Who is your Mentor ?

 

Mentor is a person who can make a significant impact on your career or on your company, drawing on the expertise and experience that person has. Whom you choose as or who gets thrusted upon you to play a mentorship role can be a game changer for you.

It will be fun and also useful to be aware of the nuances with respect to mentor and mentorship to help you choose and benefit from mentors. The role of the mentor is not standard or same in all context. There are different roles that a mentor can play.

The mentor could bring superior subject matter expertise to help you to solve a problem or guide you through corporate web. For example, if you are trying raise funds for your new venture and if you have no prior experience in this, a mentor who may have had extensive exposure as a venture capitalist can be a great help in dealing with multiple service providers and to get the best possible deal. Or if you are considering organisation wide computerisation, someone who have lived through this transformation could help you to be ready for challenges on the way.

The mentor could offer references and endorsements with people of influence and relevance for your growth through his/her network. For example, when you are raising funds, some one who have dealt multiple investors and have had the experience to understand the agenda of the diverse players could help you to refine your investment pitch and may even give reference to different investors.

The mentor could be someone could act as a sounding board for your ideas and provide a philosophical foundation for your initiatives and decisions.  For example, someone who has had good experience in guiding organisational growth could help you in your process of developing alternate growth strategies, evaluating them and make a choice.

While a good mentor may be a mix of all, very often the larger focus may be in a few roles based on their comfort and your priorities.  A genuine mentor with appropriate experience and right intention can make a big difference to you and your company. They can add significant value in helping you to evolve strategies, guide your team, select better tools, turbocharge your marketing and magnify your public relation. Therefore. it will be great for any company to have a mentorship program established as it can contribute to its overall development through development and retention of good managers.

While we give due attention when working with a mentor there is another important dimension, we should be conscious of when choosing and or working with a mentor.

Ideally a mentor would be a person who has achieved certain stature and/ or position that he plays the role of a mentor as a giver and not a taker. Let us go a little deeper on the difference between giver and taker. The giver is a person who has more to give to the mentee. They are self-confident and will work with you to bring the best out of you and also not try to usurp the credit for your achievement, but help you to grow in your role. They will spent time to understand your context, the opportunities available, challenges you face, the strategies your following and proposing and identify your weaknesses and will give you considered advice. They will help you to track progress and act as a sounding board to help you to continuously refine your way forardy

The takers are those who act or pretend to act as your mentor, primarily to enhance their agenda. They will manage to make you doubt yourself and make it look like you are surviving on their ideas. The worst is when often they have nothing really to offer. They are too impatient to understand your context, your challenges, your option and their merits and weaknesses.  They will ask you about all your thoughts and make general comments and motherhood statements with no real value addition and at best may keep goading you to up your aspirations with no suggestions or input or support to make it happen. If you end up succeeding, they will go around announcing to the whole world that your success is courtesy their idea.

You have to be mindful of such people when you choose your mentors independent of their stature and position so that you don’t end up with the latter category. Very often they are in this position because they are better at managing their environment and more than willing to sell their souls for a price. For them end justifies the means with ‘end’ defined as maximising personal agenda. They are too happy to live off the hard work of the doers and smart in edging out the doers in due course like the pirates. (Read this post https://rollingstone-revelations.blogspot.com/2012/05/some-people-all-time-humour.html for a light hearted depiction of such mentors)

Sometimes they are thrusted upon you as advisors, or consultants or directors with you having no choice. Then you will have to have your strategy to protect you from them or manage them and may be the  support of another genuine mentor who will help you in your attempt for self-preservation.

C’est la vie!

“A mentor is someone who allows you to see the hope inside yourself.” Oprah Winfrey – Host, Producer, Author & Philanthropist

Aadhaar or Not?

The total number of Aadhaar enrollment has reached a level of around 600 million. There are serious debates in the public domain about use of Aadhaar as mechanism to establish and verify identify for various subsidies and benefits extended to the residents of this country. Let us take a deep look at the merits and demerits of this idea.

Every entity that provides any benefit or service to a person has a need to establish the identity of the recipient at the time of enrollment into the scheme. It would also want to verify if the same person is receiving the benefit/ service every time the service is availed. For this purpose different entities use different methods and different supporting documents.  Aadhaar comes out as the best identity proof on account of the following.

·         Most of the identity documents that are commonly used like PAN card, Voter Id, passport, electricity bill and so on are only enrollment proof for a specific service. Therefore this limits the cross section of residents who can have each of these documents. This makes it essential for every service provider to allow a variety of identity document resulting in higher cost and risk. Aadhaar is issued by UIDAI which has been set up only for the purpose of issuing an identity documents to every resident. This makes it possible for every resident to receive an identity documents.

·         Aadhaar has established a centralised system and a standard process that is accessible throughout the country to verify the identity document submitted by the recipient of the service. This makes it easy for every service provider to establish uniform but strong verification mechanisms instead of establishing multiple verifications for various identity documents.  No other identity document has such a seamless verification process in place (many of them don’t give a facility to verify from the source if the identify document has been truly issued by the issuing entity) which makes it possible for the unscrupulous to get away with forged identity documents.

·         The above process also significantly reduces the cost and risk of identity verification.

Every service/ benefit provider could want to ensure that same person does not access the service under multiple identities. Aadhaar issues a unique number to a person supported by extremely strong biometric technology to ensure that one person cannot have multiple identities. The current practice of establishing uniqueness with demographic data like name, father’s name, age etc  is quite weak in comparison with this. No other identity document has such strong de-duplication mechanism in place to ensure that same person has multiple identities

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The issuing authorities for the various documents used as proof of identity have established their channel for enrolment to meet their requirement and they do not cater to the need and right of every resident to receive an identity document. For example voter id is issued to eligible voters. PAN is a tax id and tax department has no incentive to extent this as a service to all residents. Since UIDAI is established as an entity to issue identify document, it has established extensive channel for issuance and verification and is in the process of further extending this channel.

This helps any entity which has to uniquely identify a person to save significant cost and effort in the identity verification process.  Building on this Axis bank now has introduced scheme wherein an individual can walk into any Axis Bank Branch, give his / her UID and after verification of the same, the banks issues an account without any further document.  Many service providers are figuring our innovative application of this idea. With more than 600 million cards already established we can soon witness wider adoption.

But let us be clear; only thing Aadhaar can guarantee is a unique identity, nothing else. Not citizenship, not right for any entitlement. For any of these you will need other mechanism. So we should judge and decide based on what Aadhaar can do and its relevance, and not what it cannot!

“No one  can stop an idea whose time has come” Victor Hugo

Making the Elephant Dance

We once had a government that tried to do everything by itself. In addition to the business of governance, it also actively dabbled in bread making to aircraft production and banking to hotels.  Over a period of time it has accepted that it should focus on its core responsibility of governance and has attempted to move out from non-core sectors. Therefore it has, in the recent past, started using private sector capital and private sector involvement to augment and strengthen governance and to provide public good

Some of these partnerships have been successes and some failures.  The success and failure of such joint initiatives depend on many factors.  The willingness of the key bureaucrats driving the project to take bold decisions and the scruples of the private sector partner are two critical factors of success.

The worst combination is when we have an indecisive officer and a scrupulous service provider. In this case the project will suffer and the service provider will suffer humongous loss. This is the reason why many private sector companies desist from working for government.

The next worst combination is when we have an officer who is decisive and absolutely corrupt teaming with an unscrupulous service provider. In this case they will clean the tills and the project will suffer.

The best result is when there is combination of decisive and result oriented officer and scrupulous service provider.  This is a road fraught with risks because this will involve judgement calls and judgement calls involve calculated risks based on information available at that point of time. But unfortunately these judgment calls often are often misinterpreted. This then leads to both parties being accused of the personal agenda behind their actions.  They get equated to the worst combination described above. Both end up suffering for the decisions they have taken. That is why this is a rare combination. However what we need today is this combination.  

