Category Archives: Book readings

A Happier You

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Read Time:14 Minute

Dr Mukesh Jain, IPS, talks about positivity and its effect on personal well-being inside and out. Mr Rajagopal Swaminathan, Founder CEO, La Poochi (Azzetta) and Dr Asit K Barma, Director, Bharathidasan Institute of Management shared their insights in a conversation with the author. 

Michelangelo was one of the greatest sculptors humanity produced. Someone asked Michelangelo, “What do you do to make your statues look so lively and full of life?” Michelangelo replied, “I don’t make statues. Every stone has a beautiful statue in it. I just remove the unnecessary stone out of it.” At a very abstract and philosophical level, the Science of Happiness is about removing the unnecessary stones, which are our wrong notions and principles and stories about what gives us happiness. We all have numerous ideas about what happiness is and what will give happiness. But unfortunately, that is anecdotal—something which my father or teacher or guru taught me. What they experienced as happiness may or may not apply to us. Fortunately, in the last 25 to 30 years, there has been an evolution of a science called positive psychology. For hundreds and hundreds of years, psychologists had emphasised on the negative part of psychology, studying the mentally ill like the neurotic and psychotic people. The analysts were trying to elicit negative energies or negative memories of people’s childhood. 

In 1990s, people decided to focus on the positive part—like how people flourish and how they become successful. Ironically, if you try to remove the negativity from a person like neuroticism, he doesn’t become flourishing and successful. The whole science of positive psychology is a different ballgame. But before we understand positive psychology, we must know the clear distinction between self-help and positive psychology. 

Self-help vs. positive psychology

Positive Psychology is not self-help. We keep reading so many self-help books. Typically, they have two or three problems. One, you would have realized that on reading them, you get really energized and motivation goes up. But within two or three days, the motivation goes back to the normal situation. The problem with self-help is it follows a one-size-fits-all approach. If a person born in a very poor family followed a particular strategy and got very rich, the author will propagate that this is the strategy for you also to follow to become rich. That actually doesn’t happen. Your circumstances are different from mine; your skill sets are different from mine. The recommendations are not scientific. 

They also tend to overgeneralise.  If three people who are extremely fluent in English have good business success, can I generalize that all people who are fluent in English can become successful businessmen? No. It has to be scientifically experimented. Self-help books have the hallow effect. If somebody has achieved success in one field, they will try to say that whatever the person says about other fields also may be true.  So self-help is not positive psychology and it is not scientific at all. 

Paradigm shift

Since childhood, we have been taught a happiness equation: If you do hard work, you will be successful. If you are successful, you will be happy. If this equation is broken at two places, first, hard work does not necessarily lead to success. There are so many intervening variables. Second, even if you get success, it does not always lead to happiness. In the process of getting success, you might miss some of the important things like health, family happiness, your child’s education, the company of your best friends, etc. Happiness cannot be the endpoint.

We have also faced a paradigm: If I get this degree, I’ll be happy; If I get married to this girlfriend, I’ll be happy; If I get a four bedroom apartment, I’ll be happy. Positive psychologists say that this is not the proper equation. They say that the real happiness equation, demonstrated by millions of experiments is this:  Happiness cannot be the endpoint but it has to be the starting point. Be happy. If you are happy, then you will do a lot of good work, which will anyway convert into success. If you go to your office being happy, you do something energetically. You help other people. Other people in turn help you. You end up doing good work, which ultimately converts into success.  

If we deliberate on why we are not happy, we can find out that psychologists have zeroed in on four important things that are impediments to our happiness and they are: Impact Bias; Shifting Goalposts; Negative Bias and Comparison.

Impact bias

For every event in our life, we tend to assign that by achieving a feat, we’ll get a certain amount of happiness. For example, when we want to get admission into one of the best engineering colleges or management institutes, we think we will be so much happier. We may put it on a scale and there is always a gap. Psychologists say that this perceived gap will create unhappiness in our life.  

Shifting goalposts

We achieve so many things in life. But whatever happiness we had attributed to these goals, we don’t really enjoy on achieving the goals. We keep shifting the goalposts. Every time we achieve certain things, we shift the goalposts for a next target. Ultimately, we miss the happiness of that particular goal which we had attributed.

Negative bias

We all have an intrinsic negative bias in our mind which is related to our survival instinct. For example, if I’m sitting in my office at about 2.33 PM and my boss calls me on intercom and tells me to meet him when I leave my office at 7 PM, in my mind, I start worrying if something has gone wrong.  If my son or daughter has gone to some birthday party and does not return by the expected time, I am filled with only negative thoughts, because, we are wired for negative thoughts and this has got something to do with our evolution. When people lived in caves thousands of years ago, there were only two possibilities whenever there was noise outside the cave. Either the man could have killed a small animal to eat or he could have been attacked by a tiger. It was safer to assume that there was a tiger outside the cave. This negativity that continued down the ages, stops us from being happy. We have to consciously overcome this negativity 

Comparison

Psychologists say that in Olympics, silver medallists are less happy than the bronze medallists. Because the silver medallists compare them with the gold medallists and feel for missing the gold medal narrowly. But the bronze medallists are happy to at least figure in the list of medallists, rather than being left out, without any medal. A Maruti car owner residing in a colony of people owning Mercedes car will be the least happy person. But if they live in a colony full of two wheeler owners, they are happy, as they compare themselves with others. Comparison is probably one of the important reasons as to why we are unhappy.

Back to the old ways

Dan Gilbert, a great expert on positive psychology, did some wonderful experiments and one of which was about winning the lottery. When he asked the respondents, ‘If you win a lottery of say, five crore rupees, what will happen to your happiness?’ they said it will go up continuously. By winning the lottery, Dan Gilbert says, one’s happiness goes up but only for a while. Then it comes back to the normal level. Similarly, he did experiments with people who met with some serious accidents and were wheelchair bound after the accidents. He measured their happiness after the accident and extrapolated it before the accident. He found that after the accident, people’s happiness came down, but only for a while. Then it came back to its normal level. That means, something inside you is pulling you back to the same level.

The gene factor

Happiness has also got to do with genetics. Psychological experiments were done in Minnesota, United States, using two groups of twins—identical twins and fraternal twins. Identical twins come from the same zygote and fraternal twins come from different zygotes. This essentially means that identical twins have the same genetic structure, while fraternal twins may have some common genetic structure or not. They studied 1300 pairs of fraternal twins and identical twins from the age of zero till 14 years and followed their psychological makeup, how they got stressed, etc. They discovered that identical twins are much closer in their psychological happiness compared to fraternal twins.

There is a gene called 5 HTT, in every one of us.  We have two different variations of that. Some people have the shorter variation and some have the longer variation. People with shorter variation tend to be more sensitive towards happiness. If a nice, funny video is shown to both of them, the shorter variation people will laugh more intensely. So, gene has something to do with happiness. 

Sonja Lyubomirsky has done several studies and meta studies and she has reached the conclusion that 50% of our happiness comes from our genes. This is both good and bad news. The good news is that 50% is still in our hands and the bad news is that we can’t do anything about our 50%. Sonja also says that only 10% of our happiness comes from external circumstances like driving a car, sitting in the clouds, etc. 40% which is a major chunk of our happiness comes from our thoughts and actions.  

