Achievements and accidents

A few months ago, while I was still in India, I drove to a restaurant to have lunch with a couple of colleagues. After lunch, we were returning to our office when it happened One of my colleagues casually threw out an empty envelope though the window. Accidentally, that envelope struck a person who was riding a motorcycle. He was a rash and rowdy young man and there were 2 others riding pillion behind him. Suddenly they started shouting at us. After a small verbal courtship, they wanted to take our new relationship to the next level! He was driving through my left. And I was going straight. He, well cajoled me to stop. I was in no mood for amorous exchanges and certainly didn’t want to get physical, so I drove straight ahead. But he was desperate to get to know me better and suddenly pulled his bike right in front of my car… and …I lost control and … ACCIDENT!

Thankfully no one was hurt, and we came to ... er ... an "out of court settlement". But accidents are part of our everyday lives. More people die in road accidents than in wars. About 115 people die every day in vehicle crashes in the United States -- one death every 13 minutes. I’m not even counting flight accidents. Accidents are unfortunate. They are sad. Accidents may also be happy, though not for the car owners.

I made it into ISB this year. It is a privilege and an honour to be part of such an illustrious group of people. I would think that this is an achievement. But I also believe that I have had my fair share of luck. I got the right breaks in my career: I made a very risky job change that turned out alright, volunteered for some high risk high reward assignments and pulled 'em through, quick promotions, great set of team mates, few amazing people guiding me about the admission process et cetera, et cetera. So is ISB just a happy accident?

I don’t think that our lives can be determined only by accidents. I surely don’t hope so. But many of you will say that things go wrong all the time. It’s a big bad world. Mr. Murphy certainly thought so. You must have heard about Murphy’s laws.
1. If anything can go wrong, it will, or the corollary
2. Whatever can go wrong will go wrong, and at the worst possible time, in the worst possible way.
3. Or this corporate variation: After any salary raise, you will have less money at the end of the month than you did before. That certainly holds true in my case.

Are all promotions accidents? Let’s not even go there. Well, truth be told…the world is random. It is chaos out there. And accidents are just waiting to happen. When I first started driving on Indian roads, I was amazed at how an accident doesn’t occur every second. You have an auto that suddenly barges in from the right. When you escape it by turning left, a rikshaw honks its horns from the left and nearly hits you. And then you look in front and there’s a man standing there….right in the middle of the road….just looking at you and smiling…crossing the road at his leisure as if he’s taking a stroll in the garden, almost enticing you to just go and whack him! Believe me, when you are driving in India, just reaching your destination safely is an achievement.

If we look closely, we will find that our lives are very similar to the roads we drive our cars on. Few months ago, I had the delivery date of a very important project coming up. To make matters interesting, my GMAT was scheduled just before this date. But the week before this deadline, my mother got sick and had to be hospitalized, then when she got better, I got sick. I gave GMAT with a fever of 102 degrees, heavily drugged. Then when I got better and rejoined office, there was a man standing right in front of me looking very angry: my manager. But I stayed late in office over the next few weeks, worked really hard and completed the project before time. The project even earned client appreciation: a small achievement. And yes, I eventually made it into the class of 2010 in one of the best B schools in the world - a bigger achievement despite the accidents. We need luck, yes, but we shouldn’t count on it. I believe that the harder we work, the luckier we will get. Finally, let's hope that unlike the title of this post, “Achievements” and “Accidents” are not adjacent in too many sentences of our lives.

MBA app: Exaggerations

Yesterday, one of my very close friends, told me that a person he knew got waitlisted at University of North Carolina, Kenan Flagler Business School(UNC). Now UNC is a top class school. Great strength across concentrations, great brand name, solid faculty, alumni network, placement, the works. So what is special about this particular chap who got waitlisted? Well, he had made up most of his resume, by his own admission. My friend had shown this other person's CV to me once. There was a line about: Volunteered during flood in Kolkata. Now Kolkata has never ever been flooded. Not just in my lifetime but ever. Now agreed, even a small amount of rains cause waterlogging in the city due to an outdated drainage system (thats a topic for another post altogether), but that's not a flood and the only volunteering people do during during such a time, is to turn up in office. In fact almost all of his "social work" was made up, by this person's own admission. The fact that he has a good chance at an admission at a US top 20 school certainly throws up some questions for all applicants.