This is less of an issue when outcomes of the envisaged projects are very clear and the scope of private sector participation can be articulated un-ambiguously. In these cases it will be possible to develop a clear contract and monitor the performance against the clear milestones in the contract. However in projects which are transformative in nature this becomes all the more critical. In this kind of project it will not be very easy to clearly develop the implementation plan and identify clear milestones. Therefore there will be many occasions, based on ground realities, when judgement calls are required to be made and course corrections are required to be effected. In such cases the combination of visionary and courageous leadership from the government and scruples of the service provider becomes very critical. 

In typical government procurement such a combination which will effectively enable active management will be very difficult to implement. This is the reason why many of the transformative projects in Private Public Participation fail.

This is especially true for IT projects. Today many top-notch IT companies are unwilling to work with government because they feel that government does not understand or appreciate this dimension. On account of this blindness on the part of the government buyer, for honest service providers government projects are loss leaders. Especially with the alternate business opportunities recovering around the world it will be difficult for the government to to attract good IT companies to take serious interest in the e-enablement of government projects.

The most effective way to handle such transformative projects is to carve these as independent projects and hand these over to a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) which has been suitably structured with sufficient flexibility to take nimble decisions and relevant mid-course corrections when needed. It is also important to have the right kind of leadership, team with relevant expertise and experience and also a supervisory body that recognizes the different approach needed for these SPVs to succeed. Especially the leadership vision and courage to take decisions will be very critical.  Delhi Metro is a very visible example of a successive implementation in this model.

There are many more transformative ideas that are awaiting such interventions especially in the area of digital transformation. We hope that the clear mandate the government has this time will help them take this path with more confidence. 

“Planning is helpful. If you don’t know what you want, you’ll seldom get it. But, no matter how well you plan, you will fare better if you expect the unexpected. The unexpected, by nature, comes unseen, unthought, unenvisioned. All you can do is plan to go unplanned, prepare to be unprepared, make going with the flow part of your agenda, for the most successful among us envision, plan, and prepare, but cast all aside as needed, while those who are unable to go with the flow often suffer, if they survive.”   David W. Jones, Moses and Mickey Mouse

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At What Cost

All of us will agree that Result orientation and Reliability are two critical attributes of a valuable executive in any organization. These are of as important as his/her domain knowledge. Most successful and sought after executives are very high in these two attributes.  Let us call these twin attributes R&R (not Rest and Recreation of the army variety.) Although we value those who are high on R&R there are cases when these essential attributes can turn out to be the poison within that contribute to organizational decay. Let us try to understand this a little more in detail. 

Result orientation describes how a person goes about executing his work, his logic of prioritization and his problem solving.  Result oriented people will focus on the outcome expected. They do not get bogged down by the constraints and difficulties. They also do not allow themselves to be caught up with procedural cobwebs. If there is a roadblock, they will find a work around. If there is a limitation they will find an alternative. If they are confronted with a procedural Gordian knot, they will find a sword to slice it away.

Reliability is highly correlated to result orientation. But it also has some different flavor. This also portrays how he relates to the members of the team and/or other stakeholders.  It is about how a person can be depended to do what is expected of him or what he has committed. When we ask a reliable person do something, you can be sure that he will give an honest feedback on if it can be done by him, and by when. Once he commits you don’t need to follow-up. If he is faced by a problem that he can’t solve, he will let you know in time. He will also give you an assessment of the impact of what is being executed among various stakeholders.

Some exhibit R&R in all/ most of their dealings. Some of them exhibit these qualities more to their subordinates. We can term this as downward orientation. They are those who look after their team. Such people can be sure to be bosses who are admired and adored. As they rise up to in their career they turn out to be leaders who can take their team along. But some time they fail to keep their bosses in good humor their growth may get stunted; especially if their bosses are insecure by nature.

Some exhibit it more to their colleagues. This can be termed as horizontal orientation. They are excellent peers you can have. They are normally very popular in the office and office parties.

Some others are resourceful and reliable for their bosses. They have upward orientation. They are bosses favorites. They are much clued onto what their bosses want. Especially they are alive to factors that irritate their bosses and they will find ways to solve them and they are alive to their bosses weaknesses. They become almost indispensable for their bosses.

But this last variety while they are excellent in what they do may end up being poison to their organizations; especially if they don’t have respect their colleagues and are not sensitive to their preferences and concerns. They may run roughshod with their colleagues and subordinates to give what their bosses want. When boss give a guideline of his preference, normally they expect the implementing person to assess and field reality and optimize the implementation plan. But purely upward oriented R&R completely disregard constraints/ concerns and aspirations of the team. They are almost  like bulldogs. Very often others will not complain to avoid being termed a whiner.  

We need to be very careful with such people. Because, silently they vitiate the environment they belong. Because they are very useful they become our favourites, we praise them too much because they deliver. If we are not alive to such insensitive behavior we may end up over promoting them. But this will breed resentment all around. This is specially the case with some people who work in the staff function like personnel, administration and finance. With very little responsibility in client facing activities where client satisfaction may get measured and significant control they have of day to day conveniences, upward orientation gives them enormous influence with the big bosses. They grow very fast. But this is cancerous growth. If it is not contained, it can spell doom for their organization in the long run. Unfortunately such behavior will have very negative impact on the bosses

I have met a few such people in my long career. One used to be an HR executive. She made sure that she implemented her boss’s wishes ruthlessly. She gave regular feedback to her boss on what is happening around. But she was an absolute failure as far as her role as an HR executive. Her colleagues could not stand her and her subordinates hated her. But she was the gunslinger for her bosses and hence their darling.

The worst is when they reach very senior position. That often becomes the beginning of the end for the organization they head. If they have risen up primarily by pleasing their bosses, they will have difficulty in making the team/ organization to deliver. But by then many of the good people would have left. With what is left, it could be practically difficult to deliver. That is why when we evaluate and reward performance of people it has to be against the total organizational cost (not the cost of salary and perks alone ) and not just on what they may deliver. Bull dogs can be good in hunting trips, but they can not be the one running the farm.

In the past a leader was a boss. Today's leaders must be partners with their people... they no longer can lead solely based on positional power.  Ken Blanchard

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Riding a Tiger

“It was like riding a tiger; not knowing how to get off without being eaten” This is how Raju, former chief of Satyam, described his cover up of the poor quarterly performance he started few years ago that grew to a multi-billion dollar accounting scam that finally engulfed him and his company.

I don’t claim to be privy to what happened nor do I know the complete details of the scam. But I don’t think that he is the only one who is into managing the books in some fashion to achieve or over achieve the targets. I am sure most of us would agree with me. May be he took it to the extreme; or maybe he just got caught?

See what happens when the year-end approaches. The extra effort and extra push to generate more sales is of course a great idea and desirable. But it doesn’t end there. Each industry has its own bag of tricks. Arm twist the distributer to take an extra consignment which he may not be able to sell in the coming quarter. An accommodating purchase manager could be asked to book an order which he can cancel in the next month. A conditional loan conformation from the client. Create a fictitious company to book an order that will one day be written off. This is not just a private sector phenomenon. Ask the tax-collector what tricks he has to reach the target. Anything goes for the sake of ‘numbers’; especially when the numbers lead to fat bonusus and or promotions. One of the primary reasons for the 2008 meltdown in financial markets was also this mad scramble.

The degree of accommodation may vary. Some will do a bit of arm twisting. Some will shift the next quarter sale to this quarter. (A short fall in the first quarter is understandable!) The degree of dishonesty varies from coercion to manipulation to absolute fraud. This is not just the handiwork of the sales manager. This is the culture we are inculcating and encouraging. This culture of deceit then becomes a part of the organisational DNA.Sometimes somebody gets carried away and goes all the way and occasionally a Raju gets caught. Just hard luck!

May be we should take the spirit of the “General Anti-Avoidance Rules” in taxation where admissibility of an item of expenditure is supposed to be based on whether it is a truly value adding transaction or a transaction just for the sake of tax avoidance. In the same fashion the top management could insist that only a true sale or true collection that brings revenue for the period under consideration is booked as the income. That could be the first step towards recognizing and encouraging honesty.