Search for meaning

Psychologists discovered that it’s not the positive things like going to a theatre, eating good food or singing a song that give greater happiness. On the other hand, things that provide meaningfulness and purpose in life are those that give real happiness. Richard Ryan, Veronica Huta and their team did some experiments to find out this. They went to a college and divided the whole group into two parts. For the next 10 days, one group was asked to do one positive activity which made them happy. On day 1, they could go to a music class, day 2 to a cricket match and so on. The second group was asked to do one meaningful activity per day for the next 10 days. They could sit with a lady who is a cancer terminal patient on the first day and teach a blind boy to learn braille on the second day. 

Their happiness was measured at three points – on day zero, on day ten and after three months of the experiment. On day zero, it was the same for everyone. After ten days, the happiness was more for group 1 (who did one positive activity that made them happy) but after three months, the group which did one meaningful job a day had substantially higher happiness. They could remember each and every moment of the time they spent in doing those activities. Even after one year, their happiness was higher.

Author and TED speaker, Emily Smith, has written a book, ‘The Power of Meaning.’ She talks about four pillars of meaning that give us happiness. (Loving and engaged relationships; a sense of purpose; an attitude of optimism; and a connection to spirituality). She says that despair in people’s lives is not because of lack of happiness but lack of meaning. People who have meaning in life are more resilient, they do better in school and their work and they even live longer. 

Job crafting 

In management schools, we hear about job enrichment and job rotation. Even without changing the content of the job, can you craft it so that it becomes more meaningful? Job crafting is a wonderful concept. We have seen people in our organizations who are extremely intelligent, talented and energetic, but they become dysfunctional. Their meaning is not aligned to the organization’s meaning.

We must create an atmosphere of positivity and nurture positive emotions like pride and gratitude, which create happiness. There is a famous study of nuns done in the US that brings out the correlation between positivity in linguistic expressions and longevity. Handwritten notes from several nuns, composed when they were young, were scored for emotional content and related to survival during ages 75 to 95. A strong association was found between positive emotional content in their notes and their longevity. (Snowdon, Danner and Frieson: Positive Emotions in Early Life and Longevity: Findings from the Nun Study). 90% of the nuns who had written that they felt very positive, found the going exciting and that they were learning a lot, continued to live till 85 years whereas only 34% of those who had many grudges and complaints in their notes, survived till the age of 85.

Gratitude

Whenever somebody does a good thing to us, we are grateful. But psychologists say that unless we express our gratitude, the benefits don’t come to us. In Indian culture, we tend to presume that whatever our parents or spouses have done for us is part of their duty.  The fact is, the more we express our gratitude, the more it creates happiness for us. When we go to sleep, we can write a gratitude journal. We can also make gratitude visits, when we want to visit the person to express thanks. 


Relations, experience, mindfulness

Social Relationships matter a lot for our happiness. Good relations make us healthy and happy. We are not talking about how many friends we have on Facebook or LinkedIn or WhatsApp. It is the high quality of connections in our life. Money gives happiness but only up to a certain point and not as much as we thought. Researchers arrived at this conclusion by surveying a group of people. For example, when asked to rate their happiness on a scale of 1 to 10, if their salary was increased threefold, they said that it will increase from 4.5 to 8.5 or 9. But another group of people who were already drawing a much higher salary rated their happiness only around 5. The study was done on different groups of people with similar geographical and social backgrounds.

More than material possessions or purchases, experience gives you more happiness. So a nice vacation with family or a nice dinner or party would give more happiness than buying a good car or an iPad. Also, whenever you want to get happiness, create an anticipation effect. Let’s say you want to go for a foreign vacation next month. In the one month preceding the trip, you’re extremely excited and planning for the trip, which is probably better than the actual visit. If you want to buy a movie ticket, don’t buy it for today evening but buy it for two days hence, so that, for two days you will anticipate that happiness.

Mindfulness is another aspect of happiness. Thinking of negative things that happened in the past or worrying about the future stop you from being happy or productive. If you are fully engaged in your present work, you are not only happy but also, you are more productive and creative.

The four chemicals

Dopamine, endorphin, oxytocin and serotonin are the four chemicals that our body produces.  Eating chocolates can produce dopamine in us but we can also get it by hugging a loved one. Doing exercise or dancing can give us a lot of endorphin. Listening to good music can produce good serotonin.  Helping the body generate these brain chemicals can be the immediate artificial outside interventions to give us happiness.

To summarize, experimenters in positive psychology have come to the conclusion that happiness is 50% genetic but still 40% is in our hands. That 40% is thoughts and actions of ours. Seek meaning and purpose in life. Create positive moments and positive emotions. When you start from your home to the office, don’t ignore that little beautiful boy or the rose flower shop on the way. Be grateful not just to your parents but to a worker in your office or a subordinate who helped you make a nice and effective presentation. Maintaining social relations and high quality connections can probably be the best thing you can do to achieve happiness. Practice mindfulness. Remember the four chemicals that can give us happiness. If we follow all these strategies and become happy, our families, organisations and nations will become happy. Happiness has a habit of creating a virtuous feedback loop.

Echo point

When we join the civil services, we go to Mussoorie for our foundation course—whatever service we belong to. On the first day when we joined Mussoorie, we started walking in the evening along the Mall Road. There was a point where it was written ‘Echo point.’  We wanted to test whether the echo point really works. One of my friends started barking like a dog. The whole valley reverberated with the dog’s voice. I told my friend, “You are a good singer. Why don’t you sing a good song?” He started singing a nice song and within minutes, the Mussoorie Valley echoed the nice musical song. Life, I think, is an echo point. Whatever we give to our life, it comes back to us in a multipolar form. 

A Happier You

Posted on by
Read Time:14 Minute

Dr Mukesh Jain, IPS, talks about positivity and its effect on personal well-being inside and out. Mr Rajagopal Swaminathan, Founder CEO, La Poochi (Azzetta) and Dr Asit K Barma, Director, Bharathidasan Institute of Management shared their insights in a conversation with the author. 

Michelangelo was one of the greatest sculptors humanity produced. Someone asked Michelangelo, “What do you do to make your statues look so lively and full of life?” Michelangelo replied, “I don’t make statues. Every stone has a beautiful statue in it. I just remove the unnecessary stone out of it.” At a very abstract and philosophical level, the Science of Happiness is about removing the unnecessary stones, which are our wrong notions and principles and stories about what gives us happiness. We all have numerous ideas about what happiness is and what will give happiness. But unfortunately, that is anecdotal—something which my father or teacher or guru taught me. What they experienced as happiness may or may not apply to us. Fortunately, in the last 25 to 30 years, there has been an evolution of a science called positive psychology. For hundreds and hundreds of years, psychologists had emphasised on the negative part of psychology, studying the mentally ill like the neurotic and psychotic people. The analysts were trying to elicit negative energies or negative memories of people’s childhood. 

In 1990s, people decided to focus on the positive part—like how people flourish and how they become successful. Ironically, if you try to remove the negativity from a person like neuroticism, he doesn’t become flourishing and successful. The whole science of positive psychology is a different ballgame. But before we understand positive psychology, we must know the clear distinction between self-help and positive psychology. 

