The "TATA" IPL: the IPL is no longer a "shady operation"

 

Nine years ago, the historian Ramachandra Guha asked the question – “why is it that companies like the Tatas, the Mahindras, or Infosys have not promoted an IPL team?”

Ram Guha just got his answer.

I’m watching the Tata IPL auction on TV right now.

That’s right. The Tata IPL.

India’s most sacred, most sanctified, most celebrated corporate brand is now the IPL’s title sponsor.

Ram’s point nine years ago was that the IPL was a “shady operation run by shady characters”, that “the IPL is representative of the worst sides of Indian capitalism and Indian society. Corrupt and cronyist, it has also promoted chamchagiri (sycophancy) and compliance”.

With the Tata’s now lending their name, there is no way the IPL can be described as “run by shady characters” or as “representative of the worst sides of Indian capitalism”.

What happened?

Time elapsed.

My inner amateur historian (Ram Guha is a professional historian) has noticed that most innovation starts outside the establishment. People associated with the innovation are vilified as “corrupt”, “cronyist”, “shady operators”, “tasteless”, “cheats”, “frauds” etc. This vilification intensifies as the innovation gathers momentum. Until, at some point, the innovation is simply adopted by the establishment, the former “shady operators” become “visionaries”, and pillars of the establishment like the Tata’s, Mahindra’s and Infosys lend their name to that innovation.

I guess that has now happened to the IPL. It is now one of the pillars of the establishment, proudly wearing its Tata badge.

Kohli's team needs more players who are NOT like Kohli

Virat Kohli clearly sets the tone for the Indian Cricket Team
He needs more leaders around him, who are NOT like him

Should members of a team be tightly-knit?

Should a team be a band of brothers, so close that they can live each other’s lives, complete each other’s sentences, and even sense each other’s unspoken thoughts? Should they foster this sense of brotherhood by living every waking minute of their lives together, eating the same meals, listening to the same music, wearing the same clothes, sloping their shoulders at the same angle, sporting the same scruffy beards?

This is a Goldilocks problem. Some unity is clearly good. Too much of this good stuff is counter-productive. It creates group think (or more precisely, group feel). The hard part is to get the balance just right.

What we just saw from the Indian cricket team in England is both the good and the bad side of this Goldilocks problem.

In the Lord’s test, it was thrilling to see the passion, commitment, and belief in this Indian team. The energy India created was so thick that I could have cut it with a knife 5,000 miles away. They created this magic by feeding off and amplifying each other’s intensity.

Two weeks later, at Headingley, the same team were flatter than a dosa (or a pancake). They reminded me of Woody Allen’s truism: that eighty percent of success is just showing up. Our boys didn’t show up. Sure, there was technique involved – the optimal Headlingley length is about a yard and a half fuller than a Lord’s length – but this team has enough resources to have learnt and acted on that technical difference. We didn’t learn quickly enough. We weren’t unlucky. We were uninspired.

England feed off each other's energy
At Headingley, day 4

How can a team go from magical to uninspired in one match? When they’re too close to each other. When their moods, thoughts and feelings are too contagious. Or, when their moods, thoughts and feelings are being orchestrated by one individual. When that happens, the team starts to act like a single organism rather than a set of individuals with distinct minds and roles. When that happens a team, in any walk of like, the team's performance see-saws or yo-yos. They lack the resilience and stability a team should have. 

I think that is happening to Virat's Indian team. When a couple of members get inspired, several others lift their game. When a couple of them get into a funk, several others also get into a funk. This team is too united.

In the long sweep of history, this unity is an excellent thing.

My generation of cricket fans remember the long painful years when the Indian cricket team was anything but united. We remember the time of Gavaskar vs. Kapil Dev regional politics, of the East Zone quota (Barun Burman? Pranob Roy?), of the time when Raj Singh Dungarpur appointed Azharuddin captain to clip the wings of players asking for their fair share of the economic value they were creating, and – the lowest point in our history - the way Azharuddin went on to make money in his own way by throwing matches for bookies. After all those horrors, the unity, continuity, ambition and therefore excellence we’ve seen in the age of Ganguly, Dhoni and Kohli has been a delight.

This unity can’t be taken for granted. We need only look around at the West Indies, Sri Lanka or Pakistan to know the cost of disunity. These countries continue to produce talented individuals. They haven’t had a decent team since Brian Lara, Arjuna Ranatunga or Imran Khan because they haven’t found strong leadership and therefore unity. India has been the only third-world/ emerging-market team consistently challenging the traditional superpowers of England and Australia in the twenty-first century, because we’ve consistently found leadership and unity, because we’ve learnt to play as a team rather than as individuals.

But in the short sweep of history, a couple of “outsiders” – players who haven’t been in the India-bubble for a long time, who break up the (comfortable) unity of the team – will surely help. 

The team can be united without the players thinking and sounding alike. What Khalil Gibran's Prophet said about marriage, "let there be spaces in your togetherness", applies to teamwork as well.

Virat's team needs more independent characters, fresh voices, contrarian thoughts, un-synced emotions. The team needs more mood-makers who can pick up the baton when Kohli is just exhausted, who can balance him out, who can zig when the rest of the team are zagging. 

I don’t think this is going to happen. All the signals from the dressing room are that Virat Kohli will double down on the guys, especially the batters, already in the playing eleven. Which means no "outsiders". Faith easily hardens into stubbornness.