The problem is not just about managing the book for achieving target. It is about the culture of honesty in our business dealing or even governance. As Laurie Calhoun noted in his article The Problem of “Dirty Hands” and Corrupt Leadership “In thinking about this issue, it is important to distinguish self-serving opportunists from those who suffer corruption through their sincere efforts to govern well. Self-serving opportunists often rationalize their dubious measures to themselves through self-deceptive references to ‘the good of the whole,’ claiming that group loyalty demands moral sacrifice or that ‘the end justifies the means.’”

But we live in Kaliyuga when it is all about managing “The art and ethics of lying” (Read on Part 1 and Part 2)

The truth is never dangerous. Except when told. PHILIP MOELLER

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Some People All the Time.. Humour

Major Desai retired from the army and returned to his hometown. Many people wondered with the kind of network he claimed to have and the heroism in the wars that he boasted about why he did not go further up at least to be a brigadier. As per him he had got bored of being in the army and hence he decided to quit and be back where he belonged. Of course there are few skeptics who raise their eyebrows on this claim. Maybe they are just jealous of his charm and popularity; especially with the Municipal commissioner and the local Sub Inspector who are his drinking buddies.

In the second month after he returned home, his neighbor came and asked him whether he had any way to find out the results of the soldier selection in Indian Army, Neighbor’s son had appeared for the selection. Major Desai remembered that one of his old buddies Havildar Sharma from the army may be able to find out about the results. Havildar Sharma helped him and gave him list of all the five young lads who qualified from Major Desai’s home town. Major promptly informed all the five families and they were all impressed by the ‘connects’ Major Desai had. Now for the whole town Desai became Major Saab.

In the next selection season many parents approached Major Saab in advance to seek help for their lads. He offered to help on two conditions. He will first evaluate these lads as he would not like to recommend nincompoops to the Army. He should be given Rs 1 lac in advance for each lad who passes his evaluation. The money was not for him; but to make some in the selection committee happy! But he promised that he would return the money of those who do not get selected.

He interviewed about 30 lads and agreed to recommend for 10. When the selection team came to town he was there at the ground where physical examination was being held. He walked up to Captain who was the team leader shook hands and introduced himself. They had few army jokes to share. Major Saab of course knew by name many a colonels and brigadier’s who were his ‘batch mates’. Capt was impressed. The lads from his town saw Major Saab pointing his hands in their direction and were convinced that he had put in a word to the captain. Actually, Major Saab was describing the story about the temple that was behind the ground in the same direction as the prospective soldiers were standing. After these pleasantries Major Saab returned home.

When the selection process was completed, Havildar Sharma informed Major Saab in advance, before the results were announced, about the outcome. Seven lads from his town were selected. Out of these, five were from the lot who paid him. He met the parents of the other two and told them that they would not be selected unless some action is taken immediately. He asked for Rs 2 lac for each with the promise that he would return the money if they were not selected. Of course they were selected Five out of the original 10 who had paid him were also selected. Major Saab was a gentleman. He returned 1 lac to all the five who did not get selected. He made sure that every other person in the town knew about what he did for the lads of the town. Municipal commissioner arranged a felicitation ceremony in his honor.

Major Saab is not an exception.We come across some in all walks of life. When the stakes are high very often Major Saabs appear to manage a lead. Most of us have a small Major Saab hiding in us too, though we feel ashamed to let him loose. But then it is for us to choose! 


Shame is like everything else; live with it for long enough and it becomes part of the furniture. SALMAN RUSHDIE,

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Outcome or Process, Choose One

IT enabled Governance (ITeG) is gaining acceptance and momentum. The Electronic Service Delivery Bill now under consideration of the government is expected to give further thrust to e-enablement. With Aadhaar (unique id) getting better traction, Aadhaar integration in the service delivery also is providing stimulus in ITeG initiatives.

The complexity and challenges relating to the e-enablement vary across departments. On one end of the spectrum, the processes are quite mature and well defined, and computerization is primarily a means for improvement in productivity. On the other end of the spectrum, what is required is not just automation of existing processes, but a total transformation solution which involves significant process re-engineering, re-alignment of the role of various stakeholders which may also result in some stake holders role getting redundant or less important, innovative use of technology, phased implementation, continuous monitoring and many mid-course corrections.

In both cases Information Technology is a critical component; but often it is forgotten that IT is a means to an end and not and end in itself. I do not intend to discuss the other dimensions of ITeG in this post (take a look at ‘An amateur’s guide to e-Governance”). This note is about how the IT component is managed by government departments. Most government departments have limited in house skill to undertake these activities and therefore they outsource these to private sector service providers. Most of the IT service providers who take up these jobs of the System Integrators often do not have a total solution orientation or they are not capable to offer one. So they end up being suppliers to staff.

The predominant skill set for them is writing software for the specification given by the solution architects because our domestic software industry is often drunk with the $ from being technicians and cybercoolies and not architects and engineers. The user requirement study is "Tell me what exactly you want me to automate, I will program it" and not "Tell me what your dream is, we will work together on how technology can make it happen". So their approach is that of manpower provider than a solution provider. They don’t share the risk of a failed system (the limitation of liability clause adequately takes care of this) nor do the government comfortable to share the reward in the form of outcome based payments.

Often service providers influence how the RFP is made which ends up being an enquiry for supply of bodies than outcomes. So RFP gives more importance to the CV of the team instead of making them responsible for the outcome. Subsequently these contracts make the client to pay for rectifying the bugs in the programs and also make him spent for much more hardware than needed. Augmenting this problem is the purchase decision based on the lowest price quoted by the vendors. No proper matrices for measuring the outcome are defined and the department attempts to micromanage the CV, the attendance, hardware specification and so on. Then either the shoddy service providers takes the contract or the selected vendor develops shoddy solutions. That is the reason many ITeG don’t live up to the expectations.

When people are told exactly what and how to do something, they stop thinking for themselves-and they can't learn and grow. ~ unknown

Death by Power Point

Couple of weeks back I attended a conference. As the key note speaker we had an expert from one of the top notch institutions in the world, who had recently relocated from London. As the topic was close to my heart, I parked myself in the front seat. The speaker had a distinct western accent as he had been out of the country for a long time.

As expected from any expert speaker today, he had a power point presentation to support his talk. The slides started moving one by one. Extremely colorful, quite complex diagrams with wide variety of shapes and colours linked and interlinked using arrows and lines flowing in and out and very densely packed text. Quite visually impressive!

Even front row, I found it difficult to read most of the text. The message that was expected to be understood from the various cubes, pyramids and animations were too complex for me to follow; especially when I attempted to follow the speech. The speaker expected me to quickly assimilate each slide in milliseconds and then connect it to the pearls of wisdom that came from his mouth.

The audio and the visuals were impressive; but, failed to communicate to the audience. This is a phenomenon that has become quite common these days. Power Point presentation is a killer utility that Computer revolution has contributed to the modern day manager. With more and more functionalities and features Power Point has become more important to corporate executives than even food and water. (The only other killer functionality that can beat this is the is ‘copy paste’ function)

A good Power Point presentation can be a powerful tool to make penetrating communications; especially in presentations. It can help the presenter as cue card to help in keeping a structured story line, it can pictorially present some difficult concepts, it can help the audience to quickly refer to the broader context of what is being presented so on and so forth

But overuse of the funky features is making this to a tool that kills effective communication. Power Point helps in building excellent visual presentations and diagrammatic representations.

The diagrams pie charts we use as a part of a written document can afford to be a bit complex and dense (though I would not recommend overdose of it). This is because the reader has the flexibility to read the text, look at the model, ruminate and go back to the text and the model again if he feels the need. In this case he sets the pace. Even when we provide an electronic copy of the presentation and the receiver can view it at his pace, we can afford to have some element of complexity.

But if we are using our PPT as a complement to our oral presentation we cannot afford such complex and dense slide show. If our presentation is to a small audience who are very much clued on to the topic we are presenting (say our department colleagues, our board, our client) we can get away with some of these gimmicks.