People bloating CVs is nothing new. Though most of the schools are very strict about ethics and many schools actually have a separate essay to identify ethics in applicants, applicants have resorted to under handed tactics over and over again. A few years ago, Harvard rejected 119 applicants for hacking into their application site. Recently Fuqua expelled several students for cheating during exams. After Enron and worldcom, most business schools have tried hard to focus on and instill ethics into their students. But what can you do about a basic human urge to do one better than your peers? Many of us faced the competitive pressure during school exams that everyone cheated, so unless you also follow suit, your marks will suffer. The same analogy exists in today's business/political spheres. Unless you are corrupt like others, you will be left high and dry. For the purpose of this post, however, I shall focus on MBA applications only.

From a business school adcom perspective, it is almost impossible to verify every bullet point in the resume of applicants. I know Emory performs background checks of admitted applicants (and charges about $70 for the same as well). But by that time, the harm has already been done. Some worthy applicants have already been rejected. Off course, the adcoms can call up the immediate supervisors etc to verify the work credentials, but it's is not feasible all the times (say for a work history spanning several years). Moreover, how can you authenticate whether a personal story listed in an essay is true? So the fact is, some people will seep through the system, no matter what.

However, I firmly believe that such a tactics on the part of an individual is counterproductive in the long run. Say this person made it to UNC. Most of the other applicants would have been selected on the basis of their actual experiences and talent. So in class performance and during eventual placements, the difference is bound to surface. Most likely, such a person would not be able to cope with the MBA program rigour and/or reap its true benefits. Hard work, or the lack of it, does eventually show up. It's not a perfect world but things do average out over the years.

Books: an endangered species?

The following is my 2nd Toastmasters speech: Organize Your Speech

Some people say we have only one life. They have never read a book.
For books give us the opportunity to step into the shoes of a sharp detective and solve the mystery of Hound of Baskervilles, to fall in love with Juliet, to fall in love with the departmental head’s daughter despite being a five point someone at an IIT, to make a journey to the centre of the earth, to travel to far away galaxies, to play chess with death himself, and to do much more.

This printed object woven between two covers did not even exist five and a half centuries ago. Gutenberg, the German businessman invented print and voila, all this hoopla about books. But didn’t people learn and share knowledge before the time of Gutenberg? Wasn’t there Papyrus scrolls? Who said books cannot evolve as well? After all, the shiny little gadget which graces your pockets, is that the same monstrous instrument called telephone that Mr. Alexander Graham Bell invented? So even if people read e-books, let’s encourage that. Of course, bookworms would have to find something else for a profession but that’s another story.

Speaking of profession, we are all professionals. We are busy with fulfilling our official duties and running personal errands. Do we really get time to read? In fact, research has shown that reading, especially in the developed countries, is on the wane. In American universities, scholars have termed this generation: a Post-Literate society. A society where people know how to read, they have that capacity but they won’t read. They’d much rather go to the discos, surf the internet, play video games or watch television. Well I personally find television very educating. Whenever someone turns on the set, I go to the other room and read a book. But, that’s just me. The million dollar question is, if internet and other avenues of entertainment are so appealing, why would people read books?
In order to answer that, let’s find out what would have happened if books never existed. What if no one ever told us: “The world’s a stage where everyone must play a part”? What if Hamlet never procrastinated: “To be or not to be”? What if Harry Potter never weaved any magic? What if Humpty Dumpty didn’t have a great fall? Can you imagine such a world? What if Jules Verne never took us Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea?

