From Small Things : How I learned that changing the world isn By Patricia Espino

I’m sure many great, powerful and rich people think about how they can make a difference in the world. There are so many big problems, and they require big solutions, right? Actually, sometimes little things can make a really big difference. I learned this lesson one day five years ago with my father, when I was just acting like myself – a nine-year-old kid. Papa came home late from work after 9 pm. He’s a businessman who works long hours, and on this day he looked even more tired and stressed than usual. His eyes were already half-closed from weariness. I, on the other hand, was completely hyper. I followed him to his bedroom, skipping and doing the “Walrus Dance,” which I had made up myself. This ridiculous routine involved twisting my arms and legs in opposite directions. Papa trudged up the stairs, slowly lifting his large feet one after the other. He seemed to fall deeper and deeper into exhaustion every step he took. I was afraid that I would have to start pushing him, so I stopped dancing and got ready for the worst. Fortunately, he made it to the bedroom on his own. Papa sat down on the bed and started removing his shoes and socks. “How was work?” I asked cheerfully. “Oh, it was OK,” he replied wearily. “It’s just that I’m so tired.” “Oh,” I said, a little uncertainly. “Oh, um . . . you want me to leave?” Papa gave me a tired smile that made me more comfortable, that told me I was “safe.” It made me feel like he wasn’t going to scold me, as he often did when he was tired and I was bothering him or fooling around in any way. His smile lit up his exhausted face. I smiled too, only a much bigger smile. Well, actually a gigantic toothy grin, as I often did during that “stage in my life,” as Mama called it. “No,” he said kindly, “of course I don’t want you to leave.” Secretly I rejoiced. If I was not supposed to go yet, then that probably meant I was going to have a later bedtime tonight. Yay! There was silence for a while. I’ve always felt uncomfortable when it was quiet, so I opened my mouth and started blabbing away at top speed about nothing in particular – nonsense, actually, like why Winnie the Pooh only wears a short red shirt, and why butterflies fly. I was saying all of this in the voice of Stitch, the trouble-making little alien from the Disney movie Lilo & Stitch. Papa always loved it when I did that, and he started laughing loudly now. By the time I had acted out half the movie, voicing out all the characters by myself, Papa was crying tears of mirth. “Stop . . . stop!” he begged, wiping his streaming eyes. “Oh . . . side-stitch . . . ouch, OUCH!” I was delighted that I had made my grumpy old Papa laugh so much. “Did you like it?” I asked excitedly. “Of course I did,” he said. “Did you know that whenever you make me, or Mama, or your brother laugh when we are tired, you make us feel a lot better, and less tired?” I shook my head, astonished that I could actually do a thing like that. Papa smiled down at me. “You do.” I treasured those two simple words, and I still hold on to them in my heart. Amazing, I thought. Just like that! There are a billion people out there thinking BIG, and all I ever did was use a tiny “talent” of mine, as I like to call it. By doing so, I changed the mood of my family, changed the way they looked at things, changed the way they thought of life. A small act like that, I realised, can actually change the world. So much can happen when we work, but so much more can happen when we work cheerfully. Just by cheering people up, we can help them care more for each other, help them do their work better, and help make this world a more pleasant place to live in. There would be more love, and that, as everyone should know, is the most important thing we need to have a pleasurable life. So why not start small? Drop that ugly frown, put on your best smile, go out into the cold, dark world and spread some light, warmth and love to those who need it. You will make a difference – just ask my Papa. Source : http://www.rdasia.com/from_small_things