But if we are making a presentation to a larger audience then these colorful animations dampens the effectiveness of the presentation. Very often when we make presentations and the speeches to a large audience, the level to which most of the people are clued into the topic will be to a much lesser extent. In such circumstances, if we make our PPT and speech complex and heavy, it will fail to communicate though it may appear erudite. The complex slide deck will then become a distraction. Human beings cannot listen, read and assimilate complex messages in real time as his working memory have limited capacity and has limited duration, especially when it comes to new and novel information. The visuals could act as an intuitive complement; but, if it is anything more, it can be very frustrating and ineffective. What is worse is the presenter referring to the slides all the time taking away one of the most important component of oral presentation; the eye contact.

The new breed “MBA” varieties (I can vouch for that. I am one too) who are computer savvy (A very critical skill these days) get carried away by everything the computer can do without assessing how useful and how relevant they are in the context. The slide deck for them becomes a tool to intimidate, a means to prove how smart they are and not an aid to communicate and to relate. But in reality they become crutches to the speaker and not an aid to the audience. Should we consider banning power point presentation? Absolutely not; if we do that there will be many more (like consultants) to join Dodo as an extinct species.(don’t deny me my daily bread)

"If your words or images are not on point, making them dance in color won't make them relevant." - Edward Tufte Professor Emeritus, Yale University

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Caveat Emptor ?

The bank was taken aback by the order of the IT secretary of Tamilnadu as the adjudicator under the Information Technology Act, when he directed the bank to pay Rs 12.85 lacs as the compensation to an Abu Dhabi based NRI for the loss suffered by him in a “Phishing Fraud” . (1)

“Phishing” is a security risk that many computer users are getting to be familiar. In this case the account holder received an email that appeared genuine, which asked him to provide the use rid and password for his internet banking account to avoid his account getting closed. He parted with these details and he lost about Rs 7,00,000 from his account.

The bank took a view that the loss is on account of the carelessness of the account holder and refused any compensation as they had advised all account holders not to part with their userid and password to anybody. How could he be so irresponsible and give away his password and then claim that the bank should compensate him? But the adjudicator did not agree to this point of view.

This is an interesting dilemma for all entities like banks and depositories that provide online service to their clients. Where does their liability end for the loss suffered by their clients? Under what circumstances will they continue to be liable even if the loss was the outcome of a failure by the account holder?

Similar issues have been there with respect to offline transactions too. For example the loss suffered by credit card holders on account of misuse of their card details or loss of money from the bank account by fraudulent instructions.

One of the accepted doctrines in legal theory is that the entity that is best equipped to manage the risk should be liable to the loss arising out of such risk. This doctrine has been followed not just in online transaction. It has been used in fixing liability in terms of workplace accidents, accidents in amusement park and and so on.

For many this may look very unfair. Shouldn’t the responsibility of the service provider end when it has put in place risk containment measures and warned the users about the potential risks? Why should it bear the brunt of a fraud when ingenious souls manage to find a way around the protective walls?

There are studies comparing the incidents of banking frauds between the countries that placed the primary responsibility on the service provider and on the customer. These studies showed that when the legal structure supported the above doctrine the extent of fraud was much less. The service providers continuously upgraded their risk containment systems as they could not hide behind “fine prints” in the forms that they make their clients sign and the disclaimers that they publish. They cannot limit their risk with firewalls and dematerialized zones in their data centers. They have no option but innovative in saving their clients from their own foolishness. They are forced to look for patterns, trends, exceptions, track locations from where the transaction originate, raise alert when exceptions occur and so on. But if still a client is faced with a loss, he is compensated unless they can prove the customer connivance or involvement. We can’t just declare “Caveat Emptor”.

Risk mangment therefore becomes a managerial decision, may be more than technical solutions. (Read on Digital Security – Business, People and Economics for some more thoughts on this)

Ref: (1) https://indialawnews.org/tag/human-rights/

"Customers don't expect you to be perfect. They do expect you to fix things when they go wrong." Donald Porter, British Airways

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Even Elephants Can Dance

My friend Zakir Thomas is a revenue service officer; but he is more comfortable in developmental work than being an enforcement officer. At present he is the project director for Open Source Drug Discovery (OSDD) a unique initiative by Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and is personally mentored by its DG, Dr. Samir Brahmachari.

Though concept of Opens Source development has been in practice for a long time (though not in this name), it has become quite popular with the advent of internet, more so with the availability of collaboration tools (now referred to as web 2.0) which has enabled communities across the globe to work on solutions to complex problems.

Internet itself is product of such collaboration and Linux, the Operating System, is one of the most known open sources software. There are hundreds and thousands of such initiatives out there today in a variety of fields. Sequencing of human genome can be seen outcome of such a participative effort. However, in fields like Pharma where the cost of research, testing and regulatory approval can be phenomenal, collaboration is considered suicidal. On account of such high cost Pharma companies have least interest in working on development of drugs for ailments which particularly affect the poor (TB, Malaria etc) or which affect few people are very limited. They are keener on development of drugs for lifestyle ailments like Blood Pressure and Coronary Diseases

It is in this area the model of open source development is attempting to play a role. Today there are only few such initiatives in the world like Tropical Drug Initiative (Participants from University of California Berkeley, Dukes University, University of Sydney), Institute of One World Health, TB Alliance etc.

OSDD initiated by CSIR is an initiative attempting to provide affordable health care to the developing world, presently focusing on development of drug for TB which today kills two people every three minutes in India. OSDD has taken of well with participation from about 4500 scientists/ students from 130 countries. It has completed mapping of TB bacteria genome a record time. It already has two molecules for TB in the pipeline. CSIR hopes that they will be able to bring out at least one drug for TB in the near future.

I asked Zac what has made this possible. “A few People with commitment and Tools that made collaboration possible” he replied. He introduced me to two fellow scientists who were with him then who is working from Institute of Genomics & Integrative Biology(IGIB). Sridher Sivasubbu is a PhD in fish genetics and Vinod Scaria a medical doctor who is equally comfortable with computers. Both of them are young and highly qualified to have picked up high paying jobs in private sector in India or abroad. But they have decided to dedicate at least few years of their life to this initiative. Their energy level, enthusiasm and commitment for bringing multidisciplinary skills through collaboration to develop better drug for TB is awe-inspiring.

There are more of such dedicated scientists across the labs who share this passion. Zac suggested that I read the book “Geek Nation” by Angela Saini in which she has dedicated an entire chapter (titled The impossible drug) on this collaborative effort of a number of committed professionals from multiple labs across India to find a cure for TB. (This book is worth reading as it gives an interesting perspective on the dream, hope and possibility of India becoming a scientific super power).

What OSDD has done is to make the platform available to for these professionals to collaborate among each other and with the best around the world who are willing to join. I hope that OSDD is able to build on this momentum and don’t get ossified to a white elephant when the pioneers move on.

It is a commendable achievement for a government institution to work on such revolutionary models. We see such islands of excellence in many parts of the government. What is unfortunate is that often there is no mechanism to sustain this momentum. When the pioneers move on there is no planned succession. Successors are not selected keeping in mind the requirement of such exceptional institutions; but following a process which is meant to manage routine operations. And that is the tragedy of governance we face often.

Elephants can dance; so long as we play the right music…

"It is the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed." - Charles Darwin

Related Readings

Competitive Advantage - A case for blogs and wikis

If wishes were horses

Dare to Differ

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Software and Hard choices

In this world there are many countries which are endowed with natural resources. Some of them were content to extract these resources in its most basic form and sell and some countries built up industrial bases that add value to these natural resources. The latter prospered and the former often stagnated especially because this abundance in one area acted as a disincentive to growth in other areas. The stagnation might have happened when the resources ran out or more prices dropped or with falling demand or arrival of more competitive suppliers.