Regarding Verne, Arthur C. Clarke, the great science fiction writer, once said, “I’m sure we wouldn’t have had men on the moon if it had not been for Wells and Verne and the people who wrote about it and made people think about it. I’m rather proud of the fact that I know several astronauts who became astronauts through reading my books.”

Well, you might say what we don’t know can’t hurt us, right? Wrong. Ignorance is not bliss. Creativity, literature, art, books are the soul of any civilization and it would surely be the bane of modern society if we discouraged reading in any form.

Let me share a small personal story. When I first went to Pune, for my first job, I did not know a soul here. I had no friends, no relatives no acquaintances. I was all alone in a big city. But I had my books. And I had my world. Just the knowledge that a good book awaits us at the end of a long day makes that day happier. Outside a dog, book is a man’s best friend. Inside a dog it’s too dark to read!

In Pune, one of the first books I read was "Shantaram". It’s an autobiographical account of an Australian named Gregory David Roberts. He was a budding poet who lost his daughter after separation from his wife. He got addicted to heroin to overcome his loss. To support his addiction, he started armed robbery. He was caught and convicted for 20 years. He escaped from this maximum security prison and fled to Mumbai. He learnt Marathi, fell in love, lived in the slums, established a free clinic there, worked for the underworld, went to fight for the Mujahideen in Afghanistan and if you thought he he led a dull life, hear this: he acted in a couple of Bollywood movies in between. The book is hard hitting and savage yet tender and lyrical. The vivid imagination and lyrical imagery of the man is so profound, it will leave you spellbound. If it wasn’t for this wonderful medium called book, we would never have known about the remarkable story of this extraordinary “criminal”.

Hitler, the greatest criminal of all, tried to burn all books in Germany to inhibit free thinking and creativity there. You don’t need to destroy books to destroy society. You just get people to stop reading them. And where books are burnt, people would be burnt sooner or later. We all know what happened to Germany in Hitler’s hands. He tried to eradicate an entire race from the face of the earth just because he believed if his own racial superiority. This is what happens when you don’t respect books. So let’s learn from the mistakes of the past and let’s gift our posterity a world which is free, where the light of knowledge illuminates our hearts and minds and graces our souls.

We all have a big part to play in this. Let’s promise to ourselves that we would all read more books, we’ll spread awareness of the importance of reading and learning, we’ll present more books to our friends, we’ll even try to receive more books as presents – you now know what to give me for my birthday!

The books that help you most are those that make you think the most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy learning but a great book by a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty. So let’s make a pledge today, that we would try to find this truth and beauty in the world around us and more importantly in the people, from various cultures, across all boundaries, of different nationalities and from all walks of life. Let’s promise, to read and read and read. Amen.

Social Responsibility

For a while now, I have been thinking of posting some of my Toastmasters speeches online. Here goes unedited version of my 7th speech - research your topic.


Last week, my friend Vikram, while approaching a stationary shop, saw a old lady come out of the shop and drop a 5-hundred rupee note in front of him. She kept walking down the street. Vikram looked around: there was no else there and the lady was now far away from him. No one but Virkam saw her drop the hundered rupee note. So what did Vikram do? Did he return the money to the lady who dropped it, even though she was far away at this point and might’ve taken some effort to catch up with? Did he take the note and run in the shop and quickly spend it?
Did he have any responsibility to return that money? Do we have any responsibility towards another person? Well, the bigger question is: can we survive living our lives in an insular disconnected manner?

We owe our existence, and our values to the society which rears us, we owe some responsibility towards its upliftment. All of us privileged persons, who were lucky to be born in a family that could afford to pay for our education, our clothes and all our frivolous desires. – do bear a responsibility towards our not so fortunate brothers and sisters. It is very encouraging to know that many of us here, like AR, AM, and some others in our office are involved in such an initiative, an NGO called Jagaran that financially supports underprivileged but motivated students.

