Dumbo, the great educator

Psychologists think the ability to delay gratification is central to academic achievement, and more generally, to emotional intelligence.

Consider this Stanford psychology study: four year old children were given the option of a treat right now, say, a marshmallow, or waiting for two marshmallows. Years later, the children who were able to wait had better academic performance (SAT scores) and life outcomes (stronger friendships, fewer behavioural problems) than their more impatient cohorts.

Given this evidence, training children to delay gratification ought to be a central goal of education. The question is how?

The answer: take them to Disneyland.

Last weekend, I witnessed hundreds of children aged between four and twelve stand in line uncomplainingly for over an hour, on a hot, sultry Paris afternoon, to ride Dumbo, The Flying Elephant. The ride itself lasts between two and three minutes. The ride is pretty cool, the rider can make Dumbo fly higher or lower by toggling a little lever. Nonetheless, this was an impressive display of delayed gratification.

If this is what today's youngsters are capable of, it bodes well for the future of civilization.

Play up! play up! and play the game!

There is a breathless hush at the close tonight -
Ten to make and a match to win -
A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
An hour to play and the last man in.

And it's not for the sake of a ribboned coat,
Or the selfish hope of a season's fame,
But his captain's hand on his shoulder smote
Play up! play up! and play the game!

My family's primary religion is cricket. I grew up with these words echoing inside my head, reminding me that cricket is our spiritual calling.

When I recited this poem at my grandparent's dinner parties, or at junior school elocution competitions in Madras, I was vaguely aware that there was more to the poem. But I stopped the recitation at this point. That was probably a good thing. In the Victorian original the next stanzas go:

The sand of the desert is sodden red -
Red with the wreck of a square that broke
The gatling's jammed and the colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed its banks,
And England's far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks -
"Play up! Play up! And play the game!"

This is the word that year by year,
While in her place the school is set,
Every one of her sons must hear,
And none that hears it dare forget.
This they all with a joyful mind
Bear through life like a torch in flame,
And falling fling to the host behind -
"Play up! Play up! And play the game!"

Jeremy Paxman quotes this poem, Vitai Lampada, in The English. Paxman's take on the poem:

It is hard not to be carried along in its rhythm, even if there is something so breathtakingly stupid about the poem that it is hard to imagine how on earth it could ever have been taken seriously. Yet, in the balmy days before August 1914, the idea that life was essentially a version of the Game seemed almost plausible.

"The sand of the desert is sodden red, red with the wreck of a square that broke", is a reference to the seige of Khartoum, a colonial misadventure which ended with the entire garrison at Khartoum slaughtered and General Gordon, the British officer in charge of the garrison, beheaded by the Mahdi army.

And that is somehow like a game of cricket? Paxman is spot on: breathtakingly stupid.



Reminds me of Lance Klusener. He was asked how he stayed so calm after South Africa crashed out of the 1999 World Cup semi-finals in one of the greatest games ever. Klusener said "nobody died".

Good perspective. Must remember next time India are playing.

Have you ever thunk about thoughting?

Management is justly famous for doing strange things to the English language. Consider: option value, hedge, synergy, self-actualization, kaizen, off-shoring, intrapreneurism, portfolio, fudge, strategize, ideate, projectize, functionality, robustify, core competencies...

Plus two great new words to add to that lexicon. Both are creative conjugations of that ancient and innocent verb, to think, which can be morphed with modern technology into “thoughting” and “thunk”. I learnt both these words at a recent (and very good) seminar with Jack and Carol Weber at Darden.

“Thoughting” actually is a useful word; I believe it was coined by Jack and Carol. It is meant to describe the unsolicited thoughts that endlessly stream through every consciousness. This unsolicited stream is completely different from the disciplined, structured, methodical thinking needed to, say, prove a mathematical theorem. Or to professionally evaluate a business partner’s performance. Yet, this unsolicited stream often intrudes on formal, methodical thought, and sometimes subverts it.