If it’s any consolation, even the best Indian companies - Infosys, Tata Sons, HDFC Bank - have all had their share of difficulties in renewing their executive teams. Its not easy, but it is worth it. 

MSD: Bill Gates :: VK : Steve Jobs
Did Steve Jobs have strong voices around him?

PS: Yes, I could use this thought for a corporate workshop on building an executive team with resilience and bench-strength...

The Power of Shiva's Third Eye. Now Known to Science as "Anthro-Vision"

Lord Shiva 
Also known as Triambakesh - the God with the third eye

Why does Shiva have a third eye?

To see the most important things.

And what are these most important things?

The things which cannot otherwise be seen.

___________________________________________

This interpretation of Shiva’s third eye – that it is for the most important things, the things which cannot otherwise be seen – has long been a personal favourite. This interpretation just received scientific validation from Gillian Tett, Ph.D.

In her recent book Anthro-Vision, Gillian Tett, a Cambridge-trained anthropologist. explains that this Shivite thought – that the most important things are the things that cannot be seen – is right at the heart of Anthropology. She explains that Anthropology “enables you to see around corners, spot what is hidden in plain sight” by listening to “social silences”, by hearing what is left unsaid. Or, by observing the world through Shiva’s third eye.

Now that the provenance of Gillian Tett’s good ideas are clear, her exhortations to use Anthro-Vision in all walks of life take on an added urgency. Anthro-Vision is God’s will!

So let us open our third eyes, see the most important things, hear the sounds of silence, and therefore gain the empathy, insight and sense of humour needed to make the world a better place. 

Gillian Tett, Ph.D.
wants us to use our third eye

Dear Marie Kondo, Please come to India and play Holi...

Marie Kondo, the Japanese decluttering guru, wearing a signature white dress

Dear Marie,

I love KonMari. Your world famous decluttering method has cleansed my life of meaningless tat. You have filled my life with thoughts and memories that Spark Joy. You have refreshed my senses and renewed my life-spirit, my chi. Thank you.

Marie Kondo meditating
wearing a signature white dress

I love that you always wear white.

Your New York Magazine profile reveals that “Marie Kondo has more in common with a snowflake than with the flesh-and-blood humans around her.” If you are manifesting the energy of a beautiful and unique snowflake, it is natural that your spirit finds expression in pristine white.

I love that you understand strategic marketing. As you explained while shopping at Anthropologie, New York, you always wear white because “It is a part of my brand…my image colour. It is easy to recognize me.”

I come from India. Like you, we Indians understand that objects are animated by spirits. We know that our own spirits are enhanced by honouring and celebrating the spirits that live within things. We understand that less is more. I’m sure KonMari will be a hit in India.

I would therefore like to invite you to India, to grace our shores with your presence and your business.

Please time your visit so you’re here in the spring. When you're here we must celebrate Holi together. You will find thoughts in Holi that both resonate with and build on KonMari.

Indian Actress Alia Bhatt
Started the day in spotless whites
Had fun playing Holi 

The night before Holi, we Indians collect the clutter that has built up in our homes, the objects that no longer Spark Joy. We burn these objects in a bonfire. The negative energies that were trapped in these joyless objects are released, cleansed by the Fire God Agni in the Holika Dahan. I’m sure you will enjoy this decluttering, this Indian oshoji.

The next morning, be sure to dress in your signature whites. Most of India will be wearing whites too. Those whites will remain pristine until we start to play Holi.

When the play starts you’ll be swirled away in a riot of colour, music, drink, food, heat and holy craziness, that replace the tired joyless spirits that were swept away the previous night with energetic, young, joyful spirits. These Holi spirits have a zest for life that won’t stop at a spark of joy, they will light up entire bonfires of joy.

Your whites will not, should not, be pristine by the end of the day. That is the point. To us, this balance between the night before and the morning after, between emptying out and filling up, is as natural as breathing out and then breathing in. It’s a part of the cycle of life.

Do bring your family along when you visit India. Your husband and daughters will love Holi.  

We look forward to seeing you in India soon. And to doing (big) business together,

Cheers,

Moonballs from Planet Earth

Aam Janata playing Holi

Veeru and Basanti at Holi in Sholay

Marie Kondo says "Namaste"
Hope to see you in India soon :)

Virat Kohli deserves credit for India’s amazing win in Australia

Team India at the Gabba with the Border-Gavaskar Trophy 

Victory at the Gabba! What an amazing win! What incredible attitude, spunk, guts and gumption!

Rishabh and Siraj celebrate

India’s amazing test series victory in Australia was achieved while India’s captain and best batsman - Virat Kohli - was away on paternity leave. So, for the past week my social media feed has been buzzing with snarky memes about how Team India is better off without superstar Kohli, or with TED talk style meditations on how “servant leaders” like Ajinkya Rahane are more effective than “alpha leaders” like Virat.

These memes are missing the point. Kohli deserves a ton of credit for this win.

Kohli’s biggest contribution to this moment was in making winning test series abroad India’s #1 priority.

In the later years of MS Dhoni’s captaincy that commitment was never clear. There was always a feeling that Dhoni’s test team were going through the motions rather than playing with belief, intent, or purpose. That sense of drift was obvious on the abysmal England tours of 2011 and 2014. It seemed obvious that MSD enjoyed limited overs cricket more than test matches. The fog never really lifted until Dhoni retired from test cricket.