Self-help vs. positive psychology

Positive Psychology is not self-help. We keep reading so many self-help books. Typically, they have two or three problems. One, you would have realized that on reading them, you get really energized and motivation goes up. But within two or three days, the motivation goes back to the normal situation. The problem with self-help is it follows a one-size-fits-all approach. If a person born in a very poor family followed a particular strategy and got very rich, the author will propagate that this is the strategy for you also to follow to become rich. That actually doesn’t happen. Your circumstances are different from mine; your skill sets are different from mine. The recommendations are not scientific. 

They also tend to overgeneralise.  If three people who are extremely fluent in English have good business success, can I generalize that all people who are fluent in English can become successful businessmen? No. It has to be scientifically experimented. Self-help books have the hallow effect. If somebody has achieved success in one field, they will try to say that whatever the person says about other fields also may be true.  So self-help is not positive psychology and it is not scientific at all. 

Paradigm shift

Since childhood, we have been taught a happiness equation: If you do hard work, you will be successful. If you are successful, you will be happy. If this equation is broken at two places, first, hard work does not necessarily lead to success. There are so many intervening variables. Second, even if you get success, it does not always lead to happiness. In the process of getting success, you might miss some of the important things like health, family happiness, your child’s education, the company of your best friends, etc. Happiness cannot be the endpoint.

We have also faced a paradigm: If I get this degree, I’ll be happy; If I get married to this girlfriend, I’ll be happy; If I get a four bedroom apartment, I’ll be happy. Positive psychologists say that this is not the proper equation. They say that the real happiness equation, demonstrated by millions of experiments is this:  Happiness cannot be the endpoint but it has to be the starting point. Be happy. If you are happy, then you will do a lot of good work, which will anyway convert into success. If you go to your office being happy, you do something energetically. You help other people. Other people in turn help you. You end up doing good work, which ultimately converts into success.  

If we deliberate on why we are not happy, we can find out that psychologists have zeroed in on four important things that are impediments to our happiness and they are: Impact Bias; Shifting Goalposts; Negative Bias and Comparison.

Impact bias

For every event in our life, we tend to assign that by achieving a feat, we’ll get a certain amount of happiness. For example, when we want to get admission into one of the best engineering colleges or management institutes, we think we will be so much happier. We may put it on a scale and there is always a gap. Psychologists say that this perceived gap will create unhappiness in our life.  

Shifting goalposts

We achieve so many things in life. But whatever happiness we had attributed to these goals, we don’t really enjoy on achieving the goals. We keep shifting the goalposts. Every time we achieve certain things, we shift the goalposts for a next target. Ultimately, we miss the happiness of that particular goal which we had attributed.

Negative bias

We all have an intrinsic negative bias in our mind which is related to our survival instinct. For example, if I’m sitting in my office at about 2.33 PM and my boss calls me on intercom and tells me to meet him when I leave my office at 7 PM, in my mind, I start worrying if something has gone wrong.  If my son or daughter has gone to some birthday party and does not return by the expected time, I am filled with only negative thoughts, because, we are wired for negative thoughts and this has got something to do with our evolution. When people lived in caves thousands of years ago, there were only two possibilities whenever there was noise outside the cave. Either the man could have killed a small animal to eat or he could have been attacked by a tiger. It was safer to assume that there was a tiger outside the cave. This negativity that continued down the ages, stops us from being happy. We have to consciously overcome this negativity 

Comparison

Psychologists say that in Olympics, silver medallists are less happy than the bronze medallists. Because the silver medallists compare them with the gold medallists and feel for missing the gold medal narrowly. But the bronze medallists are happy to at least figure in the list of medallists, rather than being left out, without any medal. A Maruti car owner residing in a colony of people owning Mercedes car will be the least happy person. But if they live in a colony full of two wheeler owners, they are happy, as they compare themselves with others. Comparison is probably one of the important reasons as to why we are unhappy.

Back to the old ways

Dan Gilbert, a great expert on positive psychology, did some wonderful experiments and one of which was about winning the lottery. When he asked the respondents, ‘If you win a lottery of say, five crore rupees, what will happen to your happiness?’ they said it will go up continuously. By winning the lottery, Dan Gilbert says, one’s happiness goes up but only for a while. Then it comes back to the normal level. Similarly, he did experiments with people who met with some serious accidents and were wheelchair bound after the accidents. He measured their happiness after the accident and extrapolated it before the accident. He found that after the accident, people’s happiness came down, but only for a while. Then it came back to its normal level. That means, something inside you is pulling you back to the same level.

The gene factor

Happiness has also got to do with genetics. Psychological experiments were done in Minnesota, United States, using two groups of twins—identical twins and fraternal twins. Identical twins come from the same zygote and fraternal twins come from different zygotes. This essentially means that identical twins have the same genetic structure, while fraternal twins may have some common genetic structure or not. They studied 1300 pairs of fraternal twins and identical twins from the age of zero till 14 years and followed their psychological makeup, how they got stressed, etc. They discovered that identical twins are much closer in their psychological happiness compared to fraternal twins.

There is a gene called 5 HTT, in every one of us.  We have two different variations of that. Some people have the shorter variation and some have the longer variation. People with shorter variation tend to be more sensitive towards happiness. If a nice, funny video is shown to both of them, the shorter variation people will laugh more intensely. So, gene has something to do with happiness. 

Sonja Lyubomirsky has done several studies and meta studies and she has reached the conclusion that 50% of our happiness comes from our genes. This is both good and bad news. The good news is that 50% is still in our hands and the bad news is that we can’t do anything about our 50%. Sonja also says that only 10% of our happiness comes from external circumstances like driving a car, sitting in the clouds, etc. 40% which is a major chunk of our happiness comes from our thoughts and actions.  

Search for meaning

Psychologists discovered that it’s not the positive things like going to a theatre, eating good food or singing a song that give greater happiness. On the other hand, things that provide meaningfulness and purpose in life are those that give real happiness. Richard Ryan, Veronica Huta and their team did some experiments to find out this. They went to a college and divided the whole group into two parts. For the next 10 days, one group was asked to do one positive activity which made them happy. On day 1, they could go to a music class, day 2 to a cricket match and so on. The second group was asked to do one meaningful activity per day for the next 10 days. They could sit with a lady who is a cancer terminal patient on the first day and teach a blind boy to learn braille on the second day. 

Their happiness was measured at three points – on day zero, on day ten and after three months of the experiment. On day zero, it was the same for everyone. After ten days, the happiness was more for group 1 (who did one positive activity that made them happy) but after three months, the group which did one meaningful job a day had substantially higher happiness. They could remember each and every moment of the time they spent in doing those activities. Even after one year, their happiness was higher.

Author and TED speaker, Emily Smith, has written a book, ‘The Power of Meaning.’ She talks about four pillars of meaning that give us happiness. (Loving and engaged relationships; a sense of purpose; an attitude of optimism; and a connection to spirituality). She says that despair in people’s lives is not because of lack of happiness but lack of meaning. People who have meaning in life are more resilient, they do better in school and their work and they even live longer. 

Job crafting 

In management schools, we hear about job enrichment and job rotation. Even without changing the content of the job, can you craft it so that it becomes more meaningful? Job crafting is a wonderful concept. We have seen people in our organizations who are extremely intelligent, talented and energetic, but they become dysfunctional. Their meaning is not aligned to the organization’s meaning.