We have the potential for a somewhat similar problem in our software industry which is growing to be a significant sector of strength and opportunity for India. This could be on account of some factors that are holding us from rising above mediocrity. If we don’t address these, eventually we may end up paying price for this as a nation.

Demand Growth: There is an increasing acceptance for use of Information Technology in most sectors of economy in India; e-Governance, hospital administration, educational institutions, manufacturing industry banking and financial services. This offers huge potential for the IT industry. In India, our focus and strength is in application development more so in building bespoke applications and less in hardware and system software. This, in addition to the outsourcing opportunities for undertaking developments for international clients, creates a burgeoning demand for software industry in India.

Customer Awareness: However the in house appreciation among this large consuming sector within India is quite primitive and therefore unable to demand sophistication and quality from their vendors. On the other hand, a significant part of the our outsourcing contracts are for relatively low-end programming as per the solutions defined by in house CIO and his team or based on the solutions architectured by high-end international consulting companies. Thus there is very limited incentive among the programmers to worry about the performance of their output but encourages to focus on functionality and features.

Increase in Diversity: Fast paced  introduction of new tools, more sophisticated databases, and diverse programming languages encourages the programmers to be familiar with this diversity than develop deeper expertise in any of the systems to extract the performance efficiency. The are happy to be "Jack of all trades but Master of none"

Leaping hardware technology: The hardware is progressing in sophistication so fast that it is reducing the cost for processing same volume. When shoddy system design and program quality put strain on performance with increase in volume, the developers recommend more iron. Since these new machines process more volumes, the senior management of customers the gets lulled by the apparent reduction in cost and ask few questions because in most other areas they are used to increase in cost with increase in volume.

Impact of IT cost: Major consuming industries for our software developers are manufacturing, financial services and government. For manufacturing IT costs as a factor of their total cost is relatively low. As they get their revenue from selling products (cars to drugs to chemicals to consumer durables and non-durables) their attention is more on the technology for making and selling their products. IT is seen as an enabling component or a fad and gets lesser attention on performance.

Similarly in Financial services with the revenue being a function of the value of transactions than the number of transactions they pay less attention in cost per transaction. In e-governance application also the situation is same with less attention to performance but more on functionalities.

Measurement of Performance Efficiency: In software industry, there hardly few good measures of performance efficiency that are widely used and fewer bench mark values against which performance can be measured; especially when it comes to cost per transaction. With nobody taking the ownership of the total solution, when problems occur, providers of each component like hardware, system software and networks point finger on each other. Even very few system integrators own the performance of the total solution, and but shift performance responsibly to the components. (Read “Learn to count- both Blessings and Failures” for some more thoughts on this)

So What?

The more discerning users for whom cost per transaction is critical like those of EBay, Google and Facebook have their own in house team whose focus is to squeeze out efficiency and reduce the cost and hardly few of our software service providers do any meaningful work for this high-end computing.or develop unique solution

There are many smart Indians in the development teams out there working on such solutions. But our domestic software industry is often drunk with the $ from being technicians and cybercoolies and not architects and engineers. The user requirement study is "Tell me what exactly you want met to automate, I will program it"  and not "Tell me what your dream is, we will work together on how technology can make it happen"

But if there is a large demand for low and middle end computing should we not supply it to earn our dollars and be happy? Of course yes. What is the risk in this?

The transaction volume in our consuming industry is growing leaps and bounds. The shoddy designs will soon show its weakness in handling this ballooning volume. The users will ask for more performance. They will ask for sophisticated analytics, pattern recognition, trend analysis and statistical modeling with the goldmine of data that has been amassed. Then our conventional solution providers will have nothing to offer as against those companies who have given more attention to high-end computing and more sophisticated model building often having outsourced the run-of-the mill programming to us.

That is why in this time of plenty there is a need to invest in building high performance solutions, develop a culture of fine-tuning systems for performance, learn to offer solution to a client's problem and not just code what he ask for, develop capabilities for building models and so on. Even in our public policy we should start factoring this and shift the incentives from profits of software export to investment and profits from high-end products or solutions development for the global markets.

Talent without discipline is like an octopus on roller skates. There's plenty of movement, but you never know if it's going to be forward, backwards, or sideways.H. Jackson Brown, Jr.


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Be Relevant or … Part 2

In Part 1 of this post we discussed about the intellectual obsolescence of individuals if they fail to keep themselves relevant. Such obsolescence is applicable not only to individuals; but also to organizations and companies.

Most often companies and organizations get started by people who are visionaries, who have exciting new ideas, who are willing to take risks and who are willing struggle to see their dreams coming to fruition. They get a team of people who share their passion to work on these. Once they succeed, some of these organizations consciously build processes to ensure that they upgrade their knowledge base, encourage their people to actively participate in this knowledge build up and infuse newer ideas and newer talents so that they don’t become obsolete in the changing world. They place their best people on their biggest opportunities and not on their biggest problems as Jim Collins observed his bestselling book “Good to Great”. They move from Good to Great and enjoy enviable corporate longevity.

Many organizations after their initial success forget about this need for continuous upgrade. They get caught up in their current competencies and current success and their focus shifts to defending their current turfs. Their priorities are maximizing short term benefits and comforts and they get excited with unproductive corporate rituals that do not create value for the clients and thus to the organizations. Jack Welch and Lou Gerstner have explained about their experience on corporate bureaucracy in established and successful companies like GE and IBM and how it stifled the growth and innovation even to the extent of brining the organization to near extinction. As the famous adage goes the ‘Barbarians at the gate will walk in and dominate the board rooms’. Those who cannot feel comfortable with this leave and those who are happy to maintain status quo get to be the majority. Quoting Jim Collins again; “Most companies build their bureaucratic rules to manage the small percentage of wrong people on the bus, which in turn drives away the right people on the bus, which then increases the percentage of wrong people on the bus, which increases the need for more bureaucracy to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline, which then further drives the right people away, and so forth.” (Good to Great, P. 121).

When this happens, the value creation suffers and organization becomes internally focused; focused on a variety of processes and rituals creating lots of paperwork that keeps everybody busy, that gives reason to pat each other’s shoulders irrespective of creation of new growth opportunities for the company. Product innovation and service upgrades stop and secretarial, legal and bureaucratic trapeze come to the forefront. Internal debates cease to be on ideas; but on gossip about events and people.

This is the reason the mortality rate of companies is quite high. I am not referring to the almost 90% mortality of the start-ups within one year of their launch; but of companies which have successfully established and performed at least for a decade. Look around, successful companies which have sustained their success or even survived for 25 years are very few anywhere in the world. A Business week article has pointed out that "The average life expectancy of a multinational corporation-Fortune 500 or its equivalent-is between 40 and 50 years. This figure is based on most surveys of corporate births and deaths. A full one-third of the companies listed in the 1970 Fortune 500, for instance, had vanished by 1983-acquired, merged, or broken to pieces.Human beings have learned to survive, on aver-age, for 75 years or more, but there are very few companies that are that old and flourishing" [1] And that is why companies and organizations have to have a conscious strategy to address this".


The world we have created is a product of our thinking; it cannot be changed without changing our thinking. Albert Einstein



[1] http://www.businessweek.com/chapter/degeus.htm

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Be Relevant or Perish

I remember a story by Somerset Maugham. I don’t remember the details, only the outline. This is the story about a gentleman, let us call him George, who at the age of 45 decided to call it a day from his active career and worldly responsibilities to truly enjoy the remaining part of his life. He was not married and had no immediate family to worry about. He was not a very rich man either. So he put all his saving in a pension plan, which would give him an annuity for 25 years. He planned his annuity in such a way that the payment would run out when he turned 70. He claimed that if he was still alive after the last annuity payment, he would end his life too. For the next 25 years he had a very pleasant and enjoyable life; but, he was still a healthy man when the last cheque arrived. He did not have the guts to end his life and had had to struggle to for his life after that.

This is an extreme case. But we see variations of this around us, among people and among organizations. Some are outcome of conscious decisions, some are outcome of irresponsible planning and some are outcome of circumstances.