At that time, it was easy to imagine that Indian cricket would become IPL-land, happy to have some T20 fun, but with no higher aspirations. With a different leader that could easily have happened.

Fortunately, Kohli never had any doubts that his ambition was to make India a great test team.

He brought in other leaders, like Ravi Shastri, who shared this vision. He committed to the workload of playing more tests, to the more arduous scheduling, to the fitness culture needed to maintain a pack of 8-10 genuine quick bowlers who could bowl with intensity after an entire day’s play in any conditions. Kohli prepped India's test team with away-wins in Sri Lanka and the West Indies, with home wins against New Zealand, South Africa England and Australia before setting out to conquer the final frontier – away wins in the SENA nations.

That prize almost eluded him. With a bit of luck India could have won in South Africa in 2017-18. We lost chasing fourth inning targets of 208 in Cape Town and 287 Pretoria. With a bit more luck India could have won in England in 2018. We lost chasing fourth inning targets of 195 in Birmingham and 245 in Southampton. Compare that with the 328 we hunted down against a better attack in Brisbane.

Mother Cricket finally smiled down on Kohli’s team when India finally beat Australia in Australia in 2018-19 for the first time in history. Captain Kohli’s noble quest hadn’t been in vain. The final frontier had been conquered.

If India had the resources to win again in Australia in 2020-21, it is in significant part because of Kohli’s legacy. There is nothing inevitable about having a team of young test players with the chutzpah to beat the Aussies in Australia. Kohli’s ambition, faith and patient team building set this win up.

The point is not to take anything away from the rest of the leadership group.

Most great achievements have many fathers. Rahane’s calm, Shastri’s mental toughness, even Bharat Arun’s tactical nous all contributed to this glorious moment. But leadership is about more than being the khadoos Maratha rock the rest of the team bat around, it is about more than being calm presence in the dressing room, it is more than making the smart field placings. Leadership is also about having a vision for what we will achieve together and having the resourcefulness and patience to develop a team to deliver on that vision. To that extent the leader who gave us the joy of Brisbane 2021 is the nappy-changing daddy Kohli.

Let there be no doubt that Virat has fire in his belly...

...even if he does have a softer side.

Note: I was surfing the web for pictures of Virat and Anushka with the daughter, who was born on the day India saved the Sydney test. The photos on the net right now are all stock images or fakes.

Wikileaks reveals…the importance of table manners

Julian Assange, photographed outside Ellingham Hall

Wikileaks has radically changed the way I see our world. Not the way I see war, liberty or the role of the state – a lot of the material Wikileaks leaked, was, frankly, unsurprising – but the way I see table manners. Wikileaks' leadership team retained what sanity they had, thanks to a regimen of strict table manners.

This thought comes from the excellent documentary We Steal Secrets: the Story of Wikileaks. In it, there is a period when the Wikileaks inner circle of about fifteen people are stuck in Ellingham Hall, Norfolk, on journalist Vaughn Smith’s country estate. They can’t leave Ellingham Hall; the MI6, CIA etc. are out to get them. So they’re stuck in the middle of nowhere, with just each other for company, united only by their distrust of the outside world, each day melting into the next, as weeks run into months which run into years.

How did they manage to keep things civilized? By enforcing very strict rules on table manners. Vaughn Smith and his housekeeper enforced strict table etiquette, three meals a day, for over five hundred days of maddening claustrophobia.

Must have been the same dynamic in colonial officer’s messes, and up in the tea plantations.

Agnieszka Radwanska endorses Cheesecake Factory: the return of real marketing

Aga Radwanska @ Wimbledon

Aga Raswanska now endorses Cheesecake Factory. 

Refreshingly, she actually likes the Cheesecake Factory. She isn't just endorsing a random brand because they paid her lots of money.

She has been writing about visits to Cheesecake Factory restaurants on her blog for a couple of years now. "Can you imagine we tried almost every kind of cheesecake there during Indian Wells and Miami? Well except one — peanut butter... because I don't really like peanut butter," she wrote. "It's very close to the hotel, which is dangerous, because we could end up going there every night. We went yesterday. Maybe we'll try to cut down to every second night.". The Cheesecake Factory marketing people picked up on this, and an endorsement deal resulted. 

This feels like what celebrity endorsements ought to be about: not cynical money-making by a "media property", but a well known person sharing her genuine enthusiasm for a brand.  

Aga Radwanska @ The Cheesecake Factory

Satya Nadella: The Rorschach Ink Blot CEO

Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO

Since Satya Nadella’s appointment as Microsoft's CEO, my Facebook news feed and email inbox have been chock-a-block with stories about what Mr Nadella's success means.

Some think Satya Nadella’s success is a triumph for “Indian values, like empathy, patience and humility”. Others think it is “a slap in the face for the Indian system” (because Mr Nadella felt the need to emigrate to the USA); that it reflects the “failure of the IITs” (because such a prestigious tech job went to a guy from lowly Manipal University); that it is a triumph for the game of cricket  (because Satya learnt about leadership and teamwork as a cricket playing schoolboy in Hyderabad); that it reflects the greatness of Amercia (because you don’t have to be Bill Gates’ son to become CEO of Microsoft); that it reflects the failure of America (because homegrown talent lags so far behind educated, motivated immigrants); that it reflects the skills Mr. Nadella learnt at his family dinner table (his father was a senior IAS officer who served on India’s Planning Commission); etc. etc.

