What kind of a doer are you?

When it comes to doing, people are of three types; 
The Con doers: They think and analyse till paralysis come. Their actions remain in that state and they con themselves into thinking they are busy. 


The Can doers: These approach their tasks with enthusiasm and are focused more on the story, the experience and the process of doing. 


And finally, there are the
Do errs; They too approach their tasks with enthusiasm, but sweat the small stuff. They worry about whether they did the right things the right way. Once the task is over, they worry whether their actions will produce the right outcomes.

Where do you see the possibility?

Acting In Wisdom

Life, says Amit Varma in his column in the ET Panache, is a positive-sum-game. It is not only when you do an action that you benefit from it, but you also benefit when others do too. For instance, when two people transact a business deal, they do so because both gain value from it. When lovers kiss, the net happiness of both goes up.

Could this be true all of the time? Is it a rather idealistic way of  looking at life? Or, is it that, to have this belief, one needs to be the kind of wise person whose undertakings, the Bhagavad Gita says, "are free from desire and thoughts of the world, and whose actions are burnt up by the fire of wisdom?" 4(19).

 And how easy or difficult is it easy to gain this wisdom?

Backing Your People

An industrialist complained to Modi about a few bureaucrats who he felt were "not working properly and should be changed." Modi's rejoinder was scathing: "You manage your company, and let me manage my government."

 Leadership Lesson :
Standing up for your people instils in them the confidence to take initiative, undertake and innovate in their duties.

Are You Promotion Focused or Prevention Focused?

According to Columbia university professor and author Heidi Grant Halvorson (2), there are two types of people; the promotion focused and the prevention focused.

Promotion-focused People: These are people, say psychologists, who see an opportunity for achievement, reward and success everywhere. "They look for people are looking for why the perceiver should say yes and are apt to adopt the mantra of  "nothing ventured nothing gained." Life for them becomes about "maximising gains and avoiding missed opportunities.

Promotion focused people:

• Tend to think more in the abstract and approach ideas with an open mind
• Are often quick workers, sometimes prone to error
• Are usually optimistic and they're comfortable taking risks
• Have strength in creativity and identifying opportunities.

Example: Richard Branson

Use your lens to navigate the world

Prevention-focused People: These people, compared to the promotion-focused, are more interested in preventing loss and maintaining the status quo.The prevention lens is searching for reasons not to say no.

Prevention-focused people:

•  Have a more concrete and detail-oriented thinking style.
• Can be defensively pessimistic and risk averse.
• have strength in their analysis, evaluation, preparedness and reliability.

No Right or Wrong Way: Both lenses are equally good ways of looking at the world, and one way of thinking is generally not better than the other.

References:

1. businessinsider.in

2. Author of No One Understands You And What To Do About It

Picture source: Pinterest.com

The Right Place at the Right Time

When they first started making cars, Sir Henry Royce, and his partner, Charles Rolls, would build them near Savile Row, the London street where the city's top tailors had their establishments. They would urge their customers to have their coaches finished with trimming to match favourite suits and gowns.

Source: http://www.hubspot.com/inbound-marketing

Management Learning: Whether at life or work, being in the right place at the right time, with the right product, increases the chances of successful outcomes to your endeavours.

Strategise and focus

In the French fighter jet Rafael,  the guns are so sensitively controlled,  that you can aim and fire the guns with just a turn of the head. This is so because being a fighter jet, the pilot needs to concentrate more on the fighting strategy than on flying the plane.

Leadership lesson: Once you have prioritised the actions your teams need to take, make the tasks around the key priorities simple to do and try to eliminate as many actions around the unrelated ones. 

Why Customer is King

ET Panache,  is a supplement which comes with the Economic Times. It calls itself an "Advertorial and Promotional feature," a polite way of saying  all news in the supplement will have to be paid for.  So in today's issue we have billionaire industrialist Yohan Poonawala complaining about his dissatisfaction with premium auto maker Porsche. His SUV caught fire and he is apparently unhappy about the way the company has handled the complaint. This is bad press for Porsche.

Now, whether Poonawala has paid for the news to be featured  as headline news, maybe pure speculation, but what made him vent his ire in this manner? He says he contacted the India director the morning after the accident, who told him he will revert within 48 hours with a solution. Next,  says Poonawala,  he was informed that the director has left for a 'pre scheduled meeting' to Germany,  where he would bring up the issue. An anonymous source has told the paper that it takes a minimum of two weeks to address an issue like this,  and that an investigator is  his way down from Germany.