Many people do save for their retirement. The nest egg they build up may give certain payout which is quite comfortable. But the saving they have is invested in a fashion that the assets no more appreciate and therefore the regular cash flow remains the same in absolute terms. With the kind of longevity we enjoy these days, many would live for 20 to 30 years post retirement. As the times goes, even with a moderate inflation, the buying power of the regular cash flow diminishes, and on the other side the expenses increase; especially on account of health related costs. By then there are no more avenues for new income opportunities as we are outdated and or incapacitated.

Many of us are familiar about this possibility and plan for this. But there is yet another facet of our life where we often forget about gradual obsolescence. It is about our competence and skill sets. We study hard and acquire skills and qualifications as youngsters. Then we get into a career or profession or business, based on the skills and expertise we have built. Once we are on a job or profession some of us fail to continue with the discipline of investing in ourselves; in updating our skills sets or familiarizing with new developments in our domain or acquiring new skill sets. We get caught up in our immediate and urgent demands of our job, our family and our social obligations. This is specially so for those who have managed to get placed in government jobs or other organizations which are large and stable and need lots of people to handle routine activities. In other words, an organization where uncertainty related to sustenance is low. We get caught up in pushing papers, bureaucratic maneuvers and window dressing; actions that don’t build the business or build people.

Over a period of time, our relevance diminishes gradually. New blood comes in with new skills and new ideas. We get passed over for newer challenges and newer opportunities or even promotions. (Unless we are in an organization which is already dominated by such people in which case we can be a part of the decaying organization and hope that it doesn’t go under before we retire!) As we go up the ladder, the positions and opportunities are limited and competition gets tougher. Unless we can prove that we are the best for the job, we are overlooked. We feel that we are not compensated or given credit for our past achievements. We forget that new opportunities are based on our relevance for future demands and not for past performance.

On the other hand some of us continuously build on our strengths so that our past experience complements our new skills and capabilities we acquire and together they are still relevant to the world around. We don’t deep freeze our brain but try to keep it still active and inquisitive. Those of us who have consciously worked on this dimension go onto see their value appreciating with time and till such time our health permits we continue to be in demand for what we can deliver and not what we have delivered. (Then we will be in the fortunate position to choose whether or how to monetize or enjoy this value.)

“I dread the word success. To have succeeded is to have finished one’s goal in life. Like the Male Spider that gets eaten up once it succeeds in its courtship. I like the world of continuous becoming. With a goal in front and not behind” Barnard Shaw

Dare to Differ

In his famous book “Wisdom of the Crowds” James Surowieky has brilliantly explained how a number of average people can pool their collective wisdom to make outstanding estimations, decisions and predictions, better than what many brilliant people achieve individually. He does not claim that this is a magic solution. Neither does he claim that if zillion monkeys are given typewriters, possibly we will see the complete works of Shakespeare. (If that was the case we should be seeing at least one at www!). He is making a point that if we find a method for pooling together inputs from a large number of independent individuals with divergent views, then there could be many questions where the crowd would can come up with better results.[1]

Nature has also endowed such skills and processes to harness collective wisdom of agents who are individually endowed with limited knowledge and skill to build brilliant solutions. The way ants forage for food, the way bees select locations for their new hive, the way termites build mounts with weather control systems using natural energy with the sophistication that human beings have not yet achieved, are a few examples of how nature uses the wisdom of the crowds [2]

Democratic process we use in election of government, price discovery of goods and services in the markets and exchanges where various assets are traded among a large cross section of participating agents are examples how humans harness this wisdom of the crowds.

There are a few critical requirements for achieving meaningful results from large groups. They are: (i) diversity of knowledge of participants (ii) independence exercised by the agents (iii) mechanisms to pool this divergence; that bring about unimaginable solutions.

In the animal kingdom of ants and bees, this divergence and independence is hardwired. Human beings are also capable for this divergence; however there are many contexts and environmental conditions where this fails and the crowd or mob behaviour set in; where divergence fails and the group follows some crazy bubbles, fads or madness. (There are examples of such mob behaviour also among animals when nature uses this to trim overcrowding)

We have seen this in market bubbles, we have seen this in the similarity of strategies used my multiple fund managers, we have seen this in mob violence and so on. This depends on the context and the environment. Sometimes this is also misused by political leaders to serve their purpose.

Not just bee colonies or exchanges can benefit from the wisdom of the crowds, companies can also benefit by building environment that encourage diversity and dissent. Many company leaderships and bureaucracies don’t nurture environment for such dissent. The hierarchical structure and the feudal culture often suppress dissent, insecurity of the leaders encourages sycophancy and misguided sense of loyalty promotes conformance. Dissent is often equated to disloyalty to the organisation whereas it could be an expression of true loyalty. As Howerd Zinn observed; “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism”

Orson Welles has expressed this with a very interesting, rather cynical, example in his book ‘The Third man’: “In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror murder and bloodshed. But they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace. And what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!” [3]

This is not to suggest that the companies should encourage violence and conflicts. But it is essential to encourage diversity, dissent and competition for good ideas, if we plan to build performing teams. Very often in the normal corporate settings this does not occur naturally unless leaders actively encourage and incentivize such behaviour.

“Loyalty to the country always. Loyalty to the government when it deserves it” Mark Twain


1. Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowieky
2. Smart Swarm, Peter Miller
3. The Ape in the corner office. Richard Conniff

Break the silos

I understand that one of the primary missions of Google is to organise world’s information. As a part of this dream it embarked on a project of scanning books and creating a digital library as early as 2001. It approached this dream in a systematic fashion. It worked on strengthening the technology for speedy and efficient scanning, it interfaced relentlessly with the libraries to give it access to their treasures and it established infrastructure to handle this volume. It also had to address legal issues relating to copy rights.

Although they had proceeded quite ahead, even by 2006, they were still far short of their ultimate dream of having a large number of books in their digital library. This was not yet sure place to hit upon the scanned images of many books we are looking for. So in 2007 it came up with an innovation. It added to its book search a means to link all publically available information about any books from various sources like online library catalogues, web references on books, book reviews and a host of such sources which had rich information about any books.

They really did not have to wait till 2007 to launch this innovation. They had most of this information available with them as early as 2004. It is just that the team of Google book search did not get the idea to look at the other division in their own company and make their project more meaningful. Once they linked all these silos the outcome is truly marvellous. {1}

Today, if you want to know about practically any book, the best place to search is Google Books. If it is not available in the list of scanned books, we still can get a lot of information about the book we are searching for. As they have huge cache of scanned books, we can even search from these scanned books, on the basis of key words. A truly brilliant functionality!

We learn some lessons from this little story.

Silos within: One of the core strengths of Google as a company is encouragement they give and the environment they create for people with diverse skills and from diverse teams to interact with each other. That is one reason though late, such a solution evolved. Even then the solution which in retrospect looks so obvious did not evolve overnight.

But in many organisations we see silos; the silos that don’t talk to each other, the silos created and protected by leaders who lack vision; the silos maintained by insecurity; the silos encouraged by Tuglaks who believe in ‘divide and rule’. These silos then become sinks for innovation where status quo becomes the norm.

Cross Pollination: If there are mechanisms in place to inter-connect silos, if not break them, the benefit that we can mange would be beyond imaginations. We will find learning from one group which solved a problem, giving ideas, and generating new solutions to the problems in another area.

In his book “Future of Management” Garry Hamel has discussed the key ingredients that are required for longevity of organisation and institutions. One of the five key factors he has discussed is the contribution of diversity of knowledge, culture, ideas, and expertise present in any group.

Passion and Commitment: In any team, company and organisations there are two kinds of people.

(i) Those who are there only for a salary. They come to office, do what is required of them to do, to the extent they can get away with, they react to emergencies and problems more in the nature of blaming somebody or to cover their derriere than to find a solution. Their priorities are driven by what makes then look good and what their bosses are excited about than what is important for the organisation. They keep looking at the clock for the closing time; their leaves are planned for their convenience with no regard for organisational challenges.