All these interpretations are have some basis in fact. But having absorbed all these interpretations, my conclusion is that Satya Nadella's success is a contemporary Rorschach Ink Blot test. Any observer’s interpretation tells you a lot about the observer's state of mind. It tells you little or nothing about the meaning of Mr Nadella’s success, because Mr. Nadella’s success doesn’t actually mean anything, beyond the very specific context of Microsoft’s executive team.

The human brain is amazingly good at seeing patterns, even when there aren’t any patterns to see.

Learning monetary policy from Monopoly

Ben Bernanke, Mervyn King and D Subbarao ought to play more Monopoly. That would teach them a thing or two about the perils of an expansionary monetary policy.

I learnt about the dangers of monetary expansion last weekend, when my daughter challenged me to a game. I nearly lost inside half an hour. I landed on three houses at Oxford Street and had to mortgage King’s Cross and Liverpool station to survive; the end seemed nigh. But then I picked up £200 as I passed Go, then another £150 from Community Chest, and an hour later both my daughter and I were in rude financial health.

In effect, I’d been bailed out by an expansionary monetary policy.

Monopoly has fixed nominal prices (i.e. a hotel room on Pall Mall always costs £625). However the real price of that hotel room is constantly declining. The Bank pumps £200 per player into the economy every round, so money supply is constantly increasing, so “sticky” prices keep getting smaller compared to the money in the game, so, on average, everybody feels richer.

Hotels on Pall Mall and Vine Street are life-threatening early on. As the game develops, the board fills up with houses and hotels, and landing at a hotel on Pall Mall is a mere flea-bite. By now the action has shifted to Mayfair and Park Lane. If the dice roll such that all players survive long enough, even a hotel on Mayfair stops being life-threatening.

From that point on, the players are no longer playing Monopoly, they are playing Comfortable Oligopoly. In this game, the veneer of competition is maintained, but the Bank ensures that nobody actually goes bust, despite the fact that nobody is taking any real risks or making valuable things. There is no natural way of ending this meaningless game. My daughter and I stopped our game only when higher authorities stepped in and decreed that it was lunchtime.

So, policy makers, play a few endless games of Monopoly. Learn that in the short term, monetary expansion can save a few dads from going bust. Learn also that monetary expansion that goes on and on and on robs the world of meaning, until the real economy finally breaks through and produces lunch.

PS: I wonder if the great monetarists Milton Friedman and Robert Lucas suffered through a few endless games of Monopoly?

My beloved homeland: the 1990s

I’m homesick.
I want to go home,
to a place where I feel safe,
to a place where I know stuff,
like I know that democracy is good,
that capitalism will save us from poverty,
that the Rio summit will save the planet,
and that Sanjay Manjrekar’s immaculate technique will elevate him to Gavaskar-esque greatness.

I want to know that MTV VJ Sophiya Haque is cool, achingly so,
and that institutions reinvent themselves,
sort of, like, Tony Blair reinvented the Labour Party.

I want to know that if I follow my passion,
try really really hard,
give all I’ve got to give,
give with my body, mind and soul,
that I will find not just success, but fulfilment.

Papa I want to go,
Mama I want to go,
Show me the way to go home.

Be an interesting guy

Dom Barton of McKinsey & Company

I'm on my first day at a new job. I've just joined McKinsey and Company, one of the world's finest organizations.

My cohort of new joiners is meeting the Global Managing Partner, Dominic Barton. Very nice for our first day in. Dom welcomes us into the firm, tells us about the firm's heritage and values, and gives us some perspective on what it takes to succeed at the firm. Dom's advice: "Be an interesting guy".

Not client-centricity, thought-leadership, value-creation or some such corporate-speak, but "be interesting". Interesting.

That advice really resonated with me. To me, being interesting is a goal in itself, an essential part of a life well-lived. That is sort of why I started this blog, and keep at it; it keeps open a window to worlds other than family and work-life.

Easier said than done. My blog posting rate, and the complexity of my posts, have dropped off sharply since joining McKinsey. But still, it is nice to know that Dom Barton thinks being interesting is good for your career.

Daniel Barenboim conducts...learning to lead like the great conductors

Daniel Barenboim conducting the West Eastern Divan Orchestra

The BBC Proms, on TV this week, features the West Eastern Divan Orchestra playing the complete cycle of Beethoven symphonies, conducted by Daniel Barenboim. The West Eastern Divan Orchestra are an ensemble of accomplished musicians from the Middle East, with a compelling story about trying to bring understanding and harmony to that troubled region; they are playing Beethoven's symphonies, unquestionably some of the greatest music ever conceived. Yet the advertising tag-line reads "Daniel Barenboim conducts...". Is this fair? Does the conductor add so much value that he deserves to be the headline act?

I don't have a closed-ended answer to that question, but I am convinced that a conductor adds real value. This is thanks a one of the most memorable business leadership development programs I've attended - The Music Paradigm, with Roger Nierenberg.