Giving this formless stream of thought a distinct name, thoughting, to distinguish it from formal thought, thinking, is quite useful. A distinct name helps the mind switch out of the thoughting-mode into the thinking-mode as needed.

Maybe when Krishna told Arjuna to free his mind from the shackles of माया (maya) he was telling Arjuna to stop the thoughting and start thinking. माया is often translated as illusion. Maybe thoughting, the mindless chatter that clutters the consciousness, would be a better translation.

Maybe the meditative practice of emptying the mind is about stopping the thoughting. ध्यान (dhyana), the Sanskrit root of the word Zen, could be understood as freedom from thoughting. So the consciousness is released to prove the theorem, or evaluate the business partner. A mind that is full of thoughting will struggle to hit that little red ball hurtling towards the soft tissues at ninety miles per hour, with just a hint of reverse swing.

This famous story from Zen Flesh Zen Bones might be about thoughting:

Nan-in, a Japanese master during the Meiji era (1869-1912), received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen. Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor's cup full and then kept on pouring.

The professor watched the overflow until he could no longer restrain himself. "It is overfull. No more will go in!"

"Like this cup", Nan-in said, "you are too full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen until you first empty your cup?"

Skilled thinking can't happen without knowledge, one has to know some math to solve the theorem. Thoughting, however, gets in the way of thinking.



__________________________________________

“Thunk” is not just an uncultured way of saying thought. It is typically used in the context of another management buzzword that includes the word thinking.

Let’s say you have a high-powered corporate mandate to do "customer thinking". This means building or modifying products and processes so they are easy for customers to use. Once this work has been done, the said product or process has been "customer thunk".

The same conjugation works for "possibility thinking", which means creative problem solving, understood as an attitude rather than as a technique. When this "possibility thinking" exercise has been completed, the business itself has been "possibility thunk".

What I love most about thunk are its poetic possibilities:

The CEO was in a funk
His stock options had turned to junk
So to the consultant he quietly slunk
His business processes were customer thunk
His annual bonus went up by a chunk
And he celebrated by styling his hair like a punk

Its surprisingly difficult to come up with positive words ending in unk. Sunk, bunk, dunk…. nothing uplifting or celebratory.

Waugh: The Class Act

Is Ponting an unworthy successor to Steve Waugh? Or are they really peas from a pod, crude and petty sledgers, with Waugh smelling a little better only because he won more often? My friend Shukles got me thinking about this a couple of days ago, when he suggested that Ponting was no worse than Steve Waugh.

Consider the case for Steve Waugh:

- He found the time to support Udayan, a home for disadvantaged children in Barrackpore, Calcutta

- Waugh found the time to take his team to Gallipoli, to honour the ANZAC soldiers who fell there during WWI, starting off a little tradition

- He taught his team to enjoy playing in India, and more generally the sub-continent. Approaching the tour as a fun experience, rather than as a punishment posting probably had a big part to play in their improved results. One of my favourite photos from Waugh's autobiography is of his team, wearing their lurid yellow uniforms and with their backs to the camera, staring mesmerized at the Taj Mahal

- He encouraged Ed Smith, then a colleague at Kent, to write about what it is like to be a county pro. This is one of my favourite books about contemporary cricket

- He mourned the game's loss when Zimbabwe's Neil Johnson retired after a scintillating World Cup in 1999, including a century against Australia, because he needed to earn a living. He made a plea to the cricket community to support the game in Zimbabwe, because the game was poorer if a player of Johnson's quality could not play. For this, Sunil Gavaskar described Waugh as not just a great player, but a great leader of men. BTW, Gavaskar is no reflexive Aussie supporter.

I couldn't Google-up a link to Waugh's comments about Neil Johnson. It stuck in my memory because of Johnson's amazing personal story. Johnson was a superstar at seventeen, and a has-been at twenty. The South African team management (rightly) preferred Lance Klusener and Shaun Pollock to Neil Johnson for that all-rounder slot. Yet, he hung on to his dream, played for Zimbabwe, and got his revenge on the biggest stage of all when he single-handedly beat a South African team that included Klusener and Pollock in the 1999 World Cup, before riding off into the sunset.