The Relative Factor October 14, 2005

Vanitha Prem Kumar will retire in two months time. A fortnight back, I met her in Chennai and listened to her life-story. Born to a railway doctor in 1948 – she was the second in a family of six children. All was well until one day her father passed away all too suddenly. It left her mother is a state of shock and lingering sickness. All her siblings were receiving good education but her mother had decided that it was quite alright for her to stay home. After her pre-university, Vanitha became home bound. Her mother liked it that way – it helped her to stay close to at least one child who could take care of her. Vanitha, a devout Christian, felt that this was indeed God's way. She was happy being near her mother who felt that the "not-so-pretty" Vanitha could well wait until a good man came along to marry her - someday.Everything changed one day when her uncle, a manager with a Tata company in Kumardubi, came visiting. He threw a fit. How could all the other children get good education while one girl was singled out to stay home? He chastised Vanitha's mother and the lady promised to let Vanitha go out of the house. That was Vanitha's turning point. She stepped out and trained to become a telephone operator. Vanitha liked that kind of work because at home, when her father used to be a doctor, it was she who used to pick up the phone and even started liking the errand. One thing led to another. She saw an advertisement for a telephone operator's job and not knowing that it was from the Taj Hotels, applied for it. She was selected and trained as an "order taker" for three hundred rupees a month. Seeing her rapid progress, the amount was raised by another hundred and fifty after a month. She married a man she liked and raised her two children over the years. Today, her daughter is settled in the US, married to a software engineer and her son is in his final year in a local engineering college. Vanitha is looking forward to continuing her work even after she retires from the Taj Coromandel in Chennai. She attributes her life's joy to the career the Taj has helped her to build. It all started however, with the uncle from Kumardubi.Cut to MindTree. I was chatting with a group of young software engineers. We were discussing the kind of influence our immediate and sometimes, the extended family has on us. Many owe their career to well-informed counsel of a relative. But sometimes, they have a hugely damaging influence because they are either ill-informed or overtly possessive. One young engineer who comes from a small town in Kerala, born to retired government folks, had to give in to constant maternal cajoles to come closer home. The mother did not understand the difference between one Software Company and another. Neither did she know the difference between a job and a career. Another engineer from Delhi had this amazing story – whenever he meets his uncle, the gentleman has just one concern. One of his cousins has already gone abroad. Another cousin has changed "three jobs" in two years! What is wrong with him? Why is he still stuck with the same company for five long years? Is every thing alright? I dread to think of how many people destined to great things in life, get derailed because of pressure from what I have started calling the "Relative Factor". I think two things will help. One, we at the workplace, will have to do a better job of bringing young people to the workplace and exposing them to the myriad options. We have to do that at the level of high school students. It does not matter that many of these children may have nothing to do with our organizations or careers we currently offer. Two, we have to connect with their parents and more importantly, the uncles of India. To me, they seem to have got everyone covered in the penumbra of their influence.I feel wonderful for Vanitha who will do a hat-trick soon - making it to the President's Club of the Taj Group for the third time in a row for the work she has done. She wears the small medallions of recognition on the border of her saree as if she had won them at the Olympics! I feel saddened by the young engineer who left behind a great career with us in Bangalore to board a train to Cochin – a place that is closer to Thrissur where mother is waiting for him.Life is a snake and ladder game. Every time we make a choice, we also choose the consequences. That is the reason we need to be careful with the Relative Factor in our lives. It is better to make it informed and beneficial. Source : http://digvijayankoti.blogspot.in/2009/04/subroto-bagchi-speaks-all-articles-by.html subroto bagchi