This program is built on the premise that a leader in a business corporation is like the conductor of an orchestra. In a business, a machinist, statistician or accountant knows much more about her or his speciality then the Vice President or General Manager every will, like in an orchestra, the violinist, flautist or cellist are more skilled at their respective instruments than the conductor will ever be. The General Manager or the conductor is needed to bring the amazing individual performers together, harmoniously, to make music. The Music Paradigm session starts with members of the class, like me, sitting in the midst of the orchestra. Gradually, as everyone gets comfortable with the setting, members of the class volunteer to step up to the podium, pick up the baton, and conduct the orchestra (with Roger Nierenberg's help).

Roger Nierenberg helps a first-time conductor

What made the Music Paradigm unique, different from the dozens of other team-building or leadership development sessions I've attended, was the experience of stepping up to the podium, picking up the baton, and hearing this virtuoso orchestra responding to your gestures by making music. That was powerful, memorable, profoundly emotional, and completely unlike anything I had felt before.

My classmates and I had a debrief after the Music Paradigm session, and our takeaways were very consistent. We all were NT personalities in the Myers Briggs' framework; science or engineering majors who had experienced success as problem solvers. We were veterans of various leadership programs, and had several years of people management experience. We were used to thinking about leadership in terms of setting direction, getting buy-in or sponsorship, pulling together resources, defining roles and responsibilities, setting up incentives - as a series of problems to be solved. What we were less used to was leadership as an emotional experience. Music as a metaphor made it obvious that a conductor's, or leader's, main contribution is in establishing an emotional connection with the players and with the music, that that emotional connection makes the difference between a competent professional performance, and something that sounds very different, an inspired or visionary performance. My classmates and I may not have disagreed with that thought on a PowerPoint slide, but music brought it home in a way that PowerPoint can't.

Itay Talgam's TED talk makes the same point, with video clips of some of the twentieth century's greatest conductors in action. Maybe the next iteration of this talk will include Daniel Barenboim conducting the West Eastern Divan Orchestra. Enjoy...

Keep Ithaka always in your mind...

Came across another classically inspired poem. This time, I didn't randomly spot it on the tube. It came to my inbox in a farewell email from a Greek colleague, Clementina, who dedicated these lines to us:

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvellous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean. 

Ithaka as a metaphor for integrity reminds me of:

"You, who are on the road, 
must have a code, 
that you can live by. 

And so become yourself...".

Ithaka is where you learn that code, the code itself, and where you get to when you've lived by that code. Echoes of the Bhagavad Gita as well, "not expecting Ithaka to make you rich" maps directly to "कर्मण्ये वाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन".

Clementina found some beautiful words with which to acknowledge us, her colleagues, for being a part of her unhurried, marvellous journey, her Odyssey. Cheers Clementina! May Ithaka remain always in your mind.

Jan Morris' Fourth World: In Praise of Idleness

Ox Travels has been resident on my bedside table for several months now. This is a collection of stories by travel writers, each story based on a meeting or encounter that happened while on the road. The stories are evocative, charming, and at about ten pages per piece, are not too demanding - ideal for a dip into another world before drifting off to sleep.

One story I just read in this collection is The Fourth World, by Jan Morris. The Fourth World is Morris' term for the virtual nation of kind people around the world, who together should be a powerful force for the good:

"My own experience, after seventy odd years of the meandering life, is that there exists a kind of vast supranational community whose citizens are essentially kind.

...the qualities of this virtual nation of mine can be elusive...But I know them by now, and I recognize them in all their myriad guises. I have recognized the signs in statesmen as in housewives, in taxi-drivers as in actresses and tycoons - a look in the eye, a smile, a gurgle of laughter is often enough. I knew I was in the presence of an initiate when, one day in the high Himalayas, alone in the high snows, I met a wandering holy man with whom I shared not a word or even a gesture, just an instinct.

...over the years I have come to realize that these people constitute a vast and powerful freemasonry...

I think of them one and all of constituting a Fourth World of their own...an association as wide and varied as my Grand Diaspora, bound only by decency and humour, would surely be unconquerable..."

Morris proceeds to give an Edinburgh barmaid an impassioned spiel about the latent force of the Fourth World, which is the "encounter" in the story. Regardless, I found this notion of the Fourth World seductive. My experience is also that most people, everywhere, are basically kind. I went to sleep thinking that, surely, basic human decency, kindness, the latent power of the Fourth World, will be harnessed one day to make the world a better place.

When I woke up, however, I remembered a paper I read in B-School which shows why it is so hard to engage the power of the Fourth World. Basically, people are kind when they have time on their hands. The same people stop being kind when they get busy.

The paper in question is "From Jerusalem to Jericho: A study of Situational and Dispositional Variables in Helping Behaviour", by Darley and Batson (thank you Google). This study looks at whether or not people stop to help a man slumped in an alleyway, moaning with pain; whether or not people behave like the Good Samaritan in the biblical parable. It found that people with time on their hands stopped to help. Those who were under time pressure, including those who were bustling off to give a lecture on the Parable of the Good Samaritan, did not help. This wasn't a small effect, it was observed in almost all the subjects of this study. People with time were kind, people who were in a hurry were not.

Looked at this way, Fourth World citizenship is situational. It increases when people are feeling time-rich. Perhaps the best thing organized religion did to promote kindness was to enforce the sabbath, to give people the experience of being time-rich, to create a space where time is in our hands, where we're not in the hands of time.

Idleness serves a deep moral purpose, as citizens of the Fourth World and bloggers know...

Why Rafael Nadal is like a Black Swan

"Black Swan" is business-speak for a single observation that demolishes a previously plausible theory. 