We must create an atmosphere of positivity and nurture positive emotions like pride and gratitude, which create happiness. There is a famous study of nuns done in the US that brings out the correlation between positivity in linguistic expressions and longevity. Handwritten notes from several nuns, composed when they were young, were scored for emotional content and related to survival during ages 75 to 95. A strong association was found between positive emotional content in their notes and their longevity. (Snowdon, Danner and Frieson: Positive Emotions in Early Life and Longevity: Findings from the Nun Study). 90% of the nuns who had written that they felt very positive, found the going exciting and that they were learning a lot, continued to live till 85 years whereas only 34% of those who had many grudges and complaints in their notes, survived till the age of 85.

Gratitude

Whenever somebody does a good thing to us, we are grateful. But psychologists say that unless we express our gratitude, the benefits don’t come to us. In Indian culture, we tend to presume that whatever our parents or spouses have done for us is part of their duty.  The fact is, the more we express our gratitude, the more it creates happiness for us. When we go to sleep, we can write a gratitude journal. We can also make gratitude visits, when we want to visit the person to express thanks. 


Relations, experience, mindfulness

Social Relationships matter a lot for our happiness. Good relations make us healthy and happy. We are not talking about how many friends we have on Facebook or LinkedIn or WhatsApp. It is the high quality of connections in our life. Money gives happiness but only up to a certain point and not as much as we thought. Researchers arrived at this conclusion by surveying a group of people. For example, when asked to rate their happiness on a scale of 1 to 10, if their salary was increased threefold, they said that it will increase from 4.5 to 8.5 or 9. But another group of people who were already drawing a much higher salary rated their happiness only around 5. The study was done on different groups of people with similar geographical and social backgrounds.

More than material possessions or purchases, experience gives you more happiness. So a nice vacation with family or a nice dinner or party would give more happiness than buying a good car or an iPad. Also, whenever you want to get happiness, create an anticipation effect. Let’s say you want to go for a foreign vacation next month. In the one month preceding the trip, you’re extremely excited and planning for the trip, which is probably better than the actual visit. If you want to buy a movie ticket, don’t buy it for today evening but buy it for two days hence, so that, for two days you will anticipate that happiness.

Mindfulness is another aspect of happiness. Thinking of negative things that happened in the past or worrying about the future stop you from being happy or productive. If you are fully engaged in your present work, you are not only happy but also, you are more productive and creative.

The four chemicals

Dopamine, endorphin, oxytocin and serotonin are the four chemicals that our body produces.  Eating chocolates can produce dopamine in us but we can also get it by hugging a loved one. Doing exercise or dancing can give us a lot of endorphin. Listening to good music can produce good serotonin.  Helping the body generate these brain chemicals can be the immediate artificial outside interventions to give us happiness.

To summarize, experimenters in positive psychology have come to the conclusion that happiness is 50% genetic but still 40% is in our hands. That 40% is thoughts and actions of ours. Seek meaning and purpose in life. Create positive moments and positive emotions. When you start from your home to the office, don’t ignore that little beautiful boy or the rose flower shop on the way. Be grateful not just to your parents but to a worker in your office or a subordinate who helped you make a nice and effective presentation. Maintaining social relations and high quality connections can probably be the best thing you can do to achieve happiness. Practice mindfulness. Remember the four chemicals that can give us happiness. If we follow all these strategies and become happy, our families, organisations and nations will become happy. Happiness has a habit of creating a virtuous feedback loop.

Echo point

When we join the civil services, we go to Mussoorie for our foundation course—whatever service we belong to. On the first day when we joined Mussoorie, we started walking in the evening along the Mall Road. There was a point where it was written ‘Echo point.’  We wanted to test whether the echo point really works. One of my friends started barking like a dog. The whole valley reverberated with the dog’s voice. I told my friend, “You are a good singer. Why don’t you sing a good song?” He started singing a nice song and within minutes, the Mussoorie Valley echoed the nice musical song. Life, I think, is an echo point. Whatever we give to our life, it comes back to us in a multipolar form. 

The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek

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Read Time:10 Minute

Under the “Read & Grow” series, MMA organised a discussion on the theme of the book ‘The Infinite Game’ authored by Simon Sinek on 19 January 2023 at MMA Management Center. Mr Sreenivasan Ramaprasad, Director, CADD Centre Training Services led the conversation with Ms Viji Hari, Founder, CecureUs and Mr Babu KS, Head – Global Regulatory Affairs, Pfizer Healthcare India Pvt Ltd.

Ramaprasad: People play two kinds of games. One is the finite game where players and rules are well defined. The basic objective of the game is to win. When you win, the game ends there. People who play the finite game like soccer or cricket know exactly who their opponents are and who their players are; they play to win. That is what the author calls as a finite mindset. Infinite game is a game played without any boundaries and rules. You don’t know who your opponents are. The game is played not for winning but to perpetuate the game. People continue to play the game till they get out of the game. The game continues. 

The author Simon Sinek takes us through several examples, starting from the Vietnam War. The Americans lost the war despite winning lots of battles. He says that the Americans played with the finite mindset of winning whereas Vietnamese fought for their lives, which is an infinite game. One of his favorite examples is Microsoft and Apple. Microsoft started with a very good vision of enabling people to work better with devices. Over a period of time, that shifted to a number game. When the former CEO, Steve Ballmer, took over the company, he drove the company for winning. ‘When a finite mindset leader plays an infinite game, it’s not good for the company,’ he says. At the same time, Apple was very clear about their vision. They were not fighting with the competition; rather, they were working for betterment of the community.

Simon Sinek talks about five levers of infinite mindset, which are:

  • Just cause: Advance the just cause. It differentiates an organization. The cause must belong to the future, be useful for the community and be for the betterment of the world; it must be one for which people will be willing to make personal sacrifices. That’s the kind of just cause you need to have. 
  • Building trust and trusting teams.
  • Competitors: They are very much essential because if you have worthy competitors, you can learn from them and improve yourself.
  • Existential flexibility: For a company to survive, be flexible enough to exist. Victorinox, the Swiss knife company, was holding 95% of the market share in the Swiss knife till 9/11. After 9/11, Swiss knife was banned and the market share dropped to almost nothing. They diversified into other products and grew the business.
  • Demonstrate the courage to lead.


Viji Hari: You have to create a vision for the long term and not do something just for the short term. There are many lessons for investors, politicians, leaders, CEOs, managers and supervisors. My organization works with a just cause of creating secure and harmonious workplaces. I deal with handling sexual harassment cases. I get fulfillment every time I go and handle a case of sexual harassment; I work for the cause of diversity and inclusion and create happy workplaces.  

Simon Sinek talks of an example in the chapter on trusting teams, where he quotes that he once visited Four Seasons Hotel in Las Vegas and there in a coffee shop, he met an employee called Noah. He ordered a coffee and started having a conversation with Noah. He asked Noah, “How do you like this job?” Noah answered, “I love this job. The managers here just drop in, visit us and they keep asking us, ‘Hey, is there anything that I can do to help you to make you better over here?’” Noah also says that he works for another company in the night shift, just for his paycheck.  We know how our very own Mumbai Taj hotel staff were willing to give their lives to protect the guests in the hotel when the bomb blast happened.  