Written on Sand October 7, 2005

As a small boy, I was always fascinated with sand. In places I grew up, sand was easy to find. By the river bed, at construction sites and by short-lived rivulets that ran like fiery rivers after a spell of rain, next to paddy fields. The sand bed designed by unseen, deft fingers stayed on till a cow's hoofs went over them. I could spend hours looking at the patterns or playing on the sand dumped at construction sites. Today, bang in the heart of India's Silicon Valley, the only time I see sand is on my way to work. I see the trucks carry sand to construction sites I can no more play at. But my mind goes back to my childhood and the sand trucks bring me the memories of Koraput in Orissa. As a three-year old, I used to watch the occasional truck, groups of young adivasi women called "Nani bais" perched on the back. They wore bright sarees up to their knees, tucked flowers of the forest on the well plaited hair and sang in chorus as the trucks moved past me. At work and singing! Sometimes, as dusk fell, I would see them return - this time walking past - the women always held each other at the waist and walked in a single row - the men behind and they would be inevitably laughing or singing in a hauntingly beautiful chorus. That's my first impression of people at work. Today, I do not see them when the sand truck moves past in the traffic of Bangalore. But I notice something very interesting. The trucks come loaded from the river bed many miles away - nobody perched on them. Then they stand in some parking site - waiting for a buyer. The sand they carry is neatly stacked and every few days, the pattern changes. Sometime, they are loaded and then neatly patted to look like a pyramid, sometime like a mountain, sometime in yet some other shape. It occurs to me that the men and women who load them, have a mundane task but they have fun doing it and use their creativity on the sand as they go about their job. Some days, when the gulmohar trees are in bloom - you can also see a twig or two of bright bloom inserted on the top of the sand with the spontaneity of a child at play. Very similar to what we have all done as children by the sea, after building a sand castle. Today, I saw something even more interesting - I saw a parked sand truck - the loaders had willfully etched the Nike swoosh sign on the entire body of the sand. I am sure this is not part of a Nike campaign, but there it was. Until a buyer will come by, take the truck and the load is dumped. The artist will not be around to see the signs gone but he or she does not care. The creator had fun at work. How many of us sing at work? How many of us put our own swoosh sign on the sands we load? It occurs to me that we have left the child behind somewhere as we have gone to school and college and donned our business suits. And we complain about the spirit of innovation and lack of creativity at the work place. What is innovation and creativity? Is it in the mind or is it in the output? Is it in many small things or is it in a big bang of a great idea that will change the world forever? Is it something that flows out of designated minds in a R&D lab or is it in the hand of the "Nani bai" who improvises by plucking the flame of the forest - tucking some of it in her plaited hair and hoisting some on the sand? Or is it in the jamming they do, composing on the fly because they have never known how to read music, never been trained in any formal way? Innovation and creativity is a state of being. It does not get taught in MBA classes. It shies away when simplicity is shorn and we seek sophistication. It is not what gets guided through reward and recognition mechanisms that companies seek to fervently put in place like a net cast over a sea that has no life below the waves. It is a flow, a spontaneity and a continuum. It is in the profound anonymity of the artist of the sand truck who I will never see - someone who is telling me the importance of trying doing something new and doing it differently while loading the sand truck of my life today. Source : http://digvijayankoti.blogspot.in/2009/04/subroto-bagchi-speaks-all-articles-by.html subroto bagchi

What will I be, what will I be? September 30, 2005

I see it in their faces when they report to work on the first day, after being selected from an engineering college or an MBA institute. I see spark and innocence and a desire to win the world, laced with a kind of confidence only youth has been granted. Then I look beneath the veneer. In to the recesses their minds and I swim with their thoughts. Below the exuberance and the self-confidence, I sense uncertainties – I sense worries about what lies ahead? Flash back 1976. In the post-graduate class at the Utkal University, at all of 18-years of age, it occurred to me that I was wasting my time. My father had retired. I was living off my brothers. It had been only a couple of months before, that I had graduated with a first-class honors degree and was eligible for a national scholarship -enough to pay the mess dues at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) - the place I had wanted to go to. But the scholarship got disbursed only twice a year and mess dues needed to be paid every month. I went to many banks, they would not listen. At that time, you did not get a loan to study humanities. So, instead of going to JNU, I took admission at the local University and I was not liking it. So, what did I do? I walked out of class and took the job of a lower division clerk in the Secretariat. It paid me Rs 305 a month and in the bureaucracy, I was senior only to the dhoti-clad, elderly peon. My job started as an intern with the "upper division clerk" - a very dignified man who looked like a teacher. I would reverentially call him "Khuntia Babu". He taught me to file letters - something taken with great seriousness in government departments. One day, I was given to draft a letter of regret on behalf of the Secretary - it ended up being so sophisticated that both Khuntia Babu and the Sectional Head Clerk who was called "Bada Babu" saw great risk and thereafter, I was given a very light load. Given a lot of free time, I found myself often dragged to mediate among warring senior clerks who would suddenly start a furious debate over subjects like whether Sanjay Gandhi was good for the country - the debate often led to verbal violence but like receding waves after a crash, they would head back to the brown piles on their respective desks. One day, the dhoti-clad, elderly peon who had a permanently glazed look invited me to a secret club on the roof of the Secretariat building where a chillum was being passed around among his fraternity. In my life, it was the most exclusive, 'invitation-only' club I have ever entered. I worked there for a year before the DCM Group selected me as a Management Trainee. In a sense, the job at the Secretariat had taught me to brace for what was coming my way at the seventh largest industrial house in India at that time. Management Trainees at DCM were considered to be God's special people. Except that, I got posted to the oldest textile mill run by the group. There, my induction started at the "time office". At the gate of the Mill, at the blast of the siren, thousands of workmen - some bare-feet, some semi-clad, would march in with their "attendance cards" in hand. The smell of bidi and sweat from hard working and tough talking workmen interspersed with the noise of the clerks with thick glasses sliding down the ridge of their noses. I was the odd man out. Cut to 2005. In my office in MindTree, today I peer down the screen of my laptop, my thoughts are atomized and satellite links move them as bits and bytes across the world. I begin my day looking into the eyes of twenty-something engineers. By mid-day, I have spoken to customers in different parts of the world. By afternoon - I have sat in review meetings and spoken at training programs. Finally, ending the day with dinner with a visiting IT delegation. I time travel and step into the mind of a young man of 1976 and search out the familiar images. I ask myself - did I know that things would happen the way they did? What way my first job is linked to where I am today? I don't know. In some explainable and mostly unexplainable ways, it is. Sometimes, instead of looking for that link, it is probably better to simply do an outstanding job of whatever one has on hand. The rest, falls into place. Source : http://digvijayankoti.blogspot.in/2009/04/subroto-bagchi-speaks-all-articles-by.html subroto bagchi