The phrase comes from Nassim Taleb's excellent book - The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Suppose one had a theory that "all swans are white". This would have been a really solid theory for a while, it would have been consistent with available evidence, robust to skeptical inquiry. The theory would have held until Australia was discovered, and black swans were observed, at which point the theory is toast. Personally, I find the metaphor a little awkward. But now that it has become a part of the language, it is quite helpful in talking about the limitations of statistics, and the problems that come from looking in the rear view mirror to get a view of the road ahead.

Taleb's book is about finance, but his concept applies to any aspect of life, including tennis. 

Peter Bodo's preview of the 2012 French Open in Tennis magazine talks about why Rafael Nadal is a black swan (though he doesn't use that phrase).  Until Rafa burst on the scene, the prevailing theory was that Bjorn Borg would be the last dominant French Open champion. After Bjorn Borg, who played with a wooden Donnay racquet, French Open champions had been a succession of one-slam-wonders.

"There were solid, well thought out, inter-related reasons for this. The men's field was getting deeper and deeper. At the same time, advances in racquet and string technology gave everyone a boost of power and a more lethal return game. Combine these comparably superior and fit athletes with more powerful weapons, and put them to work on a relatively slow court, and it was a bit like tennis roulette.

It seemed that Roland Garros had been transformed from the tournament that only the best and most consistent players could win into the one that anybody could win. And that was only heightened by the fact that so many of its more successful players were developed on clay in emerging tennis nations like Spain, Sweden, France, and Argentina. When you looked back upon the Borg years, you were apt to think, "We'll not see the likes of him again. . ."

And when Bruguera, who had even more radical technique than Borg, was unable to add to his Roland Garros haul of two, it seemed that the days when style-of-play and particularly vicious topspin might yield a huge advantage were definitely over. 

Well, Nadal has exposed all that as just so much fancy-pants theorizing..."

Good luck in Paris to the King of Clay.

What Ross, Chandler and the F.R.I.E.N.D.S really lived through, by Joshua Ferris

F.R.I.E.N.D.S was more than a successful TV serial, it was a cultural phenomenon. I think it had such a big impact, beyond what one would expect of any well-written, well performed sitcom, because it filled in a gap in popular culture. It was the first extensive exploration of a life stage that people like us now routinely live through, but which falls outside our traditional frameworks of life stages.

Ross, Chandler, Rachel, Monica, Phoebe and Joey have finished with formal education, have started careers, but haven't yet married or started families. This time in life falls somewhere between youth and adulthood, somewhere between brahmacharya and grihastashram in the Hindu tradition. This life-stage is growing: people live longer, young men no longer get drafted into armies, more women are becoming professionals, careers demand ever longer apprenticeships. This is clearly a formative stage in life, at least as formative as the university years. This is the time in life when most of my peers found their professions and life-partners, and solidified their identities. While the angst of both youth and middle age have been mined extensively in popular culture - think Rebel Without A Cause and American Beauty - the angst of this life stage remains relatively unexplored. F.R.I.E.N.D.S captured the public imagination so powerfully because it was good, but also because it was the first show to extensively explore this life-space (the closest benchmark I can think of are one-dimensional rom-coms).

However, for all that, even F.R.I.E.N.D.S didn't explore one huge aspect of this life stage: work. In my experience, this is the life stage when work consumes more psychic energy than anything else. This is the time when the soaring expectations of youth are still very much alive, when the frustrations of the real world are an everyday reality, and when the tension between those two haven't yet found a happy equilibrium.

In real life, a young scientist like Ross probably spends a vast chunk of his energy obsessing about whether his research paper will get published, about where he will get his next grant from, and about how he can get on to this high profile consortium that might lead to a couple of Nobel Prizes. He would spend most of his social time with other research scientists. They would share, and therefore amplify, each other's career anxieties, and gossip endlessly about other research scientists. A young business executive like Chandler would obsess about departmental politics, about the hopeless incompetence of his colleagues, and about whether he should go work on Wall Street and get seriously rich. A few blocks away, journalist Carrie Bradshaw might obsess about whether freelance writing about her friend's love lives will ever win her the Pulitzer Prize, and if she should become a real journalist who risks losing an eye reporting from a war-zone.

In F.R.I.E.N.D.S, work forms the backdrop to the characters' lives. In reality, work would be in the foreground. I accepted that easily, assuming that other people's work-lives are intrinsically boring. It turns out, that assumption was wrong.

I just read this outstanding book called Then We Came To The End, by Joshua Ferris, which takes the work-lives of people like us as its raw material, and turns it into a thoroughly entertaining novel. It is set in an advertising agency, in Chicago. This agency is a big little world. It includes people of all sorts - married people, blacks, people with kids, people with cancer, people who die. But "we", the collective of cool kids from whose viewpoint this story is written, the gang who are the social and spiritual core of the agency, are squarely in the F.R.I.E.N.D.S stage in life.  

A sample of one character's thoughts:

"good God, was work so meaningless? Was life so meaningless? It reminded him of when an ad got watered down by a client, and watered down, until everything interesting about the ad disappeared. Carl still had to write copy for it. The art director still had to put the drop shadow where the drop shadow belonged and the logo in its proper place. That was the process known as polishing the turd. Those two poor saps hosing down the alleyway were just doing the same thing. All over America, in fact, people were up and out of their beds today in a continuing effort to polish turds. Sure, for the sake of survival, but more immediately, for the sake of some sadistic manager or shit-brained client whose small imagination and numbingly dumb ideas were bleaching the world of all relevancy and hope..."