So where did the India director go wrong in dealing with Poonawala? Considering he is a car aficionado and a billionaire to boot, should the director have been in constant personal touch with him? Should be have offered Poonawala another car as a temporary replacement?

There are several possibilities here,  but only one lesson in customer relationship management -  do not take your customers lightly. They have any number of forums, paid, and free, to vent their spleen on you. 

And that can have serious consequences for your company's image.

Setting right priorities

Former F1 racer David Coulthard says the cost of a present day racing car engine has gone up from £5 million to £20 million. The race for new technologies and the sky rocketing costs are putting pressure on the smaller companies. So much so that just 15 of all the cars in the Australian Grand Prix started the race, something is wrong, says Coulthard, when all the cars in the fray cannot start a race. He goes on to makes an important point, when he cautions that we should not get so caught up in showing off technology, that we forget that there are people in the grandstand who want to see a motor race.

The learning point in this situation? The critical need for leaders to be clear on;

1. what they are in the business of

2. what they are in business for, and

3. what their customer needs are

Then set their business priorities accordingly.

Lessons for work and life 1

Schmitten,  a new brand of premium luxury chocolates by a Surat based manufacturer seems to have it all,  beginning with a premium sounding name. It is setting up experience-cum-retail lounges in 50 cities to promote the chocolates.  It's first set of launch commercials have been made by Swedish ad maker Frederick Bond. The brand will be backed by a 70cr ad campaign and aggressive retail expansion.  It has roped in adman Prasoon Joshi and Bollywood actress Priyanka Chopra to promote the chocolates and It has set up a 450cr manufacturing unit near Mumbai.

Wow, you say? Well,  hold it, because according to Harish Bijoor, the marketing guru,  the  chocolates have one major flaw;  the brand suffers from a packaging issue.  It does not reflect the premium status it is aspiring to build through its advertising.  It is important for a brand that aspires to be seen as premium or luxury,  to connote those values through their packaging as well says Bijoor.

Life lesson: in a competitive world,  you have to package yourself right - reflect the values you represent in your communication, your attire, in short your very persona.  Sounds sordid when put like that? Gandhiji put it in a more palatable way - be the change you like others to be.

How to remove the garbage from your mind

"To compose, I need to be happy and to have free mind space."

                                                        - A.R. Rahman Music composer

One of the secrets to our wellbeing, says blogger Philipp, is to find the balance between being and doing . To be ourselves, he says,  is to connect to the things that make us happy, and to achieve the happy state, we need to learn to simply be. Cleaning out a busy schedule or taking a long vacation will help, but ultimately we will need to find the being in the doing.

Read Phillip's interesting, take on how to be happy.

http://balancedaction.me/2013/02/13/finding-the-being-in-the-doing/

Success is Failures Learned Well

The wisdom of learning from failure is indisputable. Yet organizations that do it well are extraordinarily rare. This gap is not due to a lack of commitment to learning, says Amy Edmondson in her article in the Harvard Business Review. Managers in the vast majority of enterprises that she has studied over the past 20 years genuinely wanted to help their organizations learn from failures to improve future performance. The common feeling in most organizations is that failure is bad. This leads to the fear of telling the truth, which in turn, can get in the way of learning from past mistakes. The unfortunate consequence is that many failures go unreported and their lessons are lost. A story from the book The Leader, the Teacher and You, by former top Singapore civil servant Lim Siong Guan, serves to illustrate the point well.

When People are Afraid of Telling the Truth

The Singapore Ministry of Defence once decided that the SAF (Singapore Armed Forces) camps should plant papaya trees to enhance the use of land and provide an additional source of nutrition for the troops. As with any initiative, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) were established.

Not all camps were successful despite their best efforts, because some terrains would not yield healthy papaya trees. However, rather than declare their failure, a few units took to buying papayas and papaya trees to keep up with their regular reports of the KPIs. The experiment was finally abandoned when it was plain that some units had perpetually young papaya trees!

'The experiment," writes Lim in his book, "was a lesson in how honesty and integrity can so easily be undermined” when people are afraid of telling the truth. “The opportunity to learn and correct poor ideas in good time was missed.”