Babu: The purpose of our actions has to be much bigger.  I come from Pfizer, the pharma industry. We have registered our products across the world. Our vision is to provide breakthrough medicines to treat patients that change their lives. In Chennai, we have a big setup. During the 2015 Chennai floods, we were all struck in our Chennai homes. We had some critical regulatory submissions to be made in some of the geographies in the world. If we didn’t do the submissions, the approvals and the launch of the products would get delayed in the market and patients were going to suffer. We never asked our colleagues to go to office but some of them went to office, in the floods, on their own risk and made sure that the submissions were made, of course, in digital. 

Simon also has another book, “‘Start with Why.’ The ‘why’ is very important. He compares parents who push their children to get first rank with parents who make sure that their children become lifelong students. I was a topper in my district from Andhra when I went to BITS but there I realised that I was one among several toppers. The ranks and the positions, the turnover, the top line, bottom line and profit are all very relative terms. They don’t make any sense in a way.   Your actions have to be driven by the love for what you do. Why I get up every day and do what I want to do is very important.

Ramaprasad: Existential flexibility is one thing which resonates with me. When CAD center started 35 years ago, our original intention was to provide CAD services. We realized that we were probably 10 years early to the market. One month down the line, our revenue was a big issue and we didn’t know how to continue the business. That’s when we decided to start training in CAD as it had a bigger demand at the time. We quickly put together a training program and started offering it. There was no turning back after that.   

Babu: Courageous leadership is the lever that appeals to me. I think the organization is always driven by leaders. The quality of the leadership and the courage they display is very important, especially when things become very competitive and it becomes very tough to stay in the game. Sometimes leaders may have temptations to take shortcuts. The courage to stick to the cause and the clear direction from the leaders at the top are vital to the organisation.  

In Chennai, iD idly/dosa batter is very popular. P C Mustafa, the founder shared his story at the Harvard Kennedy School. When they started, they really struggled; making money for survival became a big question. They also had a product called ‘diamond cuts’ which is a tasty snack. They got a huge order from one of the star hotels for 1000 kgs of diamond cuts and they were very excited, as it would change the future of the company. When he discussed further with the hotel about where they wanted to use the diamond cuts, they said they were going to use it as a snack in their bar. Mustafa was very clear. They didn’t want to promote drinking. He declined the offer. With iD batter, they were committed to help household cooking and wanted to give a pleasant experience for cooking to homemakers. He did not deviate from his vision.

Ramaprasad: We also had this temptation of selling PCs which were booming during the late 80s and early 90s. But our promoters clearly said that we must stay focused on CAD which would give us the longevity. 

Viji Hari: Simon Sinek talks about CVS Pharma whose CEO took a decision not to sell cigarettes, because Pharma is something that promotes health and cigarettes would go against that cause. Everyone advised him against it because the shareholders were worried about profits. In the next three years, the profit share increased and their investors made a lot more money. In the place of cigarettes, they started selling nicotine free chewing gums and other substitutes, which boosted their sales and encouraged the brand.

Simon Sinek gives tips on how to form your vision statement, in writing which, he says, we must ask questions such as: Is it really inclusive? Is it designed only for particular customers or is it open to everyone? Is it flexible? He clearly states that we must write down our mission statement, record it and make it public. That will help us to stick to our cause, even during tough times.

Ramaprasad: What is your view on current leadership of organizations that you’ve been dealing with? Do leaders operate with finite mindset or infinite mindset?  

Babu: We have examples of both. When I started my career in the 90s, there were some great pharma companies. They were started by founders who had great passion for serving humanity and bringing affordable, safe medicines to the world. In some cases, when the next generation takes over, probably the focus and the priorities get changed. They couldn’t stay in the game. Eventually, some of the star companies in my early years, now don’t even exist. There are also some companies like Pfizer who are more than 100 years old in India.  

Viji Hari: The CEOs who have to perform under intense investor pressure probably succumb to the pressure and forget the long term vision. Leaders and CEOs must ensure that they have an infinite mindset. Simon Sinek suggests that a CEO must be renamed as CVO–Chief Vision Officer.  He points out that the average life span of companies figuring in S&P 500 index in 1970s used to be close to 61 years; it is 18 years now. He also points out the huge gap between a CEO’s salary today as compared to that of the lowest paid worker in his/her firm. This will make the CEO focus on making short term money, rather than developing an infinite mindset.

Ramaprasad: How easy or difficult it is for you to build a trusting team today?

Viji Hari: It is not easy but very important. One of the simple exercises that I do with my team spread across India, is that we meet once every year in Chennai, in a resort, so we can bond well. Instead of discussing the company goals and the vision for the big things, we talk about each other’s backgrounds and what’s happening in their personal life. This has really helped me in the long run. The stories that some people share are very heart moving. People end up in tears. We open up and share more than the numbers. Simon Sinek talks about how in Shell, they built trusting teams that must work in hazardous conditions in oil rigs and it’s a powerful story.

Babu: Leaders have to be very choosy in getting the talent who are passionate and aligned with the vision of the organization. Generally, we tend to buy talent from market who have the skills. For example, in pharma, I may get the temptation of hiring people who know the science of medicines or pharmaceutics or drug safety. They’re very important, no doubt. But in addition to that, they should be passionate about what the organization does. Technical skills can always be trained. What we learn today is going to become obsolete tomorrow. We all have to be students lifelong. Also, the leader must create a safe environment where people are able to open up, speak freely, share their ideas and mistakes and accept that they don’t know. Communication, alignment with the vision and a safe environment are three things that make a lasting theme.

Ramaprasad: How relevant is infinite mindset to the current generation?  

Babu: Absolutely important. The present generation get distracted a lot with multiple things and technology. They are keen on immediate results and instant gratification that reduce your patience. I loved Test matches but today’s generation want only T20 matches. The attention span and our patience are all coming down. If the younger generation stick to what they love, I think, the future will be in smart hands and they will lead the world into something that is very different. 

Viji Hari: Organisations now gear up to change the policies to accommodate the thought process of the younger generation. They are very clear on what they want. They don’t look at the long term. But, we saw during the Chennai floods the younger generation coming up and helping out a lot. I’m sure the future is in safe hands.  

Engineered in India

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MMA-KAS organised a discussion on the book “Engineered In India” authored by Dr BVR Mohan Reddy, Founder Chairman & Board Member, CYIENT. Mr M M Murugappan, Chairman, Carborundum Universal Limited, led the conversation with the author.  

Murugappan: Tell us about the defining moments in your life and how they impacted you.

Mohan Reddy: Mothers have a very important role in our lives. So was my mother. I was in class seven. I was good in extracurricular activities. When I got the mark sheet, I was so scared to show it to my mother and hid it for a while. She was smart enough to find where I could hide things. She saw my marks and was furious. She said, “Look, this is not acceptable. If you don’t perform well at the end of the year, I will send you off to our village, where you can go and join your grandfather.” My paternal grandfather was a farmer. I used to go and spend summer holidays with him. I knew how difficult it was to live in a village. Just about that time, around 1961 or 62, they got power supply in the village. 