The novel takes a little dig at itself. There is a writer at the agency,

Joshua Ferris

"working on a failed novel. He described it as "small and angry". We all wondered who the hell would buy small and angry. We asked him what it was about. "Work," he replied. A small, angry book about work. Now there was a guaranteed best seller. There was a fun read on the beach. We suggested alternative topics on subjects that mattered to us. "But those don't interest me" he said. "The fact that we spend most of our lives at work, that interests me." Truly noble, we said to him."

That is what this book is. It is a small, angry book about us at work. It has observed us so precisely that the blurb from The Times printed on the back cover is entirely true. "Very funny, intense and exhilarating...for the first time in fiction, it has truly captured the way we work". In a way, Joshua Ferris' book completes the F.R.I.E.N.D.S life experience.

Teaching compassion through drama

"Why don't we teach our children compassion?". 

Roshi Joan Halifax asked this question in the TED talk I posted about last week, implying that we don't do enough to teach our children compassion.

On reflection, I think we do more to teach our children than we generally give ourselves credit for. This teaching is not called "compassion class". It is called drama. For instance, my daughters attend a very popular theater workshop in our neighbourhood. The faculty that they develop through theater is compassion; they learn to get into someone else's skin.

I didn't learn drama as a child, but I did attend a couple of corporate leadership workshops, in America, that were built around acting technique. The idea is - learn to act, get into the other's skin, understand others more completely, communicate better, discover yourself, discover your own authentic leadership voice, and therefore ride away into the golden sunset of promotions and profits - which sounds awfully naff, but was actually quite helpful. 

Work-family balance: one front where Manmohan Singh has it easier than Barack Obama

Jodi Kantor's new book The Obamas reports that "Barack refuses to miss dinner with his family more than twice a week". Apparently, this is not good. Obama's family-centric approach "left him, when the going got tough, short of friends, short of people who owed him, short of people who felt that the White House was interested in them". Effective presidents are meant to be out and about, schmoozing with potential allies.

Powerful men across the political spectrum face the same trade-off - between family time and schmoozing - on this side of the pond. David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband are all in what the Economist calls their "Gruffolo years", the time when dads read stories to their children. By most accounts, all three party leaders make time for their families. 

I clearly sympathize with Obama's and Cameron's choice (I'm writing this after having read out The Blackberry Mouse to my daughters). I want to believe that work can and should be organized so it can be done within defined working hours. But the truth is, there is a trade-off. I inhabit a less exalted world than the Obamas' and the Camerons', but even in my little world, schmoozing is clearly useful, but it is a potentially infinite drain on time and energy.

How much easier it must be for Manmohan Singh. He didn't have to face these hard trade-offs between bedtime stories and professional schmoozing when he became Prime Minister of India, aged 72.  Maybe working into what used to be the "retirement years" isn't all bad.

  

"Let us take what the terrain gives"

"Follow your dream" is advice I have frequently received. This is also advice I have given multiple times. However, in most circumstances, this advice is worse than useless. I need to make choices about my career as a business executive in the here and now. Reminding myself of my childhood dream, to open the batting for the Indian cricket team, doesn't in any way help me make better life choices.

I discussed this in an earlier blog post, titled "Follow your dream, not". More recently, I came across the words "let us take what the terrain gives", which make the same point more elegantly, more positively.

These words were spoken by Daniel Kahneman back in 1996, at a graveside eulogy for his lifelong research partner Amos Tversky. Apparently, "let us take what the terrain gives" was the maxim Amos Tversky lived by. Kahneman went on to win the Nobel prize in 2002, his partner Tversky tragically missed out because he died so young. "Let us take what the terrain gives" is clearly not a case for embracing mediocrity, but it does recognize that "the other side of freedom is the ability to find joy in what one does".

BTW...I loved these pictures of Tversky on holiday in Switzerland in 1972...

Raj Rajaratnam: Nayagan?

தென் பாண்டி சீமையிலே
தேரோடும் வீதியிலே
மான் போல வந்தவனே
யார்  அடித்தாரோ
யார்  அடித்தாரோ


These lyrics are from the theme song of the Tamil film Nayagan. The refrain, "yaar aditharo?" translates to "who hit you?", which is a pretty accurate description of what this Mani Ratnam film is about.

Nayagan is an exploration of what hit a young Tamil boy called Shakti Velu, and turned him into Velu Nayagan, one of Bombay's most feared crime bosses. It tells the story a frightened boy who runs away from a crumbling home, arrives in distant, alien Bombay, gets caught up by chance with the criminal underworld, rises through the crime ranks with his smarts, and when needed, his decisive brutality, yet retains his innate integrity, his decency, his faith, a capacity for empathy. It is based loosely on the life of the real-life Bombay crime boss Varadarajan Mudaliar, and for my money, is one of the best films ever made.

This film came back to mind because I was reading about, and reflecting on, a similar contemporary story.