In her HBR article, Strategies to Learn from Failure, Amy Edmondson, observes that in most companies, the attitudes and activities required to effectively detect and analyze failures are in short supply , and the need for context-specific learning strategies is under appreciated. Organization, she says, need new and better ways to go beyond lessons that are superficial (“Procedures weren't followed”) or self-serving (“The market just wasn't ready for our great new product”). That means jettisoning old cultural beliefs and stereotypical notions of success and embracing failure’s lessons. She proposes an excellent structured process to review failure and learn lessons from it.

Call to Action

Freedom to make mistakes and learning lessons from it are vital to an organization's success. Allow room for failure, and set up a process to review lessons learnt from it. The scale Praiseworthy to Blameworthy in Edmondson’s article, represents the spectrum of reasons for failure in a scalar form. It can prove an excellent tool to flag-off and institute a process to review failures within an organization. You could use it too!

Business Leaders Should Walk The Talk

Today's Corporate Dossier carries a story on how the young bunch of managers at Airasia - the latest low-cost airline about to be launched in India - are actually  living the philosophy of 'low-cost'. 29 year-old Gangtok-born Ningku Lachungpa is in charge of the ancillaries.As part of shoring up ancillary revenues, she is doing her bit to understand every discipline to live up the tagline of making more people fly. As part of this effort, Lachungpa takes the suburban train every morning from near the airport, where she lives, to her spartan 600 sq.ft. office, situated atop a mall."When I come to the office in a taxi, I don't put down that down in the office expense as each of us are aware that even a Rs. 10 saving is a saving."

Similarly, when Aditya Ghosh, CEO of leading low-cost airline Indigo and his boss Rahul Bhatia, MD, had to go for a meeting of the private airlines' captains with the Prime Minister, they travelled in a small, unassuming hatchback. 

Indigo Airlines CEO Aditya Ghosh (L) and MD Rahul Bhatia (R)

The rest came in their fancy limos.

Living the management philosophy

In the Puranas, as mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik, explains, Vaikuntha, the abode of Vishnu, is the land of happiness. It is a playground or ranga-bhoomi and is described as a place which attracts Laxmi, the goddess of wealth. Vishnu always attracts wealth and is popularly worshiped as Shri-nath or Tiru-pati which means lord of affluence and abundance. On the other hand, Indra the king of the devas, who resides in his paradise, Swarga, is constantly chasing Laxmi, and trying to prevent the asuras from taking her away.The fundamental difference between Vishnu and Indra is that Indra thinks only of himself and his shareholders. They all feel entitled, like shareholders. On the other hand, Vishnu thinks of everyone - his employees, customers, shareholders, vendors, society at large, in other words - stakeholders. Thus ensuring affluence and abundance.

At times, business leaders and senior executives forget that the people they lead are closely watching their every move and action.  When leaders start living out the key brand proposition and what their company stands for, with actions such as the ones cited above, it can go a long way in inculcating an ideal organizational culture. A culture which results  in more sales, more growth and more profits, making every stakeholder - employees, customers, shareholders, vendors, society at large happy!

So, would you like Vishnu, attract wealth, or like Indra, chase it? The choice is yours.

Life is About The Choices We Make

Mohan was a charming fellow, every time I ran into him on the street, he would flash his good-natured smile and wave at me. Then one day, he happily told me that he had started a catering business, and pressed his newly printed visiting card into my hand. i told him I certainly would recommend his services to people and keep him in mind when the occasion arose. And I did hire his catering services for a few family functions. At these times, i noticed, it was his wife who was running the show. A grim-faced woman, who unlike Mohan, never smiled, she would be busily looking after the details of the service, keeping a close watch on every aspect of the service. Mohan was employed in a pharma company, but when his catering business started flourishing, he quit his job, and he became the smiling front for his catering service, winning over people with his charm and good nature. Soon, I lost touch with Mohan, and my running into him became less and less frequent, and soon, he just slipped from my mind. Then one day, after years, I ran into him again. He wasn't his usual decently dressed self - his clothes seemed slightly disheveled, and so was his hair. Moreover, he passed me on the street without looking at me! I was surprised, this wasn't the Mohan, I knew, but I just dismissed at it being one of his bad hair days. This happened on a couple of more occasions - his appearance was disheveled and he did not acknowledge my greeting. Finally, one day when i met him again, i stopped him and asked him whether he had forgotten who i was and why he was behaving in this strange manner. He was silent for a while and then in a sad voice he told me, "My wife is no more." He did not say anything more, and neither did I pursue the matter further. I later learnt from people that he had given up his catering business and had devoted himself to looking after the house and his only son.