Letter from Nimesh Anand October 21, 2005

One of the interesting rewards of writing a column is the wide variety of mails I receive. Sometimes, they contain words of appreciation, sometimes criticism, and then there are mails from people seeking professional advice. I do not like offering advice because it is not possible to give good advice without involved discussion. Also, most people do not like to receive advice. What they seek to hear is an affirmation of their own conclusions. Against this backdrop of reluctance, when Nimesh Anand (not his real name) wrote to me a few days ago, insisting that we meet, I asked him to summarize his issues first. When his reply arrived, it made me sit up. In many ways, Nimesh Anand is going through a happy problem. He has two job offers at hand from comparable companies for middle management positions. An engineer by education, he has spent most of his life in the sales profession. He wants to know, which of the two offers should he choose? That brings us to a very basic question. What are his goals? If we know a person’s larger goals, making a decision becomes easier. Here is what he has to say about his goals - “...over the next two to three years, I want to get a part-time MBA from a decent school; spend a little more time with my family than I have been able to; position myself to earn in the $500,000 bracket or be able to live in India and earn a US salary.’’ Very commendable, even if very self-centered. I wrote back to him, asking him how old he was. The reply startled me. Nimesh Anand is all of 32-years-old! At 32, he has a burning desire to earn $500,000 a year. He wants a US compensation to be paid out in India. For this he wants to have the kind of job that lets him have “enough time’’ to do a part-time MBA, but from a “decent’’ school and he also wants to spend more time with the family. Where does the company fit into the overall scheme of things? We will worry about that later. First, a little mathematics. If Nimesh is given out half a million dollars in compensation, his total cost to company will be in the order of a million dollars. It is a simple rule of thumb. You add the office rental, the equipment, other overheads, his travel and related organisational expenses. In the service industry, we normally take the total cost of owning an individual as twice the compensation paid. Given that, what value must Nimesh add such that his company can service his half million ambition? What level of rain making capacity must he have? How would he sustain that level of rain making, year after year? I was baffled. I asked myself, what was I doing when I was 32? It was 1989. My salary was Rs 5,000 per month. Add to that, a twobedroom company-owned house. My job involved coordination between Wipro’s computer factory and the field, looking after debtors and the technical training function. A bit hotchpotch, you may say. But I woke up every morning and ran. I worked hard and looked around baffled at all the people around—they seemed to be infinitely smarter, more competent than me. Seeing them, I worked even harder and asked myself, what value was I adding to be worthy of their company? It’s not that I was a martyr with no material ambitions. I did have my fair share. But they were not the compass of my life. Nor were they my North Star.You may say that was 1989, 16 years ago! Okay, let’s pay Nimesh 16 times or even 32 times more than what I earned then. But his needs are working out to be 375 times than what I used to make! He has at least 30 more years to go before hanging up his boots. If today, he needs half a million, what will he need in each of the three decades ahead of him? His view of a professional career is clearly that of a slot machine. Would he sign up for the rules as well? If all the money he needs must be made before he turns forty, he may have to squeeze all the juice out of his marrow before he hits his prime. Then what? Leaders, who have reached the top in any industry, have done so by giving more to life than they have taken out of it. Their foremost aim at every stage in their career has been to create disproportionate value, for the system, before self. Material rewards have followed, some times quite below their expectations, and sometimes well beyond. Source : http://digvijayankoti.blogspot.in/2009/04/subroto-bagchi-speaks-all-articles-by.html subroto bagchi

