India's obsession with NRIs' achievements

Indian girl devised a charged to charge your mobile phone in less than 30 seconds and Indian media goes gaga over achievement. India born American citizen gets a seat in panel first time and the media is ecstatic. India born girl wins IQ competition and the country swells with proud.

Recently such news have been regulars in the media circles. However, instead of making me proud they are irritating for me. Not that I don’t enjoy someone else’s success but I do get irritated when people try to link someone else’s success to their own by some or the other link they could draw in between. Like in these cases, the India born executive or NRI girl has nothing to do with India anymore!! Is it so difficult to understand this? Yes, they were born in Indian geography few years or decades back, but isn’t it odd for the country to celebrate wildly on how intelligent or successful some people have become, who were once born or lived in this country? These people no more represent India. They are citizens of a different country. What does that mean? It means that these people have chosen the other land to be their home, over the home which they once had. It means that they have gotten over the fact that India was once their home. Can’t we get over this?

This desperate measure of looking for success stories from people who no more represents India is beyond just petty self-acclaim. What is more dangerous is the inherent message these stories pass by their very being. Unfortunately, this message is widely acknowledged. It is – “Indians become known to world and achieve success when they are not Indians anymore”. May sound unpleasing to many but beholds the truth. We so deliberately propagate the thought of success with a pre-requisite to it. The pre-requisite is that these people achieved success because they were not in India anymore. Yes, India may be a tough place to make a mark, but so is every other country in the world. The challenges differs though, not the sincerity of efforts.

It also gives excuses to many for being unsuccessful. “…I could not do it coz am stuck here in India..”. As pessimist as it may sound, the whole point of taking credits from people’s success and linking it to India is not going to lead us anywhere.

Some articles and news go further by digging out connections to some places or events in India which changed the way an achiever use to think or work. May or may not be true, makes us believe in some way that it may work for us as well. Giving this mumbo jumbo to people and making them believe in things rather than themselves and their potential can be dangerous for the real India’s growth.

Its time we put behind what NRIs are achieving in their new homes and rather take these stories as inspirations for their hard work and perseverance, instead of how being Indians or being associated to India made them achieve it.

Open your eyes and your mind to the reality and not to the fantasy stories served by people who are hell bound to make news that is interesting but not necessarily true.

Cheers,

No more home sweet home for work! say Yahoo!

Everyone seems to be mind boggled with the storm brought by Marissa Mayer last week when she banned the work from home policy at Yahoo!

I don’t see a reason for this after-madness.

I think there will always be people who will be for and against the motion about everything under the sun and what matters is what do you think is right to do and whether you have the authority to it. Not to forget the time to make a decision and the justification which you put across are dangerously important.

Justification, however is never going to be convincing enough for anyone who does not believ in something that is just imposed upon. Justifications are usually the aftermath of a decision which is nothing but – rationalizing an emotional decision.

Coming back to the point on whether or not Marissa Mayer is right in doing what she did. Well, I certainly think she atleast cannot be foolishly wrong with decision. The whole idea from work-from-home has been seriously abused by people in industries.

Before even jumping into passing opinions about the quality of the decision, we must first understand, work-from-home is not for all the industries and set-ups.

Work-from-home claims to brew creativity in people and hence not doing so, will be stifling the creative being in a person. Patrons also claimed that the idea of having a changed work-place is more often than not improved the productivity of employees. Not to mention the buttressing arguments of being comfortable, relaxed, secured etc which sounds like a terrific medicine to make people innovative.

Not that all of this is untrue. But to what extent it is true and in what circumstances it is true are two important questions to be asked.

The idea of work-from-home as mentioned earlier is one of the most abused working concepts of today’s workplace conundrum. The number of people who are genuinely opening their creative pores sitting in their shorts with their dog sitting next to them, is far lesser than what patrons claims for. Instead work-from-home has become more often a holiday that was not approved!

Yes, again, nothing is completely true and same can be applied to the above statement. But what must be looked upon as well are the rational arguments that justifies the fact that work-from-home definitely is not the best thing in recent times which has happened to workplace policies in organizations.