Dealing with life situations and events

Tragedies are a part of our life - we lose people and things we hold dear, jobs are lost and relationships broken, which are actually a test of our Response-ability - the ability to cope with life's situations and events in the most appropriate manner.While we may not be responsible for most of what happens, we are completely responsible for our reaction to what is happening. Rather than placing blame, this way of thinking acknowledges personal power. Response-ability is the capacity to choose. Out of many possible responses, I can always choose the one I make. Response-ability is remembering to be in charge and make careful, thought-out choices.When we respond with the best of our ability, and accept and handle whatever consequences we have helped to create, we not only benefit from your choices, but our life and relationships will improve immensely. 

Analyse Your Business

Raghoo Potini shared some key insights from the Book "Flash Foresight" By Danil Burrus, which I thought was a great framework for analyzing one's business. 

"A flash foresight is a classic eureka! moment, like Newton's discovery of gravity after watching an apple fall from a tree . Actually the Flash Foresight triggered by the application of one or more of seven simple principles covered in the book .Let me cover two big ones.

TRIGGER #1: START WITH CERTAINTY: There are two distinct kinds of change that we can use to find certainty:1. Cyclic change2. Linear change
Cyclic change: provides us with all sorts of certainty .When it is autumn, you can predict that, within six months, it will be spring. Humanity has identified more than 300 distinct cycles that allow us to predict the future accurately. 
Linear change: A simple example of linear change is your age. Your life progresses in one direction. No matter how well you take care of your health, you are not going to start aging backward. Linear change is where the real action is, precisely because it is not a repeating pattern and therefore creates entirely new circumstances and opportunities. 

Hard trends and soft trends: A hard trend is something that will happen; it is a future fact. A soft trend is something that might happen; it is a future maybe. Here's an example about Hard trend and soft trend. The 78 million Baby Boomers are now flooding health care system in the US. Again, notice where the hard trend is, and where it isn't. The increasing numbers of Boomers who will need medical care as they get older is a hard trend, because those numbers are fixed and cannot be changed. But the projected shortage of doctors and nurses to provide that care is a soft trend, because it is something we can change if we see it and decide to act on it.Action:  

Make a list of all the cyclic changes that are affecting your business. Make a list of the linear changes that will have an impact on your life. Make a list of all the hard trends that are taking place in your industry, so you know what you can be certain about. Make a list of all the soft trends that are taking place in your industry, so you can see what you can change or influence. Ask yourself, "What do I know will happen in the next few weeks, months, and years? And how can I innovate to take advantage of what I now know for certain about the future?"

To anticipate the world ahead, Lets see some hard trends in technology space .To anticipate the world ahead, Lets see some hard trends in technology space .

Dematerialization. As technology improves, we are reducing the amount of material it takes to build the tools we use. For example, laptops are getting smaller, lighter, and more portable, even as they become more powerful.   Virtualization. This means taking things we currently do physically and shifting the medium so that we can now do them purely in a virtual world. Using software, we can now test airplanes, spaceships, and nuclear bombs without actually building them. Virtualization has transformed the world of business. Amazon is a virtual bookstore, and eBay is a virtual yard sale.   Mobility. With the advance of wireless technology, we are rapidly becoming untethered from everything. Our mainframe computers became desktops, then laptops, then palmtops, then cell phones.   Product intelligence: Imagine you're driving down the road, and a light blinks on your dashboard: One of your tires is about to go flat. Your GPS speaks up: "Service station with an air hose in three miles; take the next exit." How does your car know this? It's intelligent. It has smart tires, and it's networked.   Convergence. Filling stations and convenience stores converged in the 1980s; in the '90s, so did coffee shops and bookstores. Today, telecommunications, consumer electronics, and information technology are all converging. Products are converging, too. The modern smartphone is an e-mail device, a camera, a video camera, a music player, a GPS device, and more. Action: Ask yourself, What problems will my company be facing in the next few weeks, months, and years? What problems will our customers be facing?" Then look for creative ways to solve those problems before they happen.

TRIGGER #2: ANTICIPATE: When a competitor offers lower prices, you are forced to change how you do business. Being preactive means putting yourself into opportunity mode, looking at problems before they occur, and then preventing them from happening in the first place. It means, instead of reacting to change that happens from the outside in, creating change from the inside out.

These five technology trends all the result of three interlocking hard trends. The first digital accelerator is processing power. The second digital accelerator is the growth of bandwidth, the third digital accelerator, storage."