Could a cussed captain have been made to look like a hero by a good spin-doctor? Some moments, like Udayan and Gallipoli, could have been stage managed, though they reflect well on Waugh even if those associations were prompted by an image-consultant. But the Ed Smith and Neil Johnson stories would have been hard for a spin-doctor to fabricate. Looking at the whole rather than at the parts, the gestalt, I still am left with the impression that Waugh was a genuinely gracious guy. He understood that he was a part of something bigger than himself.

If so, why did he sledge? In his autobiography he says "sledging invariably occured when a player was frustrated at his poor form and wanted to show how much he was trying and how much he was annoyed with his performance. It is a cheap way of getting attention...". In Waugh's framework, he did not sledge. He tried to engineer a collapse in his opponent's confidence, mental disintegration, which is a part of the game.

He famously tried to bring about Saurav Ganguly's mental disintegration. Ganguly did not disintegrate, and Waugh now talks about "an ongoing verbal battle between Saurav and me, which belied an underlying admiration for each other... I saw in Saurav a committed individual who wanted to inject some toughness and combativeness into a side that had often tended to roll over and expose a soft underbelly".

In Waugh's world, a captain who tries hard enough is a captain who tries to engineer the mental disintegration of his opponents. Nothing personal or disrespectful. It's just part of the game. Which is why Steve Waugh is such a hard act for Ponting to follow.

Spiritual Intelligence and corporate life

कर्मण्ये  वाधिकारस्ते  मा  फलेषु  कदाचन
मा  कर्मफलहेतुर  भूर  मा  ते संगोस्त्व  अकर्मणि

These words from the Bhagavad Gita were first spoken by Lord Krishna to Arjuna at Kurukshetra. They roughly translate to: you contol your actions, but not their more remote consequences. So take the remote consequences off your mind, act, and fulfill your sacred destiny.

These words were also the theme of a corporate leadership development program I was at earlier this week. A bunch of successful and well-compensated executives spoke to us developees about how leadership is about service, about having a bias for action, and not obsessing about moving up the corporate ladder. Absolutely. Following the blockbuster success of Emotional Intelligence, Amazon is now selling a book on Spiritual Intelligence.

Yeah, right…but this program was not naïve. It recognized that the developees cared about money. After all, these were people in corporate jobs. The program advised setting very specific goals on how much wealth one wanted to build.

This advice, from Jack Weber at the Darden School in Virginia, was based on an interesting longitudinal study done by Harvard Business School. The study sampled a class of HBS MBAs at graduation. It asked the graduates to rate how much they cared about money on a scale of 1-10. It also asked them how much they thought their net worth would be in 5, 10 and 15 years. The answer to the second question could also be “don’t know”. The study then went back and measured the net worth of these graduates in 5, 10 and 15 years. The finding was that the first question had no predictive power: the MBAs all cared about making money. The second question was a strong predictor of future net worth, with the people who didn’t know what they would be worth performing even worse than those who had put down modest targets. As an aside, I would love to know if the students with the highest wealth expectations also had the highest variance in wealth outcomes, because of having made lower probability bets (I couldn’t locate this study through googling).

A third perspective on careers that emerged came not from the faculty but from a fellow developee, chatting after work. Her boss had told her, “Our company is an ocean with many currents running through it. The key to success is to find a current that will become as big as the Gulf Stream, and to ride it.” This makes even more sense if company were replaced by industry or society. Some realpolitick here: how does one respond to mundane work that moves the company forward, but is unlikely to grow into a career-enhancing Gulf Stream?

Maybe staying sane is about balancing these perspectives. Or maybe it is about these elements coming together: ride the Gulf Stream to get wealthy, which enables the generosity of spirit needed to think in terms of मा कर्मफलहेतुर भूर.

There but for the grace of you go I

Came across this story in the New Yorker, a profile of a liberal Iranian economist called Mohammed Tabibian. Has stayed in memory because Iran, seen through Tabibian's eyes, reminds me so much of India.