(ii) Those who share the dream, the vision and are passionately committed to and involved in what they are part of. They have in the back of their mind, processes running looking for new ideas and new solutions from everything they read, see or come across. They behave almost like young men/ girls who have been smitten and are constantly looking for ways to please their loved ones. Their priorities are driven by what can make a difference to the team/ project/ company / organisation they belong to and how they can make the life better for their clients. When they are so passionately involved they are able to crack insurmountable problems. It is this phenomenon that is expressed in the famous quote from Alchemist “If you believe in something the whole world will conspire to make it happen for you”.

These learning are relevant for any organisation whether private or public. Any organisation that attempts to break down silos, encourage cross pollination of ideas and instil commitment and passion will see emergence of unique solutions, killer applications and exciting products that elevates them to new heights. Those who fail in these are destined to have a place in the history a place they will share with dinosaurs.

There are three ways of dealing with difference: domination, compromise, and integration. By domination only one side gets what it wants; by compromise neither side gets what it wants; by integration we find a way by which both sides may get what they wish.- Mary Parker Follett


[1]Planet Google, Randall Stross

“Are you being watched?”

Radia tapes controversy is about the tapping of tele-conversations of Nira Radia by the informant agencies, the celebrated lobbyist had with a cross section of powerful people from industry, politics, press and a host of other power brokers. This incident has raised a host of questions.

Is it right to tap private conversations? We can say that when there is serious suspicion about possible legal violations, the law enforcing bodies have the right to eavesdrop to help them in their enforcement or to protect the sovereignty of the country. On the other hand how do we ensure that this right is not misused for political gains and industrial espionage? What kind or processes do we put in place to ensure that this is not a means to suppress dissent and democratic processes?

Then the next question is whether it was right to have leaked this information to public domain? These were not private conversations or business secrets or even some escapades which have no social relevance except for satisfying the voyeuristic inclinations of a perverted few. These were conspiracies by people in power, to defraud the public. Don’t the public have a right to know?

The ‘wiki leaks’ has established a forum for the whistle blowers to bring to light conspiracies, corruption and machinations of very powerful people which otherwise would not have been possible because of possible repercussions. It has got kudos and criticisms.
‘The organization won a number of awards, including The Economist's New Media Award in 2008 and Amnesty International's UK Media Award in 2009. In 2010, the New York City Daily News listed WikiLeaks first among websites "that could totally change the news", and Julian Assange was named the Readers' Choice for TIME's Person of the Year in 2010. Supporters of Wikileaks in the media have commended it for exposing state and corporate secrets, increasing transparency, supporting freedom of the press, and enhancing democratic discourse while challenging powerful institutions. At the same time, several U.S. government officials have criticized WikiLeaks for exposing classified information, harming national security, and compromising international diplomacy.[Human right organizations such as Amnesty International criticized WikiLeaks for not adequately redacting the names of civilians working with the U.S. military. Some journalists have criticized the lack of editorial discretion when releasing thousands of documents at once and without sufficient analysis. Among negative public reactions in the United States, people have characterized the organization as irresponsible, immoral, and illegal.’ [1]

Incidences like this and revelations of this magnitude were once only occasional occurrences. But the progress in technology has gradually been chipping away the concept of privacy and secrecy the way we are familiar.

The ubiquitous availability of electronic communication and electronic recordings are giving a different dimension to private conversations. I am not talking about spying which is still considered illegal (except if it is by the authorities who have the right to do so) I am talking about stronger evidences that can reveal the truth about what transpired in a meeting where you and I were present.

For example, although oral contracts always were recognized by law, it was often difficult to prove the validity of the contract. We addressed this by having more people to participate our discussions who could act as witnesses. But even then it was your word against mine. So in critical meetings we started the practice of signed minutes. But this again had the limitation of doctored minutes, ingenuity of the minute writer and limitation of human memory or event the minutes getting lost. It also could not capture the nuances of the conversations which are discernable only when we listen to the way dialogues were delivered. Now the technology provides us with tools to have voice notes, voice minutes and even video notes. It is perfectly legal and even moral if you are not eves dropping or if you are not sharing it with those who are not meant to have access to it. It is ‘the true minutes of meeting’ that can better represent the truth.

Earlier paper documents could vanish could not be traced and would have been too painful to track. But today the mails and files are stored for eternity at very low cost and computer can help us to trace and track these with ease based on key words, dates and so on.

More and more of our friends are going online and share photos and videos of events where we were a part. More people are going to blog about us, more people are going to study, dissect and publish opinion about what we do. We have limited control over these. The higher we go, the more publically relevant what we do, the more open is going to be our acts of commission and omission.

Wiki leaks and the likes of it are going to make whistle blowing easier. Legal enablement of the right to information reduces our ability to hide and obfuscate under official secrets act. Cheaper storage, stronger searches, powerful algorithm to match and generate profiles will make it easier for anybody to obtain a much better understanding of what we are and what we do. As the Economist observed in an article, Wiki Gaga, “Such freedom may test the limits of democracy, in which rights to speech are balanced by duties to privacy and security” [2]

All these are nudging us to change the way we talk and behave. Be more honest in our dealing and more truthful or at least careful in our uttering and behaviour. Bluffing our way through is not the obvious option any more. When we mess up, remember it may not remain a secret all the time. On the other hand we must also learn to be less judgemental about human follies often revealed out of context in the digital world and learn to forget and forgive

As Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University has pointed ‘Our character, ultimately, can’t be judged by strangers on the basis of our Facebook or Google profiles; it can be judged by only those who know us and have time to evaluate our strengths and weaknesses, face to face and in context, with insight and understanding. In the meantime, as all of us stumble over the challenges of living in a world without forgetting, we need to learn new forms of empathy, new ways of defining ourselves without reference to what others say about us and new ways of forgiving one another for the digital trails that will follow us forever.’[3]

I am not making any value judgement of whether this is right or wrong. I am only pointing out that we are moving towards a more open society and whether we like it or not there is a pretty high chance that what we thought to be confidential may not remain so and we have no option. (Read up “Privacy Fantasies” for some futuristic thoughts on this topic)


“You already have zero privacy - get over it” Scott McNealy, Cofounder of SUN Micro System

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks
2. http://www.economist.com/node/16335810
3. The Web Means the End of Forgetting. The New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/magazine/25privacy-t2.html?_r=1)

Fire in the belly

Over the weekend I was at IIT Kanpur. I was there to talk to students who had come from the best engineering schools across India to participate in the Asian leg of the annual Intercollegiate Programming Competition. The top team from India will be selected to participate in the world finals which will have about 80 teams selected from about 60 centers across the world.

I spent some time talking to the judges who have been associated with this event a number of times. One of them was a young lecturer from Bangladesh who had reached the finals twice.
The profs told me that in the world competition the top ten places are always bagged by the teams from Russia and China. The best performance from the teams from India ever was a rank of 29.

“How come India which is supposed to be a powerhouse of software development does not fare well?” I asked

“The Chinese kids do a lot of preparation. The colleges give them enormous support. In fact I understand that they even give really good team members relaxed schedule to complete their other curriculum schedules” one of the faculty explained.

I found it quite familiar. We hear similar stories about the focused development support institutions and government provide for development of international competitiveness in different fields including sports in countries like China and Russia. We also need to build such national priorities and support systems to see our competitiveness boosting.

“But then how do you explain the kids from Bangladesh doing better than Indian kids”

“That is a different dimension of performance. These kids are full of passion and are desperate to prove to the world that they are good” The Professor explained.

“With the IT Industry booming, our kids are sure of the job opening irrespective of their academic performance. So they don’t want to put in the hard work needed to be even to participate in the world finals; forget being the world champions.”

“In the Asian leg, practically no teams from IITs ever reach the top positions in the recent past. It is the students from the institute from the next rung that end up in the top 10. In fact the team from Indonesia & IIIT Hyderabad topped this year.” the Prof continued.