Stories to Coach With: A Leap of Faith

Often while coaching, we come across situations where clients have got stuck - feeling powerless to do anything to change. At such time a useful non-invasive coaching tool is storytelling.  According to Margaret Parkin, author of Tales for Coaching, storytelling can help clients to reflect on their own story in their own way, and search for what the message means to them personally. Here is a story I found recently. 

A Fighters Saga

Girisha is from Karnataka, the son of a poor farmer. Unfortunately, for Girisha, he had an impairment in his left leg which made him walk with a limp. Life was hard for Girisha whose father had to struggle to meet make ends to meet the needs for the family of five. Inspite of the hardship, his father always encouraged him to take up sport. With his father's blessings and his unstinting support, Girisha represented his school at 10 years of age. And this year, 2012, battling all odds, he was the winner of the silver medal for high jump at the Paralympic Games held in London!

This success did not come easily to him.

Though without a job to support him financially, Girisha actively pursued his passion for sports and participated in games meant for, and against able-bodied athletes. One day, someone noticed his passion and talents for sports and suggested he start participating in special games meant for the disabled. In this arena, competing against people who too were disabled, Girisha's potential came even greater to the fore, and he was selected to train at the Sport's Authority of India centre at Bangalore.

Those years were very depressing years for Girisha. Though he was winning medals at the nationals, nothing seemed to be working for him. Living alone in a big city like Bangalore, he struggled to manage his life and passion for sports. They were trying times. The money he received as financial support by an NGO just was hardly  enough to cover his living expenses, leave alone the expenses of an escort, and he had to do everything himself. Many were the times when Girisha felt intensely lonely and seriously thought of giving up sports and taking up a job instead. Fortunately for him, and for India, he was dissuaded from doing so by his coach Satyanarayana and motivated him to stay on and give the Parlympics a shot.

He did - and achieved the distinction of winning for India its first medal at the games. The silver medal he won happens to be only the eighth medal won by India at the games and the first in eight years.

And now the good times have started rolling for Girisha! The government authorities have decided to honour him with a Rs. 30 lacs cash award for his feat. As for his father, his faith in Girisha's potential and perseverance in supporting him inspite of financial odds, has been vindicated. Since the time he won the medal, Girisha's father's phone has not stopped ringing. The entire village had gathered at his house as soon as they heard the news, and they rejoiced with him. The people from his village have now decided to felicitate him with a grand reception on his return from London.

Girisha's ecstatic father has only one wish - he hopes his son inspires other parents to support their differently-abled children in taking up sport. Or any other vocation of their choice. Thoughtfully, he reminds them not to think of the hurdles - just as he has done all his life.

10 Reasons Why I Am Passionate about Coaching

I subscribe to an interesting newsletter by E.R. Haas, whose outfit provides virtual training products for personal and professional excellence. His recent newsletter had the subject line; The Power of Why will change the way you look at business success. Intrigued, I opened the newsletter, because I must tell you, I have been struggling with this 'why' business for a long time now! Long have been the hours I have spent thinking of why I am so passionate about coaching. Unfortunately, every statement I had thought of had sounded like a motherhood rather than  a statement which captured the key drivers of my passion. Things had come to such a pass where doubts had started to creep into my mind of the sincerity of my passion! And now this newsletter had come along to rub salt into my wounds! Or so I thought, as I decided to see what this guy Haas had to say. And I must say what  he had to say, pushed me finally into getting down (once again) to find answers to the question which had haunted me all this time about why I coach. And this time I finally managed to crack it!! Here is how my moment of epiphany happened. 

The Eureka Hour!

The trigger of stimulation in Haas's newsletter was a video of a TED presentation called 'Start with Why: How Great Leaders inspire Action' by Simon Sinek. Sinek spoke of what he called the Golden Circle, which looked like this.

