect more from its people or risk dying as a brand. 

So, while it is an indisputable fact that certain IITians have brought about significant change to the country we live in, there is so much left to be desired from people who claim to be the nation's most talented people. Maybe it is time to forget vanity and that falsely based sense of greatness, and believe that we still have everything left to prove to the world. What the IITs have given you is something precious. Please let it not be wasted on you.