“I agree. The inner passion to demonstrate our software credentials helped leaders like Moorthy, Nandan, Bagchi, Soota and their team to slog it out and build large software powerhouses from India. Our kids have it easy these days!”

I remembered what my good friend Ajay had explained to me as a possible contributing reason why Jewish race has managed to win more than 175 Nobel prices though they form a very small proportion of global population. They had been exposed to multiple occasions of severe persecution and they were pushed to their limits for survival. This trial by fire could be one of the reason for their outstanding performance in various fields.

It is a well understood fact that whether it is in sports, computer programming or business one of the key essentials for success is ‘fire in the belly’, a ‘burning desire’ to make a mark. It is of equal importance at the top, at the bottom and in between. If the top dog has no ambition to build, his team will also settle down and relax. If the top dog has ambition but he fails to build a team that share his dream then too the results will be limited. When any organisation get to be dominated by people who have retired in their hearts, it will be the beginning of the end.

And that is the challenge that any leadership faces..

“If you ask people to reach, to think creatively, and produce extraordinary results, they usually will. Too often in our modern world they are simply not asked” John Wood, Founder, Room to Read

To be or Not to be: Part 6 - The Larger Good ?

I was about 18 years old and I used to be a very active member of a youth group in our area. We had a great bunch of talented guys and girls in this group and we used to have lots of fun cooking up interesting stuff together.

Once we decided to organise a cultural evening; an evening of drama, songs and dance for us to perform and show-off. I was the secretary of the group and played an active role in organising the program. I wanted to use this as an opportunity to get wider participation from the youngsters in the area. So I invited them to participate in the event. Among them there was a girl who was very talented, good looking and a bit arrogant who had never actively participated in our earlier programs except for occasional guest appearances. (Let us call her Monica) I asked her to participate in our cultural evening and she agreed. (May be she could not resist my charm!) She volunteered to be the Master of Ceremonies (MC). She sat through the rehearsals to get a good idea of the various programs, helped us to organise them in a creative sequence and worked out nice introductions for each item which was developed with quite a lot or research to include nice quotes and humorous quips. I was really impressed by the work she did.

On the day of the program, we practiced the whole day and late in the afternoon I went home, had a bath, put on nice clothes and returned to the venue. Then a delegation of few guys from our group who were part of many of the main items for the day, like drama, skit and group songs, approached me.

“We don’t want Monica to be the MC today” Their leader told me.

“Why? She has put in a lot of efforts for this and has done a fabulous job” I replied.

“We don’t care. If she is the MC we will not participate in any programs today”, retorted their leader.

“But you should have expressed your concern earlier. Not at the last moment”

“Nothing doing, it is our decision now”.

I tried my level best to persuade them; begged, pleaded, appealed to their sense of right and wrong and tried to call their bluff. No luck.

If I didn’t heed to their demand many of the items of the day would be cancelled. Many youngsters (in addition to the few who led the anti Monica rebellion) who were part of these programs would be devastated. Also, with the star items cancelled the program would be turn out to be a flop.

On the flip side, if I did heed to their demand, it would be unfair to Monica who had put in so much of effort to knit up a wonderful story line for introductions. Not just that, without the MC, the punch of the program would also be lost; unless I convince her to sacrifice for the greater good, share the story line and get somebody else to do the MC Job.

We can argue the merit of each of these options. Sacrifice many for one? Or Sacrifice one for many? It was double bind, a Morton’s fork; I was stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea.

We face these kinds of dilemmas in our day to day work. Take a few examples; (i) A client comes to us with a complaint. The mistake is ours; but it will be difficult for him to fix it on us. If we accept his demand, there is a cost to the company and one of our colleagues could be in trouble. (Recently Toyota had to go through a similar kind of situation) (ii) We made a goof up in our work. It is easy to bury the mistake and our role in it; but the company will have to pay the price. (iii) We want to push some of our agenda; but one colleague could stand in our way. Should we try to get him out of the company?

Some of us have a simple rule. Choose the option that serves our purpose the most. Some of us want to do what is right. Even this distinction is often blurred and contextual. There are two important factors that will determine whether and when we will compromise doing the right thing. It is the balance between the stakes involved and the strength of our moral conviction in the particular case.

Then what is that could leverage our moral conviction? May be the habit that we develop (Our parents, teachers and Society helped us to develop) would encourage us to choose the right thing most of the times. As Aristotle observed “Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts”. If we develop this habit, we will at the least try to reflect for a moment what is right instead of just what we want. When more people think in this manner most of the time, we will have a civilized society.

Sometimes it is difficult to identify what is right. The reasons tell us one and the conviction the other. From time immemorial the thinking man has tried to find a method to figure this out. Mythologies address this question extensively. Yet do we have the answer? When we get “the answer” to this question, I think we will become one with the god; attain the “true nirvana”

Till then it is a search, and that is what we call life ...

About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after. Ernest Hemingway

100th Milestone Part II - Learning

Continued from last week.. My experience in blogging

My enterprise of writing a weekly blog has helped me enormously. Most importantly it taught me the meaning of the quote “If there is a will there is a way”

It has also taught me the discipline of thinking through issues and doing some research. Normally many thoughts and ideas drift through our mind. But when I sit down to consolidate my thoughts as a post, it helps me to focus and get a better hang on the related issues, it questions some of my assumptions and it forces me to take a position which I am not afraid to share.

Some of what I write are original. Some are new ways of presenting an idea or thought, some are sharing of experience and some are remixes of interesting stuff. The postings I like best are based on my experience. They also frustrate me the most, because it is quite an arduous task to remove the characters and the context to distil the learning. Nevertheless, it is fun. There are of course occasions when I long to reproduce the incidences and the context in ‘as is’ format, which would have been much more hilarious. But then my good senses prevail and I postpone them for my post retirement entertainment :-)

I realized that taking a position in public (not in front of a few people whom we know) is scary for many reasons.

(i) When I articulate my stand in a few written words, it may not succeed in communicating what I meant. (may be my failure in communication)
(ii) As I try layered writing which helps the reader find a meaning in their context, sometimes some people read a meaning that I never imagined. Especially some creative minds may work overtime in coming out with divergent interpretations
(iii) Sometimes the underlying meaning touch some sensitive heart (especially if is perceived to be rubbing them the wrong way) and could bring about a violent reaction. This is specially the case when I write about public policy or governance.

I have realized that these are the risks I should I accept if I decide to publish my thoughts. But I do believe that it is the right of every reader to interpret anything that he reads and to react or respond as he chooses. I cannot and should not complain..Like Voltaire remarked " I don't agree with what he says; but I will defend to death his right to say so"

Writing my blog has been an enriching experience because it improves my articulation, the feedback I get from smart people extends my horizon of learning, it gives me an idea of how different people react to the same stuff and most importantly it forces me to think.

After every posting I am filled with trepidation on how it is going to be received. How many people will read it and how many will like it. The tracker tells me that on an average there are 150 to 200 clicks for each of my posts which come from all over the world. Half the readers are from India and another quarter from US. I get readers from UK, Denmark, Korea, China, Australia, Italy, Singapore, Hong Kong, Germany, Austria and so on. It really makes me feel good and encourages me to continue with my initiative.

Another great benefit of this venture is that it has helped me to be aware and familiar with the new options evolving in communication technologies and social media. I look at the new blog features, figure out new gadgets to be attached, experiment with social media and viral marketing options. It has also given me lots of new friends who are willing to share their ideas.

Some of my friends who have been reading my posts on a regular basis have been nudging me to consolidate all my blogs to a book. The idea excites me. Two things are holding me back. (i) I am scared (ii) I seem to have very little time to take up this project. But now I feel confident to take a public position again. This confidence arises from the partnership that has been promised by one of my old time friends Sankarankutty, who is well read, has a good writing style and has a sophisticated taste for artistic expression; complementing what I have and don't have.

As most things about life this too is a journey...

There are high spots in all of our lives and most of them have come about through encouragement from someone else. I don't care how great, how famous or successful a man or woman may be, each hungers for applause. - GEORGE MATTHEW ADAMS