She also asked me, “When your sister can do so well in the school, why can’t you?” My sister, elder to me by a year, is now a medical doctor. I couldn’t sleep that night. I was really scared of going to the village. I started studying my sister. She was very studious and hard working. I started competing with myself to do better and better. That became a very positive habit and led to a virtuous cycle that goes on and on. I was in pursuit of excellence in everything I did. This attitude thereafter translated itself into my business too. I started my career as a professional. I spent about nine years in Voltas, a Tata Group company. Then I jumped into a full-fledged entrepreneurial journey. 

The second moment came after working for 18 years when I realised the environment was changing. I turned 40 and the energy levels seemed to go down. The family was very supportive and therefore, with a big leap of faith in myself, I took a jump and became an entrepreneur, ready to take the risks in my life. The third, is meeting you and you made a lot of difference to my life, as my mentor, though younger to me. So please do not think your mentors need to be elder to you.

Murugappan:  You chose to pursue an entrepreneurial dream at 40. Did you assess your risks at that time?

Mohan Reddy: Yes, I did. I come from a middle-class family. My father was an honest police officer. My mother was a homemaker. There was not so much of money at home. But I had the ambition and dream to become an entrepreneur. As soon as I graduated, I wanted to be the master of myself and do something to contribute to the world. I understood that I had to wait for a while to create some amount of wealth for myself. Also, in the 1970s and the 80s, it was still a tremendous amount of license raj and it was not technology. My wife Suchi (Sucharita) and I assessed the risks. I also had growing up children at that time. I built a little economic, social net to make sure that she would become economically safe. I came and bought a property in Chennai and rented it out to TCS. I promised my wife that I would not touch the rental income.   

Murugappan: So, there was an element of a very typical South Indian conservatism, coupled with a high aspiration, courage and conviction. Is that why you chose to go public at an early stage of your business? 

Mohan Reddy: Maybe hindsight tells me that it was one of the wrong decisions. We started with a very small capital. 20 lakhs was my personal money. Two NRI friends gave me $10,000 each. (1 USD was Rs 25 then). I borrowed 97 lakhs from IDBI. The project cost was just 1.22 crores in all. Fairly quickly, by 1997 or 98, we thought it was important to raise capital. Somehow, I got the impression that the lowest risk capital was the public issue. As it was just after the Harshad Mehta scam, my financial advisor said that it could be the last chance for us to go public, in the next couple of years. In hindsight, I think I diluted myself a little early. But that was a key driver model. We wanted to expand the business by raising money. Engineering was still not there. So that was the trigger.  

Murugappan: I’ve seen the company grow over time. First, it started off with digitalization services. Soon it transformed itself towards value added services and more towards engineering services. Did you engineer these transformations? Or did it happen at the right time, at the right place?

Mohan Reddy: It was a very conscious move for us to transform ourselves on a continuous basis. My lifelong dream is to build engineering products. I’m a mechanical engineer by training. We also moved up the value chain to provide product engineering services, providing solutions to customers and design-led manufacturing to ensure that we get a competitive advantage.

Murugappan: You chose to invite some key customers into the shareholding. Wasn’t that a conflict of interest?  

Mohan Reddy: The key to it is that if you have a customer who has got a stake in the business, he becomes your anchor customer. United Technology Corporation or Pratt and Whitney had the maximum shareholding in the company at 15%. We had our own doubts if they would interfere with our work, look at the pricing structure and put pressure on the margins and pricing. The second challenge was if this would block any of their competitors to come to us. We discussed ways and means by which we could address that. But we were sure that once they became an investor in the company, they will certainly have a greater commitment to us. Hindsight tells us that it was an amazing decision. They continue to be a top customer. We have an engagement with 1000 people and generate $100 million revenue year after year. Literally, this is like an annuity that comes to us. We wrote the contracts in such a way that they cannot question our pricing and they agreed to it. We also ensured that their competitors come and work with us. After the deal, I spoke to Mr Louis, then Chairman of United Technology Corporation and profusely thanked him. He said that he had made money twice over. “First, by getting you as an offshoring partner, I’ve saved two thirds of my money. Second, by investing in your company.” I was delighted by what he said.

Murugappan: I saw, as a board member, you created value in terms of capability of the company. There was also an underlying value system of trust. That is why, all the customers came to us without batting an eyelid. 

Mohan Reddy: Absolutely. My simple definition of trust is ‘under promise and over deliver.’ That is when you earn the trust of the people. We won the contract with Pratt and Whitney, precisely because of the trust part. It was an accidental meeting I had with a team of 16 Pratt and Whitney. After 90 minutes of conversation, their Executive Vice President asked me, “Mohan. Can I come to your office tomorrow?” It was not on his calendar. At the end of the meeting, he invited me to come to Hartford. Much later, I went back and asked him, “Louis. What made you decide so quickly that I was the right partner for you?” He said, “Trust. When I came to your office, I saw all that happened. It was no different from what you told me—your emphasis in process, your ability to deliver quality and on time and the way in which you control your costs. All that mirrored every document I saw in your office.”  

Murugappan: You chose to give people from across the world responsibilities, which spanned India as well. What caused you to do this? 

Mohan Reddy: I believe that locals know the culture, the value system and the ethos in that part and they are much better in conversing and convincing and giving the comfort to a customer, compared to a foreign individual who goes from here. For example, Indians would not understand how the American football game is played. Right from the very early days, we decided to have locals work with us in making sure that we can scale our business much more comfortably. 

Murugappan: Building capability was a big part of Cyient. You also felt that Cyient was at a stage where you needed to slowly step back and do things that you enjoy in society. We already had the Cyient Foundation. You look at something much larger.

Mohan Reddy: The underlying phenomenon is fairly simple. We build institutions to last forever. Human beings don’t last forever, founders will not. But they like to see businesses flourish even after their time. Therefore, there is a very clear succession plan that comes in. When I turned 60, I decided to put a succession plan in place to make sure the company will flourish forever. If the company gets into trouble, it is not just the wealth of the founders that is lost, but 16,000 jobs are at risk. I’m putting families at risk. They trusted me, believed in me, came and joined me and they built this company.

When I was 32 years old, fully in control of my previous company called OMC computers, a Tata Sons director asked me if I ever thought what would happen if a bus came and stopped over me. I had two young children and I was only worried about them. But when the same question was asked ten years later, I started this company and it started growing. Now I was thinking about all my people in Cyient.  

Murugappan: In the new phase of your life, you spend more time in public service, educational institutions, mentoring startups and so on. Is the joy that you get now greater than what you got when you started the business? 

Mohan Reddy: Both of them give me joy. I can’t put one to be superior and the other as inferior.  It’s an amazing feeling that you get at the end of it. Business gave a joy to us in making sure that we created wealth, not just for ourselves but for several other associates in the company and investors. We also participate in nation building. In 1991, when I started this company, India was precisely in the same situation that Sri Lanka is in today, unable to pay the foreign debt. Today, India has about $550 billion of foreign exchange. Software companies contributed in big way. We also contributed in a small way. The joy that comes from doing work outside the business is also enormous.

There is a poem by Linda Ellis. It’s called ‘Dash.’ Once we disappear in this world, every one of us will rest in a six by four space. The tombstone has a name, date of birth, dash and date of death. If you look at the constituents of that board, nothing is under your control, except the ‘Dash’. Dash is the one that you contribute to this world. So we must think about what we can leave behind as our legacy. 

Murugappan: What do you think the future holds for India? 

