Back to Your Roots

"Understanding where you are from help you better understand where you want to go."
                          - US Ambassador to India Richard Verma, describing his recent visit to his hometown in Punjab. 

Be Mindful not Mind Full

“Your mind is like a sponge, and less filled it is with muck, the greater the capacity of it to absorb water. Keep your mind out of petty jealousies like who is doing what and who is talking about what. You are taking away the tremendous capacity of your mind. You don’t know how much talent and energy it is sucking out of you.” Ajit Doval, National Security Advisor.

The Awareness Framework

Awareness precedes choice and choice precedes results. - Robin Sharma

When Paul O'Neill arrived as CEO at Alcoa, he didn't hold his troops to criteria that CEOs commonly use, such as profit margins, sales growth rates, or share appreciation. His singular standard: time lost to employee injuries. By focusing on just one  highly impactful habit, O’Neill managed to create change at different levels of awareness within the organization, the company's annual net income went up by five times and its market capitalization rose by $27 billion.

The Awareness Framework can help us understand the deeper and wide ranging implications of the focus on safety:

1. Task Awareness: Empowered employees began to offer suggestions and accidents were immediately brought to the attention of executives. As a result, the accident rate declined — ultimately to about 5% of the national average.

2. Situational Awareness:  Workers realizing that the management was keen to examine and improve every inefficient and dangerous manufacturing process, increased  communication among employees. Line workers offered suggestions to improve efficiency, and the company underwent a renaissance.

3. Emergent Awareness: Employees started recommending business improvements that otherwise would have remained out of sight. One day, a low-level employee made a suggestion that quickly worked its way to the general manager. Within a year, profits on the product doubled. By creating patterns of better communication, a chain reaction started that lifted profits.

4.  Self Awareness:  ''Paul came in and got us to do things we never thought we could do,'' says L. Richard Milner, head of Alcoa's automotive unit. The safety habit influenced every part of the employees’ lives - how they worked, ate, played, lived, spent, and communicated. Employees’ thoughts, feelings and  beliefs and their attitudes and reactions to changes in the environment improved. Their attitudes to people around  having a different point of view also took a turn for the better. Hard-core, ladder-climbing, capitalist executives turned into soft, feel-good samaritans, adept at identifying, co-opting, and shaping behavior patterns to increase profits.

By creating awareness around safety, O'Neill unleashed a pattern with the power to start a chain reaction. A reaction that improved a host of processes in the organization, created a employee-friendly environment, aligned people to the company’s goals and increased profits.

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Living mindfully

When we think of the word 'food', we only think of nutrition, says chef Pankaj Walia. But the truth is our connection with food is deep and spiritual; something that our ancestors realised and respected. Archaeology professor Dr Kurush Dalal recommends slow cooking to establish the connection. Slow cooking, he says, recognises the connection between plate, people, planet and culture; things we have forgotten to correlate these days while munching on fast food.

#Viewpoint
People, planet and culture - each, some, or all three, are integral to our every action. Recognising the impact of our actions on the three, can help us become more mindful citizens.

The Healthy Sceptic

Before Isaac Newton came on the scene, people believed that the rainbow comprises of three colours;  red, blue and yellow. Through his famous prism experiment, Newton demonstrated that color is intrinsic to light. He also divided the spectrum into seven colours giving us ROYGBIV.  We now know that the spectrum consists of more than just those seven colours. Turns out, there wasn’t any particular scientific reason he chose the number seven, it was just his idosyncracy; he  thought it made more sense that way!

#Viewpoint
In these days of dependence on Google for research and knowledge seeking, and stories going instantly viral, it makes sense to recollect what the Buddha said more than 2500 years ago.