Google Your Career October 28, 2005

Google was started by two geeky youngsters from Stanford University—its beginning is legendary. I heard it from a Silicon Valley venture capitalist Ram Shriram. Shriram had made his fortune working with start-ups like Junglee and Netscape. Thereafter, he decided to become an angel investor. On one of his visits to Stanford to catch up with Professor Jeff Ullman, he met the two Google co-founders. The professor told Shriram that he should be backing these two young men. Despite the existence of the concept of internet-based search engines, there was something unusual here. Shriram and Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun, were willing to listen to the professor and took out their cheque books. It was then that everyone realised that the two youngsters did not even have a company name, much less a bank account.On the spot, they thought of the name ‘Google’ and Shriram filled the ‘to payee’ column accordingly. The rest is history. Google became a great IPO success, is meeting profit projections and has already become a Wall Street darling. I like the way the company raised itself to industry leadership. I think it has huge lessons for working professionals who could take a leaf or two from the Google story to build their own careers.To begin with, Google built itself on a solid value proposition and took a uniquely differentiated position. It provided value to the world before demanding any value for itself. It served until the world became dependent on it. It created value by meeting the unstated needs of unseen customers. That is a sure way, though a more difficult one, to win. It did not fear incumbency. So what if there were established large players who could have eaten Google for breakfast? Finally, Google persevered. It wasn’t an overnight success story. These are elements that build memorable professional careers as well. But wait, I haven’t told you the real secret sauce of their success, yet.Google started as a search engine. You typed in keywords and it looked through millions of pages all over the world’s farflung servers and reported what matched your needs. As time went by, they tried to make the search process more intelligent, more intuitive. They did not stop with that. When millions of people came to them with their search queries, they added the now famous ‘gmail’ to their basket of products — virtually unlimited storage, with no need to delete anything, more intuitive organisation of all your communication needs. What next at Google? I meet analysts who tell me that the next great wave of computing could come in the form of ‘service on demand’ from Google. You want to process your payroll? You want to print invoices and file tax returns? You want to manage your inventory? You will probably just go to Google and use any of these applications for a fraction of what it costs to own a software that does these sorts of things today. This may or may not turn out to be the state of the future. But, what is undeniable is the fact that Google will remain a force to contend with in the days ahead.Now think of your career and mine. If we can be compared to Google, the question becomes, what new value have you and I added of late? I meet many folks who started out in sales, and have grown up over time to manage larger territories and bigger accounts. I meet engineers who started in production or information systems or planning, and kept growing in a linear manner ‘managing’ essentially more of the same as years went by. Will this model work in the future? The answer is a short ‘no’.We may all choose to become a generalist, a specialist, remain an individual professional contributor, be a manager or a leader or whatever else we want. But in any of those, one must be sure to question periodically, "What new service offering do I have to offer to the world around me? Do I deliver it after someone has asked for it or am I pre-investing in building the capability?'' Just as Google needs to create new value for its users constantly, as professionals, we can't just be the best search engine and stay put. People who just continue to deliver the same good old stuff, cease to be interesting to the world around them after a while.I like people to look at their careers as five-year spans. Every five-year span is usually populated by two major assignments. Usually, we think of these assignments in terms of roles, job-descriptions, responsibilities, span of control, location and of course, compensation. It is time to take a leaf out of Google’s book. We need, periodically, to do a Google to our careers to create unusual new value and stay the favourite. Source : http://digvijayankoti.blogspot.in/2009/04/subroto-bagchi-speaks-all-articles-by.html