According to Sinek, everybody knows “what” they do 100%. Some know how they do it. But very very few people or organizations know WHY they do it. (he was telling me!) The answer, Sinek said, wasn't about making a profit, that was the result. It was the “why”, why do you do it, why do you get out of bed in the morning, and why should people care. Simple yet profound, and it immediately got me researching (aka google) my unanswered question of 'why I coach' with renewed vigour. My search led me to a presentation by the Master Motivator Tony Robbins called Why we do what we do, in which he talked of the "invisible forces" that motivated everyone's actions. I spent the entire evening mulling about what Robbins had to say. I slept over it, and the first thing the next morning, as soon as I woke up, was this sudden blinding clarity! A clarity about all the reasons why I was so passionate about coaching! All of them seemed to want to burst forth like a dam burst! The best thing was, I could relate every one of the reasons to something that had actually occurred sometime in my coaching situations! I immediately put pen to paper and started jotting down my thoughts. And here is what I wrote: 

I coach because it enables me to make a difference to people’s lives. I do this by helping them:

1. Discover things about themselves they weren’t aware of

2. Feel they are worth it

3. Convert inertia in their efforts at success into impatience to get going

4. Add new meaning and depth to their relationships

5. Make their life and work feel more fulfilling

6. See  their life and work situations and events in new ways

7. Create their own processes to learn, grow and evolve

8. Create relationships between what they are aware of about their life and work, and what they were not aware of in those contexts

9. Get new insights in the patterns of their behaviour 

10. Put things into context by connecting past life and work events with present actions, behaviours and attitudes

Most importantly, the nature of the challenges my clients face, give me insights into those of my own.Their efforts and commitment to overcome their challenges give me the motivation and the learning to act on those of my own. 

And the bottom line - my clients’ every ‘ah aah’ moments give me SATISFACTION, their successful outcomes FULFILLMENT and the learning, ENRICHES  my life.

Thank you Haas, Simon and Tony!

Know and Use the World's Oldest Goal Setting Tool

Some among us are of the view that spirituality, philosophy and such other intellectual pursuits are activities to be reserved for the last stage of our lives, which our ancients described as Vanaprasthaashram, or, life in the woods. But consider the life of Henry David Thoreau, the American philosopher, whose philosophical work influenced the likes of Gandhi, Leo Tolstoy and Martin Luther King, Jr. Though by inclination a philosopher, throughout most of his life, he was actually involved in managing his family's pencil company and even invented a new way of making pencil leads. He just thought that making money should never be his life's overriding purpose. He believed, "To have done anything by which you earned money merely  is to have been truly idle or worse." Merely being the operative word. This life-changing thought came to him from two years he spent in the woods contemplating nature and spirituality. 

For those of us who consider any amount of time, (least of all two years in the woods!), spent in contemplating one's life and goals as time spent unproductively, here is a suggested way to combine the philosophical with a practical approach.

Planning the Four Goals of a Balanced Life

Our ancient seers articulated the objectives of humankind asPurusharthas, Purush being  the person and Artha being the objective. The four Purusharthas were defined as; Dharma, Artha, Kama andMoksha. Dharma: righteousness or  duty, Artha: wealth, Kama:  desire and Moksha: liberation. Priya Banati, a keen student of Jyotish, Yoga and Ayurveda gives an interesting contemporary interpretation to the four Purusharthas in one of her blog articles. She defines them as:

Dharma: Doing what best fits your individual aptitude in the context of your familial and societal responsibilities. Dharma comes from a Sanskrit root that means ‘to establish’ and hence is the path through life that establishes an individual as a stable, productive, satisfied human being.

Artha: Resources or more commonly wealth. It includes all our intentions around the acquisition of adequate means for self-support to live life fully. Both money and knowledge when used for self-support falls under Artha.

Kama: The innate urge to relate to others. Commonly interpreted as lust, Kama is actually much broader than that and relates to how we build and nurture relationships with other human beings.

Moksha: The freedom, or the quality of being able to free oneself from the mirage that dharma, artha and kama are able to provide enduring satisfaction.

Everything we do in our life (ie, the sum total of our desires) rolls up to meeting one or more of these four purusharthas. So how do your 2012 resolutions map to these four goals? You are likely to find that much of your resolutions are really focused on one of these purusharthas. If so, then spend some time reflecting on the other purusharthas and ask yourself what you can do to help address them in 2012. Almost all humans need to achieve all purusharthas to at least some degree if they hope to achieve a life well lived. A simple and practical method of applying the wisdom of the ancients to our contemporary lives is illustrated by the following example: 

Suppose one of your intentions this year is to buy a car. This primarily falls under Artha – ie, acquiring material possessions / wealth for self-support

Remember, the more clearly you qualify your intention, the easier it is to pick the predominant bucket for that particular desire. For example, if the reason for buying a car is so that you can go from being an Auto driver to a Taxi driver, then this desire falls somewhere between Artha and Dharma. However if this is a car that you’d like to gift to your daughter for her 18th birthday, then it falls more in the Artha – Kama space. Predominantly though, buying a car falls within Artha.