About one month ago, some of us went to visit a few of our beneficiaries to verify how they were doing academically. We visited one a boy named Imran. We came to know from our local NGO contact that initially the NGO used to sponsor Imran's books as well as his private tuition fees. After a few months, Imran had turned down the aid for tuition fees while continuing to receive books for his studies. When we asked him about it, he replied, with a charming smile, that he finds it immoral to ask for tuition aid when he can very well manage on his own! The facts support his quiet confidence. He has never stood 2nd in his school and was a consistent top performer even in std 11. Here was a person who lived his life out of just one dank room, where his parents, his sister and he vies for each inch of space, who cannot even afford to replace his worn out shirt, yet he dared to refuse aid for something that he could well do without. We had set out in the journey that day to give something to others but this soft spoken, charming, bespectacled boy of 15 gave us so much.
Such is the nature of social work – you get more than you give.

Now the people are what make an organization. So if we, as human beings share a social responsibility towards the society at large, what about corporations?

Corporate Social Responsibility or CSR is concerned with treating the stakeholders of the firm
ethically or in a socially responsible manner. Many people criticize companies which undertake CSR programs because they feel that the companies are trying to distract the public from their unethical practices

Milton Friedman, a Nobel winning economist said, and I quote, "There is one and only one social responsibility of business -- to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits."He goes on to say, "so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud." (I'm sure you can think of a few companies that forgot that last part.)
Let's look at some of the side effects of single-minded pursuit of profit
“There were thousands of bodies. There were bodies everywhere. And people were dying all round.” These were the words of one of the victims of Bhopal gas tragedy. On early morning of 3rd Dec’1984, 40 tons of poisonous methyl isocyanate gas was released from pesticide plant of Union Carbide Corporation in Bhopal. Severe cost cutting measures resulting in improper security facilities were to blame for this disaster. The disaster left 15,000 dead, 5.5 lakhs ill, with a polluted environment that is yet to recover. An average monetary rehabilitation of … Rs 200 per year was awarded to each person. Rs 200(!!) for the victims of such a disaster!
We have all heard about the Enron scandal. At the beginning of 2001, the Enron Corporation, the world's dominant energy trader, appeared unstoppable. However, after a series of revelations involving fraudulent accounting procedures perpetrated throughout the 1990s, it stood at the verge of undergoing the largest bankruptcy in history by mid-November 2001. As the scandal was revealed, Enron shares dropped from over $90 to just pennies.
To draw a contrast with the above examples, let’s see a few examples of socially responsible behaviour by corporations.
Let’s take PwC: it has a well developed CSR program worldwide.
Various offices of PwC engage in activities like volunteering in the community (eg. parties for marginalized children), monitory donations by individuals and the firm to supported organizations, free professional Services such as Audit, Tax Advice, etc to community or not-for-profit organizations and so on.

Closer home, the Infosys Foundation has taken a lot of initiatives. While I was in Pune, I was part of one such initiative: we used to go teach slum kids in a place called Khadki. As most of the kids were Marathi, I had to teach them Marathi while I couldn’t even say “Hello” in that language! Well what happened was I knew Hindi and since the alphabets of Marathi are same as that of Hindi, I somehow managed it. Nonetheless it was great fun.

The ITC e-chaupal initiative also deserves mention. The e-Choupal places computers with Internet access in rural farming villages; the e-Choupals serve as both a social gathering place for exchange of such information as market prices of the crops and also help the farmers to locate potential buyers. This system is also a highly profitable e-commerce platform for the company.

The social responsibility of businesses may always be a sticky point to argue about, but plain old responsibility shouldn't be hard to strive for. Sir Winston Churchill used to say, “The price of greatness is responsibility”. It stands to reason that companies with great management teams that focus on profiting from excellence and innovation, and not "profit at all costs," are the ones that will produce sustainable profit growth.