Mohan Reddy: The future looks very promising. I’m an optimist like many other entrepreneurs. The environment today is so conducive for the growth of this nation. The ease of doing business has improved.  The innovation index has improved. I believe that technology, AI especially, will drive this decade. ChatGPT will become as popular as what it is. It’s very concerning to many. But we will see ChatGPT will get integrated in every industrial applications- agriculture, logistics, transportation and healthcare. The opportunities are aplenty for the young people through technology and a conducive environment. In addition to that, we have the demographic dividend.

Free Ice Cream

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MMA organised a Discussion on the theme of the book “Free Ice Cream” authored by Mr Ganesh Natarajan on 28 December 2022 at MMA Management Center. Mr R A Nadesan, fulltime director, SRM Group, CA V Pattabhi Ram, author, public speaker and teacher, Ms Malini Saravanan, Head HR (III SBG) Water & Effluent Treatment IC L&T Ltd and Mr Anand Srinivasan, economist, author and value investor, shared their insights in a conversation with the author.

Ganesh Natarajan: FRICE is a fairly unusual concept. Can we make everything free for everyone? The question people ask is, “How is it possible?” Today we have a problem. It is artificial intelligence. It is going to lead to a major job loss event.

When we look at artificial intelligence, what we require is computing capacity. In 2017, the best computer that we had, was as good as the rat’s brain. The human brain is about 100,000 times better than a rat’s brain. Applying Moore’s Law, our computers get better, faster and twice the capacity every two years. By 2050, we will have a computer as good as a human brain. By 2083, we will have a supercomputer that’s 100,000 times better than a human brain. We look at a rat as a pest. We kill them terming it pest control.

A computer needs energy. By 2083, 10 billion people are going to be hanging around consuming energy. If I am that supercomputer, I’m going to look at all the people as an unwanted load on the system, just like we look at rats now. Noah Harare, the author of the book, ‘Sapiens-A Brief History of Humankind’ said that human beings will become useless. People like Bill Gates and Elon Musk say, “Yes, we have a problem on our hands.” The UBI- universal basic income has been floated around for a while. For various reasons, this may not be the best solution.

Machine vs. Machine

Computers have already beaten human beings in Jeopardy, Chess and in GO. GO is a game like checkers. There’s something called the Shannon number, which is the number of possible permutations and combinations. In a game of chess, it’s 35 to the power of 80. So no wonder, chess is pretty hard. In GO, it is 250 to the power of 150. Google, through one of its subsidiaries, built the computer called AlphaGo. They taught the rules, gave it a lot of data input and prepared the computer. It beat Lee Sedol, the champion in GO, which was a major event in that space.

What was interesting was that Google set up the next machine AlphaGo Zero. This machine was given the rules and inputs. It started learning and beat the previous machine AlphaGo in three days. The next version Alpha Zero beat the previous version, by learning in just 36 hours. So now we are talking about the game between computers and the human is out. This is scary stuff. What is AI yesterday becomes a part of normal today.

The Automation Spree

Yesterday, we built a factory and we needed 500 people. Today you build the same factory and you need only 100 people because the cost of sensors has come down. Why would I need a person watching the temperature or pressure, when I can put a sensor and walk away? Tomorrow, it’s going to be 20 people and the day after tomorrow, there are going to be no people. It’s a logical progression. You can’t fight this, you can’t argue with this, this is what’s happening. 80% of the jobs can and will be automated. And we are not talking about factory jobs but of doctors, lawyers and accountants.

In 2050, we are expecting 10 billion people as the world population. If 80% of the jobs will go away, how many billion people will be out of work? It’s not as if the doctor is bad. The doctor knows all the stuff. But the doctor takes an hour to think through the process. He can only think of 20 case studies, the lawyer can only look at 50 or 100 cases but the computer can look at million cases instantaneously.

The other side of the problem is that for most of us, we take up a job to get some income for our survival. They need to put food on the table. If all of us are going to be without a job, what do we need to do? The simple answer would be to decouple job and our survival. There are a couple of ways for this. One, make everything free for everyone. The other option is a UBI. But UBI has got many issues. Simply speaking, it is going to increase inequality severely. You will have 10 multi billionaires globally and 10 billion paupers. Those 10 people will decide what is good for the universe.  

Ideas will matter

Millions of years ago, we were in the hunter-gatherer phase. If you had a spear, you could go and kill some animals and you got your food. Then we started farming. If you had the land, you could grow some crops. Then we had the industrial phase. Warren Buffett is the richest person in the industrial phase. He doesn’t want farmland, he wants stocks. The nature of ownership changes as we go forward. In the post AI society, it will be ideas, because there’ll be a machine to implement the idea. The idea hopefully will come from us.

In resource allocation, agrarian economy was feudalism, industrial economy was capitalism or communism—both two sides of the same coin. The only difference is in resource allocation. In capitalism, they say it’s up to the individual. In communism, it’s up to the central planning. As we are going into a new era of artificial intelligence, it’s time for us to have a new economic model -free ice cream economy.

Malini Saravanan: Will AI make us all irrelevant? We don’t have to get scared because it is not going to happen tomorrow or next year. It’s going to happen only in a phased manner, so we can be much more prepared, we can foresee it and plan for it. Despite artificial intelligence coming in, human beings play a significant role, because they are the ones who can be more creative and innovative. Tomorrow, we may have robots working along with human beings. Machines will not have fatigue and will work round the clock. People in the new age must have multi-dimensional and multi-functional knowledge, to stay competitive.

R A Nadesan: AI can probably do fuzzy logic, like in our washing machines, AC and TV. They can do predictions and extrapolations. A combination of fuzzy logic, deep learning, machine learning and sensors and various other things form the robots. Robots can do jobs that human beings cannot do, like working in dangerous terrains- for example, jungles and mines. There are also humanoids like Sofia. Basically, the understanding is that you need human intelligence to feed artificial intelligence. I do not think that 80% of the people are going to be unemployed. If you apply the Pareto principle, 20% of the people who are going to do the job can probably get that 80% result. The other 80% who are otherwise doing repetitive works can do more creative things. The routine elements can be done by the robots.

CA V Pattabhi Ram: AI is definitely a challenge. At the same time, we must also recognize that down the years—from 70s and 80s, people have been talking about how technology will take over our lives. When computerization first came, people said accountants would go away. Accountants did not go anywhere. Only accountants who did not embrace technology disappeared.

To give a more current example, a lot of audits that happened today have been done in a better way, thanks to AI. We need to look at AI as a tool that helps us. I do a lot of writing. The Grammarly software does a remarkable job in cleaning up the spelling, checking the tense and suggesting modifications. Even in a creative space, AI can do many things. We thought that technology will face a challenge in creative areas. Today, many new jobs have come up. 15 years ago, we never thought there would be a Swiggy or Uber drivers. So new jobs will come up. We need to embrace AI to make our lives far simpler.

Mr Anand Srinivasan: There are two distinct sciences in our life. One, we have physical sciences. We also have what is called Social Science like Philosophy and Economics. This book on the Frice concept talks about Natural Science. The end point of Natural Science is Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle which states that it is impossible to measure or calculate exactly, both the position and the momentum of an object. That’s where social science begins.