Desires that fall within Dharma:

Change jobs

Seek a career change.

Start a family

Have a child

Have a second/third child

Run a marathon

Get fit

Lose weight

Desires that fall within Artha:

Get employed

Find a job

Start a business

Do a degree

Take an exam

Improve my financial prospects

Investing in property, shares etc

Desires that fall within Kama:

Get married or seek a long term relationship with someone

Get a promotion

Get voted into office

Make new friends

Engage with Government policies.

Desires that fall withing Moksha

Be more proactive.

Adopt positive thinking.

Recycle regularly.

Give to charity.

Provide free service.

Develop one’s spiritual strength.

Practice Yoga.

The Prescription for a Happy Life
What happens to you in this this year is colored, based on your purushartha lens. If your shares are not doing well, viewing them from an Artha lens will surely bring disappointment – However viewing them through a Moksha lens will help in your spiritual growth. Using the purusharthas in this way, will not only you to decide on your actions but more importantly, act as a tool to help you accept what is happening to you.

The Power of Inspiration

Some experiences in our life have the power to shape it forever. Here are two real life stories of people whose experiences in their early years left a permanent mark on their thinking and actions.

Vineet Nayar's Jalwa (charisma)

Thirty years ago, Vineet Nayar, vice chairman and CEO of HCL Technologies was a student of a new batch at XLRI. He and his batchmates had just settled in for the first day in class when 50 adivasis stormed into the classroom and ransacked it before vanishing into thin air. None of the students were hurt, but the professor, Father McGrath, lay in a pool of blood. Even as the students were recovering from their shock, Father McGrath rose to his feet and announced that it was a staged show. "I want you to write sit down and write about what you have just seen," he told them.

The event left an indelible stamp on the young Nayar. "If you want to say something say it in the Father McGrath way so that people never forget about it, or don't sat it at all,"  was the mantra he carried from the experience. Nayar had understood with blinding clarity, the power of communication and the learning went on to form the cornerstone of his leadership style. Today, whether it is the 88,000 employees of HCL Technologies, customers, vendors or the public at large, Nayar makes it a point to get his message across with energy and elan. For instance, at a recent employee conference, he shook a leg to the Bollywood number Tera Hi Jalwa with co-workers before announcing the numbers. Plus, he has eight internal networking platforms and four external ones through which he communicates to his world of employees and stakeholders. These include Meme, HCL's equivalent of  Facebook through which he interacts with 67, 000 employees and Twitter where he sends Tweets daily and has 9000 followers. Its as if Father McGrath is still maintaining a constant vigil on him!

Mashelkar's Aag (fire)

In the case of R.A. Mashelkar, former Director at National Chemical Labotatory at Pune, the inspiration came first from his mother. Mashelkar had a difficult childhood and his mother, who worked as a maidservant, could not support his college education. But she gave him the courage to face life in times of adversity and taught him how to stand tall and not give up on principles. With her inspiration,  he not only went on to to be a rank holder in the Matriculation examination, but also win many other laurels in public life. The other inspiration was his teacher, Principal Bhave. During an experiment on how to find the focal length of a convex mirror, he held the glass till the paper caught fire. Then he turned to young Mashelkar and told him that if he could focus his energies like that, he could burn anything. This two experiences became the cornerstone of his life philosophy and also his leadership style.

Among other things, Mashelkar's personal experience of ascendance from dire circumstances, shaped his thinking that there is no limit to human endurance and achievements except the limit you put on yourself. On the other hand, his experience of Professor Bhave's convex lens experiment, shaped his leadership style forever. It  convinced him of the power of concentration and focus, When he came to CSIR, which was a network of 38 laboratories, he saw that they were competing with each other and there was zero collaboration. His convex lens style of leadership led him to initiate several collaborating programmes, including one which had 19 labs working together. Mashlekar is now hailed as the man behind India’s scientific intellectual property rights (IPR) revolution, a visionary administrator, an inspirational orator and one of the most humble scientists of his times. His mantra; focus your energies and you can set the world on fire. 

Call to Action

Both Nayar and Mashelkar know who the architects of their life philosophy and leadership style are. Do you? If not, here is a set of questions to reflect on and make you to think:

• Think of all your greatest heroes and heroines, for some of us, as in the case of Mashelkar, it may be our parents, or it could be one of our teachers and it could even be an event.
• Who do you look for inspiration in your daily life?
• Who influences your work and your profession the most?
• Who is the front runner in being your role model?