So, today we have examined various instances of both responsible and irresponsible behaviour by individuals and corporations. Personally, I believe in what Samuel DiPiazza, our Global CEO, says, “Our obligation as business leaders and as individuals is to leave the world better than we found it”. So the choice is ours: whether we choose to focus our attention on our own lives or we look slightly above and beyond our quotidian tasks and try to make a difference in the lives of others as well. And to come back to my friend Vikram, he did take that extra step. He did run after the lady and return the money to her. He was socially responsible. Just as you and I are. And we all can, as Michael Jackson sang,
Heal the world
Make it a better place
For you and for me and the entire human race

Circuitous roads, a memorale vacation and a little bit of business

I took a well deserved(!) vacation over the thanksgiving weekend with a few friends who flew down from New Jersey. We covered Orlando (Universal Studios theme park) , Tampa and Clearwater beach. Not to mention the thanksgiving sale.
Ill come to the sale later. I drove for about 600 miles during the 3 days! Since I d been to Clearwater beach earlier, Universal was a special attraction. I was amazed at the scale and creativity of the park. They say that the world of movies is like a dream world. The theme park has actually carried that notion forward and carved out several rides/shows out of the all time favourite movies (produced by Universal pictures). The Shrek show (4-D) was awesome. The seats in the hall place you inside the horse carts in the movie, or take you on a boat though a waterfall i.e. the seats move along with the motion. When Shrek sneezes, you will get wet! The terminator 3D show was also awesome. The real actors getting inside the screen and zoming off on a bike. In addition, the 3-D terminators bounce off the screen right onto your face, the whole experience was breathtaking. The best experience, however, was the Revenge of the Mummy ride: It's an awesome, nerve wrecking ride! What a feeling. These 3 are probably the best shows/rides-there are others such as ET ride and a lot of behind the scenes coverages of the various popular films such as MIB, etc....The whole place is decorated as a studio...with street names/signs shops etc all organized like an old world city. It's truly a dream world.It may be due to my impending MBA, but I couldnt help but marvel at the brilliant business idea behind it all. There is no reason (other than a few million dollars) why the concept cant be replicated in India. Why not have a a Sholay ride, with you chasing Gabbar in a horse? Or Taking rani mukherjee on a ride while singing Ae kya bolti tu? Packaging is something we all can learn from the Americans. I read somewhere that a movie, even if it is a super flop, recovers its cost for the producers through the television /DVD and other promotional avenues. And such parks ensure that the legacy lives on for 20-30 years and continuously remains a top earner. There's no business like show business!

We went to clearwater beach just off Tampa. There are a lot of street performers there - spray painting, fire tricks, et all. The beach was as usual magnificient-resplendant in all its glory at the sunset.


Then the Thanksgiving sale. I shopped for about 10 hours that day! Things were just so damn cheap, and quality goods mind you, I just couldn't resist. My exploits included Laptop, digital camera, micro SD card, external Hard drive, sweaters, jackets and what not. I ravaged the lands of Circuit city, Macy's and Old Navy. However, the biggest surprise came 2 days later. A persistent salesman had made me buy a laptop cooler during the sale, saying it was extremely essential! Next day I realized my folly and felt the pang of conscience (read $15). I just checked the receipt once, and it was written that "If you change your mind about a product, we'll refund your money." So I thought of testing its validity. And whoa, no questions asked, I got my $15 back! Talk of customer service. Even bigger surprise was awaiting me, however. I saw at the store that the camera I had bought was $20 cheaper now. I complained to the Ckt city manager that this made mockery of the long wait in queue for the thanksgiving sale. He promptly refunded the balance $20! I was amazed at the congeniality of the personnel at the store. Whoever has experienced the lordly behaviors of salespeople at Indian stores will realize what a sea change in attitude this is. In India, most stores follow a "No refund or exchange policy" - none has even heard of discount adjustment for fall in price. Circuit City may have lost out on a few $ of sales but it gained a lot of loyalty. And that eventually will bring more business. Something to ponder over in my future career.