Here are some nuggets that I really liked:

- Tabibian speaks with a lucidity and directness that is startling in a culture marked by allusiveness and elaborate courtesy

- In Iran the spectrum of economic thought, Tabibian joked, "runs from left to left". The so-called convervatives... talk of redistributing Iran's wealth, not of re-structuring its economy

- "The common morality was that if the rich give a part of their wealth to the poor, then the poor will be helped out. Many days and nights, in my imagination and daydreaming, I distributed the wealth of my family to the poor in my neighbourhood. Always my calculation came to the same conculsion: that such an imaginary scheme, even if it happens, makes us poor and the neighbourhood not much better off"

- Tabibian is not bothered by the negative example (of free markets run amok) unfolding in the West. "We are on two different sides of the spectrum. You need more regulation. We need less regulation and government intervention"

- The senior Iranian clergy at Qom "were nice people, gentle people, very concerned about morality and things to come from the other life". Their economic presriptions, however, were vanishingly vague: society should be prosperous, people should not be greedy

- After the Revolution, the Central Bank had only one clear priority, to abolish the interest rate which was deemed un-Islamic. And yet, no matter which policy the Central Bank pursued, interest quickly reappeared. A bank branch in Tehran would place a red car on its roof and announce that all depositers would be entered into a lottery for that car - a strategy that allowed the bank to pay a variable rate of return on its deposits. Bankers even found ayatollahs who would issue fatwas in support of their schemes

- The revolution had made education available to more Iranians. But there was no role for these people in an economy that depended not on productive industries but on the dispensation of oil-rents

All the Shah’s Men?

Was Barack Obama’s tough talk on Iran the kiss of death for the recent protests?

Great question, because it opens up a pivotal passage in history that needs to be resolved before sanity returns to the Middle East. I didn’t know about this until I read All the Shah’s Men. This book, a breeze at 230 pages of comfortably large fonts, is a must read for anyone who has been following the news coming out of Iran over the last few weeks.

The key to understanding Iran, and why any association with America and/or Britain is so toxic in Iranian politics, goes back to 1953.



This was when the CIA sponsored a coup to unseat the secular, liberal, democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, and install Shah Reza Pahlavi in his place. The point of the coup was to retain western control of the oil fields and refineries at Abadan. Mohammed Mossadegh planned to nationalize these oil fields, which were owned and operated by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now known as British Petroleum).

The coup worked for a quarter century, until the Shah was overthrown in 1979 by a people’s revolution that morphed into the Islamic Republic. These events, not much talked about in today's western media, are vividly remembered in the Middle East.

Interestingly, America’s Democrat leaders are well aware of this history:

- Barack Obama referred to the 1953 coup during his historic speech at Cairo University, “For many years, Iran has defined itself in part by its opposition to my country, and there is in fact a tumultuous history between us. In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government”.

- John Kerry wrote this op-ed piece in the New York Times, “The last thing we should do is give Mr. Ahmadinejad an opportunity to evoke the 1953 American-sponsored coup, which ousted Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh and returned Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi to power. Doing so would only allow him to cast himself as a modern-day Mossadegh, standing up for principle against a Western puppet”.

Some other interesting nuggets from All the Shah's Men:

- Kermit Roosevelt Jr., Teddy Roosevelt's grandson, was the CIA agent who engineered the 1953 coup

- Norman Schwarzkopf Sr. spoke to the exiled Shah to convince him to return to Iran and take power. His son was the Norman Schwarzkopf Jr. who commanded American forces in Operation Desert Storm in 1991

- Winston Churchill was the British Prime Minister when Mossadegh started moves to nationalize Anglo-Iranian. This felt personal to Churchill, the Admiralty man. Abadan had fueled the Royal Navy through two world wars. Churchill immediately reached out to America for help, and got nowhere with President Harry Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson. The plot to oust Mossadegh really started getting traction when the Eisenhower administration brought the Dulles brothers to the center of power.

Flying through Dulles airport in Washington DC reminds me of the story of Mohammed Mossadegh.