When people meet, they talk. When they talk in offices or workplace, more often than not, they will talk about work, peers, superiors etc. This helps the organization in number of ways –

There are common talking points between in peers making them not just tw computers sitting next to each other but people who mutually exists

Discussions in offices are one of the major reason why work-from-home must be abolished. It allows people to argue and counter argue. It allows people to filter and refine their thoughts at a much earlier stage, hence saving  a lot of productive time and possible resources

A common identity which is associated with the employees is the workplace which all of them visit every day and associate with. Taking that away from employees is pushing the people away from that single association point

Yes, we are in 2012 and yes, u have heard of e-mail, outlook, skype, twitter, fb etc but when you want to discuss an issue or an idea, nothing is more effective than a peer or a real team sitting together instead of 4 small video windows on your screens with your team looking and talking in different directions

Finally, it is important to trust your employees and give them the liberty to do their work, but can anyone deny that productivity always needs to be enhanced and to do that you must first know how to manage it. And how will you manage it, when you do not have enough and correct parameters to evaluate it? I mean the time spent, the efforts expensed, the results achieved(tangible and intangible) etc.

No wonder people are unhappy with this move by Yahoo! CEO, but is it surprising? A big chunk of people who were having time of their lives by working-from-home are suddenly questioned about their productivity. They have suddenly realized they are under radar too. And they have certainly realized that the party is over for them. And it is just to be seen , who all follow the suit.

I think Marissa Mayer did just the right thing. It is not more home sweet home for work! Now say Yahoo!

How actually creativity is stifled

We were studying how creativity is being stifled at workplace due to stringent rules and procedures which more often than not, does not do any good to anyone.

It was interesting to be part of a brainstorming session where almost everyone was chipping in with reasons why organizations are losing people with creative ideas. We started pointing reasons starting from how fear of failure causes people to keep comfortable in their own cocoon, or how it is the higher management and missing leadership qualities that are the reasons for bogging down creative ideas.

We also did not spare the family environment as a reason for the first place of stifling the creativity among individuals. Why not, it is actually true! How many times are we encouraged in our homes while we are very young to do things which are new to everyone? We are not. We are showed a path right from the childhood and asked to follow it. Every time when we try something new we are forcefully asked to retreat, and we oblige.

So we were getting all excited about how at one or other instances, we all faced situations where we wanted to discover a path which was beyond the expected and accepted protocol and how we were stopped from doing so.

Our teacher was especially very interested in bringing out most of all of us through our knowledge as well as experience on how the creative minds, like our (pun intended!) have been made to work like machines. She gave us a beautiful structure on how we need to overcome that. Try to do things which are not written in rulebook, try to do things differently than you would normally do, do things which are interesting for you rather than what you should be doing, open the brain to a new world and new things around to make it work in a more creative manner.

It was all going so well and I started to feel more creative than I was when I entered the class.(yeah!)

The class ended and ma’am started to give us feedback on the article reviews we had submitted in the last class. I was excited after listening such positive views from our teacher on being creative, treading the unusual and going out of the box for something which is interesting etc. I got my article review back with a note on it – “It is not an article from an academic journal but from a blog. Repeat with a penalty assignment”.

I was shocked! It was such an interesting topic that I really wanted to do a review on that. I knew it was not from an “academic journal” but how does it matter as far as the article is interesting enough to be dealt with. I even wanted to share my understanding of this very interesting article with the class. But here I am, forget about a positive feedback of the heart-ridden review I did for the article, I have actually got a repeat assignment. I told ma’am, this is such an interesting article and I did my review nicely, why should I be getting a repeat assignment. Ma’am replies – “ As per the instructions given, you should take an article only from an academic journal with these constraints and must analyze it only on the basis of analysis parameters I have given to you. Also the article must be attached only before the review. These rules must be followed strictly for the article review to be considered completely”. And I had nothing to say. This was happening within 10 minutes of a insightful discussion where we were trying to find out – how actually creativity is stifled?

Cheers,