The Power of Mentoring November 4, 2005

In Bengali households, the eldest brother is often called “Dadamoni’’. I was eight years old when I came under the tutelage of Dadamoni, my eldest brother, D P Bagchi. He is 14 years older than I am, and at that time, was teaching at the local university. I came to live with him in Bhubaneswar from a small place that had no schools in the vicinity. While waiting to be admitted to school in the campus at Vani Vihar, I had no work on hand. I guess being both uneducated and unemployed at eight has its special circumstances. So, at times, I would sneak out of the house to hang around at the university, often eavesdropping on post-graduate classrooms.On one such occasion, I was outside a classroom where he was teaching and was caught. Instead of punishing me, he asked me if I understood what he was teaching. I sheepishly explained the theory of demand and supply that he was teaching to his class. He was so impressed with me that, instead of discounting me as a child, he started explaining the theory in greater detail. Thereafter, he started telling me about many other theories, like the law of marginal utility. One day, the Chancellor’s Cup Debate was held, and he asked me to come along with the condition that I promised to sit quietly at the back. There, I was thoroughly impressed by the young men and women who came up to the podium to debate the motion. I did not understand a word they said, but the process was spellbinding. I told myself that, someday, I had to do this kind of stuff. After a year there, Dadamoni joined the IAS. In due time, he was posted as an assistant collector in a sub-division called Keonjhar in Orissa. There, as he was trained in various aspects of district administration from doing land settlement in villages to declaring Section-144 in disturbed areas during a student strike he would treat me like an adult, teaching me all about the IPC and the CrPC, and explaining to me the intricacies of the revenue administration and discuss issues of development. Once the Hungarian ambassador visited an iron-ore mine in Dadamoni’s sub-division and he had to play host. He took me along to meet him. On the way, he explained the concept of protocol and coached me to address the ambassador as “Your Excellency.’’ I couldn’t wait for the visitor to ask me a question, to show off that I knew how to address him correctly even though I was a small boy in shorts. Dadamoni also taught me to recite Rabindranath Tagore’s timeless verse ‘Where the mind is without fear’. It came in handy for me because I shifted school every other year and, whichever new school I went to, the fact that I could recite an English poem of that sort earned me acceptance in the eyes of my new teachers and peers, who spoke little English themselves. Strangely, most workplaces have not heard about the concept of mentoring yet. In some, it is seen as a so-called “HR’’ initiative thereby driving it down to the lowest common denominator. In this context, my meeting with a young software engineer, Sriram becomes fascinating. Sriram quit his job to start a mentoring programme called “NalandaWay’’ in Chennai. The initiative impacts more than 220 promising children living in slums. NalandaWay locates such children by going around, meeting their parents and teachers. These children are then paired with successful people in the corporate sector. In the small time that the initiative has been around, it has become massively successful. The internationally renowned Ashoka organisation has adopted it as one of its “social entrepreneurship’’ programmes. Sometime ago, we got the folks from NalandaWay to talk to our leaders on what it takes to mentor young children. The idea was to learn the process so that we could introduce it to our own people. As my mentor, Dadamoni had a Pygmalion effect in shaping my personality and destiny. Education gives us some knowledge but good mentoring gives us the ability to relate it to the real world; it helps us to learn life-skills and moulds our attitude. The self-confidence that it can generate is so huge, it is almost magical. The principles of mentoring the child that was me, a teenage girl in a fishing village of Chennai and a budding young white-collar worker are not different. They all begin with the magical sensation of a grown-up reaching out to hold a soft, unformed hand and whispering, “Yes, you can!’’ This is when dreams are created and bridges built across to the realm of the possible. Where would I be today, without you Dadamoni? Source : http://digvijayankoti.blogspot.in/2009/04/subroto-bagchi-speaks-all-articles-by.html