I'll be happy to hear your experience!

Planners and Doers

Alan Cohen is an inspirational writer and author of The Daily Dose of Sanity. I read a page a day from the book for, as the blurb on the book says, my "five minute soul recharge." I find every thought  inspiring and often profoundly insightful. Today's 'soul recharge' was about how a participant at one of Cohen's seminar asked him for a good spiritual community to join. The lady appeared very interested and also took notes of the details Cohen gave her. Later that night, one of the seminar sponsors asked him whether the lady had inquired about spiritual communities, when Cohen replied in the affirmative, the sponsor told him that she has been doing this for years, and she doesn't follow up."She just likes asking," he concluded.

The lesson Cohen draws from the incident is, while the lady certainly craved community, she had more of an investment in the question than the answer. She symbolized the part all of us have that would rather seek than find.

Quite like one of my coaching clients, let us call him J, who was more of a planner than a doer. In the course of every coaching session, he would get some brilliant insights into some aspect of his life or business, and he would duly note it down as an action point. Come next session, when I would ask him the status on the action points he had noted the last time, he would always say   that he hadn't attended to them. After several such incidents, I finally asked him if he ever, even referred to the notes he so enthusiastically made at every session. His reply was another "no!" No wonder it took him one year to recruit a person for a critical position - he would call the same person time and again and never be able to take a decision!

My coaching lesson was that some of us have a greater emotional investment in the intellectual exercise of planning than in the uncertainties of the results of the execution of the thought. 

On The Highs and Lows of Human Nature

Anything on human nature has always fascinated me. Why do we do the things we do, is the question that arises in my mind as I read about feats of bravery as well as cruelty. As happened recently with two incidents - one which left me in utter awe and the other with a feeling of revulsion. 

The High

Monument to William Hartley

Let me begin with the story I found profoundly touching and inspiring. It was a snippet in the Economic Times about how the band on the Titanic played on to lift the spirits of the passengers - even as the ship was sinking. Every one of the seven musicians went down with the ship. On researching more, I discovered that Bandmaster Wallace Hartley, just 33, and the others knew full well that they were doomed. By all accounts, not a one of them ever even donned a life jacket.

We'll never know what was in their minds. But play they did. And played, and played. At first, they played upbeat tunes in the first class lounge. Later, they moved out on deck and played as passengers desperately tried to escape. Finally, they played one last song, and shortly after . . . they were gone forever.

The Low

Adolf Eichmann

Soon after having read this moving story - and the contrast was striking - I read about Eichmann of the Holocaust notoriety. Eichmann was an extermination administrator for the Nazis, in charge of transporting Jews, and in this capacity deported 430,000 Hungarians to their deaths in gas chambers.

He continued to do so even after the official order from Heinrich Himmler, the German Chief of Police to halt the extermination and to destroy all evidence of it. He did this to avoid being called up for active combat duty! Eichmann, it appears,  had abdicated his will to make moral choices, and thus his autonomy. Eichmann claimed he was just following orders, and that he was therefore respecting the duties of a "bureaucrat".Before they joined the Nazi Party and rose through it's ranks, Adolf Eichmann, a school dropout was a sales clerk and his boss Himmler a chicken farmer. What could have made these two perfectly ordinary human beings do such monstrous things? 

To Question or Not to Question. That IS the Question

Hannah Arendt, a cultural theorist has an explanation believes that the great evils in history, including the Holocaust particularly, were not perpetrated by by rabid fanatics and sociopaths. Rather, they were  ordinary folk, who unquestioningly accepted twisted theories and political propaganda of a state or an organization as being perfectly normal.

Even if this theory were true (she has been attacked by critics as being extremely naive), what could have prompted Wallace Hartley and his team of brave musicians to play as the Titanic sank? Hartley, (he planned to stop working on ships after his Titanic gig) and his band were no victims of political or any other propaganda. Nor were they moved, affected or influenced by the power of the panicking passengers. They just played on and went down with the ship. They were not under orders nor did anyone tell them to.

In the corporate arena, one often hears of executives kowtowing to bad business practices (Satyam, Enron, Lehman Bothers etc.). They, like Eichmann, appear to have abdicated their will to make moral choices, and thus their autonomy. On the other hand we have the brave service staff of the Taj in Mumbai, who during the terrorist attack, went beyond the call of duty to escort guests to safety. In doing so, many of them gave up their lives.

What prompts either behavior? God alone knows!