In this contemporary telling, the distant alien city the young Tamil boy finds himself in is not Bombay, but New York, the criminal underworld is Wall Street. The crime boss in question - the Nayagan - is Raj Rajarathnam. The story teller is journalist Suketu Mehta, who did several hours of interviews with Raj Rajarathnam shortly after his eleven year prison sentence was announced. These interviews contain a fair bit of new information. Rajaratnam was a very private man in his glory days, and these are the first interviews he has given since being charged.

Suketu Mehta's portrayal of Rajaratnam is generally sympathetic. Rajaratnam is portrayed as The Outsider, doing what he had to, to win at a game where the deck was stacked against him.

"He had grown up, as he tells it, in fear: of the Sinhalese majority in his homeland; of the skinheads in Britain where he’d studied; and of the established elites of Wall Street where he did business. At just about every stage of his life, there were people out to get him."

Mehta emphasizes Rajaratnam's community spirit and generosity:

"In New York’s South Asian community there are many stories of Rajaratnam’s generosity. He has given financial support to the Harlem Children’s Zone; the education reformer Geoffrey Canada testified in his support during the trial. He’s also given $250,000 a year for three years to South Asian Youth Action, a Queens-based NGO; his wife, Asha, is on the board..."

He emphasizes Rajaratnam's dignity in adversity: Raj refuses to wear a wire-tap, and refuses to be drawn into any immigrants vs. insiders conspiracy theory.

"Rajaratnam was...being asked by the government to turn on (Rajat) Gupta. But he wouldn’t wear a wire, he says, so he could sleep at night."

"Why so many Indian names in the indictments, I ask. “Because Roomy Khan’s network was Indian,” he explains simply. “They’re not being unfairly targeted. I don’t believe in conspiracy theories. ” His brother Rengan sees it differently. “For years these guys were sitting around in sports clubs and exchanging information. That wasn’t a crime. And now we immigrants do the same thing and it is?”

Mehta emphasizes the contrast between the moral codes and norms of America, and what Rajaratnam grew up with in Sri Lanka.

"The whole story speaks to the South Asian–American community: its pursuit of success and money at any cost; the differences between immigrants and the first generation; and the immigrants’ incomplete understanding of the rigor of the law in the U.S."

The picture that develops through Suketu Mehta's story is of a proud, big-hearted, dignified man, a spirited underdog, more a victim than a villain, who is facing an unprecedented jail term for doing things that he did not see as a serious crime, because so many others around him were doing the same.

The picture that also emerges if that of someone who comes from a familiar milieu, a milieu that I, and I guess most readers of this blog, would find easy to relate to. Rajaratnam is a Tamil, like me. His father was an upright executive, head of the Singer Sewing Machine Company in South Asia. My father was also an upright executive, he worked for Unilever and Ogilvy & Mather advertising in India. Rajaratnam studied business at Wharton, I studied at the University of Chicago. Rajaratnam's face lights up when talking about PG Wodehouse. Mine would too, I come from a devoutly Wodehousian clan.

However, unlike Rajaratnam, I did not attend Dulwich College, the south London public school that Wodehouse himself attended. Rajaratnam spent three years of his life in what once was Wodehouse's room. This is the point at which the similarity in our backgrounds starts to break down; I know several South Asian professionals, I don't know any who sent their children to public school in England. My parents were very well off by the standards of their time, but I don't think they could have dreamt of sending me to public school in England. If anything Rajaratnam seems to come from a background which is similar to mine, but even more privileged.

Understanding this background makes me see Rajaratnam in different light, makes it harder for me to see him as a victim. Yes, there are immigrants to the USA, say Mexican fruit-pickers, who have the "immigrants’ incomplete understanding of the rigor of the law in the U.S", and may consequently break the law. Yes, there have been Sicilian immigrants who stepped on to American soil staring at a stark choice between joining the mafia and being killed by the mafia. A Columbian cocaine mule escaping from a drug cartel, like in the movie Maria Full of Grace, necessarily faces some very hard life choices, like Shakti Velu did when he found himself in Bombay. The choices Rajaratnam faced are just not comparable to the choices faced by these stereotypical, less fortunate immigrants, immigrants whose lives were hit by fate.

Rajaratnam, and his crooked henchmen from McKinsey and Company like Anil Kumar and (presumably) Rajat Gupta, were brought up to be a part of an elite. These guys had real choices. They were fully equipped - by their native intelligence, their privileged upbringing, and by their first rate education - to very quickly understand the "rigour of the law in the U.S.", with all its nuances of meaning. They were equipped to grasp just how sick and cynical Wall Street was. They had the option of trying to be a force for the good. At a minimum, they had the option of not playing and stepping away if the game got too ugly, and going on to live still very comfortable lives. Instead, despite all the privileges that they had been given, they chose to actively embrace the ugliest and most cynical aspects of life on Wall Street.

At the denouement of the movie Nayagan, Velu Nayagan's grandson asks him "Are you a good man or a bad man?". Choked up, Velu Nayagan replies "I don't know".

Velu Nayagan was a murderous mafia don. Yet, when one makes the effort to get into his skin, understand his back-story, and sees where he is coming from, it is hard not to be sympathetic. It is hard to be judgemental. His own moral ambiguity feels appropriate. With Raj Rajratnam, when one makes the effort to get into his skin, understand his back-story, when one sees all the privileges and choices he had, and the cynicism with which he chose to be a crook, it is hard to be sympathetic. Moral ambiguity doesn't feel nearly as appropriate as it did with Velu Nayagan.