We don’t play by rules

AI as of today has limitations. Yes, if the rules are known to you, then you can program a computer to do anything. But in most situations in life, you do not know the rules or people don’t play by the rules. That is 95% of the situation. AI will be effective when people play by the rules.

Let me take an example of a recent cricket test match played between India and Bangladesh in Mirpur, Bangladesh. I was listening to ‘Ashwin Speak.’ In the subcontinent, you cannot play a spinning ball on the fifth day pitch. The skill is to pick which ball will turn and which will go through straight. Most players don’t go after the ball that turns and jumps. Most of the wickets go to the balls that go straight. Ashwin made an important point as a bowler, which no batsman could do. The balls used in the test match were not the original kookaburra balls. So he believed that after 35 overs, the ball would do nothing. He tried telling it to others in the team management but nobody took him seriously. If you have just gone by AI, Bangladesh should have won the match, with the quality of bowlers they had. But Ashwin knew that the ball would do nothing after 35 overs and that he could play it either on front foot or back foot. The fact was that India won and Ashwin played a key role in it. AI can help in a T20 Test match but life is not T20. It is all about playing Test cricket. We have to play for 80 years.

But I agree that 70% of us or even higher are in trouble because our attention span has come down. We cannot watch anything for more than five minutes anymore, especially the younger ones. If you lose attention span, you lose the ability to gain knowledge. If you don’t study for knowledge and just study to pass the exams, then AI will surely kill you. But if you are going to accumulate knowledge by reading at least 50 pages a day, you have nothing to worry about AI. 

Malini Saravanan: AI can provide meaningful data analysis and predictive analysis. But human beings are required to look at those predictive analysis. We need humans to understand human emotions and human behavior and in a given business scenario, to provide right decision making.

Ganesh Natarajan: If all people are not going to lose jobs and if they’re going get new jobs, that’s great. But as a species, if this is going to lead to our extinction, then we need to be prepared. So as a minimum, we need to have a plan B. Now, let’s move on some basics.

Why do things cost money?

If I am going to start a bakery to make bread, I need flour, a baker and an oven. I need energy—gas or electricity. So I need to pay for the raw materials, labour, machinery and energy. These are my input costs. As a business owner, I want to make a profit. If my bread costs me Rs 40, I will sell it for Rs 50. If I am a not-for-profit organization, I can sell the bread for 40 rupees.

If I focus on reducing my cost further, then I can make it cheaper. When I totally eliminate the cost and do not have a profit, I can sell the bread for free. How do we make it happen? Let’s look at the energy cost. If we have a solar panel or a wind farm which is fully automated and has zero maintenance, then the cost of energy is zero. There is, of course, the capital cost—which is the cost of the machinery.   

Automation will happen and there is no turning back. Newer factories will have less and less labour and they will progressively be totally automated and it will be a major job loss event. The next cost aspect is the raw material. Now this gets interesting. If you want to make a shirt, cloth is the raw material. If you want to make cloth, cotton is the raw material. A hammer requires steel, which comes from the iron ore. All of these are classified as primary raw materials. They either come from a farm or a mine. If you start at the primary raw material and make that free and progressively move up the chain with free energy and total automation all along the process, most costs are eliminated. The last one—which is the machinery—is the most interesting case.

How are the machines made? To make a fridge, you need steel, some moulded plastic, polyurethane foam for insulation and a compressor which is mostly steel, copper and various other metals. We need machines to make machines. Think of a 3D printer. Let us borrow a 3D printer, give it the necessary raw materials and make another 3D printer out of it. You can return the first 3D printer. So you borrowed the first one, replicated it and gave the first machine back.

Let’s get more granular. To make ice cream, I require a factory, milk, cream and sugar as raw materials. I need a dairy processing facility to make cream and sugar mill for sugar. As we go up, sugar cane is required as raw material. To make sugar cane, we need energy, water, fertilizer and equipment. We need factories to make all of those things. What is interesting is that once you have the infrastructure to grow sugar cane, you also have the infrastructure to grow rice, wheat, grass for cows or any farm material produce. So when you solve one problem, you solve multiple problems.

Free energy, free machines and free factories

Just like the 3D printer making multiple 3D printers, let us assume that we make one factory out of another factory and return the first factory. The remaining factory is our own factory. We start making solar panels or wind farms and start generating electricity. We start using that electricity in our own factory and use the excess energy to repay our debts. The electricity becomes free for us. The next step is we start making mining machines that are fully automated and use our own energy to operate. So we got free energy and we got a free mining machine, which is fully automated. We eliminated the energy costs, labour costs and the machine cost, at this point, for mining operation.

We’re going to do the same thing for a smelter. A smelter is a place where the ore gets melted and we extract the metal. We have our own metal. We start using our own metal for any further development and any excess metal that we produce, we use to repay our debt. Extrapolating this concept, we have our own oil rigs, petrochemical complexes, which will take petroleum and convert it into plastic beads. It’s all free. Going forward, this factory can produce whatever we want for free. So what do we do? We build a pumping station. Maybe we build a desalination plant to get the necessary water for the sugarcane farm. We build a factory to make fertilizers and we use those fertilizers for our sugarcane. We make a factory which produces automated farm equipment which is powered by the energy that we produce. And that takes care of all the farming needs. In the same process, we take care of the cows as well.

In the next step, we build a sugar mill and dairy processing facility. We have milk, cream, sugar and then the ice cream factory. We got free ice cream for all. You take the same process and apply it for any material things you want to be made. We have addressed the two core sources. One is the farm and the other is the mine. We started from there and automated that part of the process. Progressively we moved into the economy. Whatever you want, yes, it can be made absolutely free.

In the current economic model, if you borrow something from the bank, you got to return it. If I go and borrow your machine, I got to return it. Strictly speaking, you don’t have to return it, if everything is free for everyone. How it will all work is the price contract. Whatever you’re getting for free, pro rata, you need to give out for free.

Lifelong learning 

The final point in the supply chain is the end user. You get everything for free, only if you continue to engage in education, social, community or volunteering activities. It’s a social contract. The last thing we want to do is have the whole population sitting in front of TV and not being productive. We will just decay. We don’t need anything else to die as a species. We need some motivation, so we need to do something.

My pet aspect out of all these is education. Why should we stop education when we are 20 or 21? We did that because of the Industrial Revolution. We studied for a while and then we were thrown inside the factory. We needed people. In this new free price economy, you can go back to college and do one subject every semester till you’re 80. Innovation requires three things. One plus one makes three. That’s innovation. If you know something about biology and something of physics, then you can make up a third subject, which could be biophysics. You need to know about multiple things and bring them together to bring new solutions and new ideas. That’s not going to happen if you don’t educate yourself. Human needs are never ending. We will always be creative, wanting new and different things. 50 years back, nobody thought of an iPhone. Today, none can live without a smartphone.  

CA V Pattabhi Ram: First of all, I don’t buy the idea that everything is going to be free. It will not happen. There’ll be serious problems about motivation. If everybody is going to have everything, we have the antithesis of market economy. We have to be careful about that. Also, if you offer something for free, its value comes down.

 R A Nadesan: According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, if your basic needs are met, then there’ll be a lot of other benefits to the society. For example, there won’t be theft. People might shift their concentration to more creative things. But such a society is not possible and everything cannot be made free. If you give me free ice cream, I won’t take it. I’ll be suspicious of that.

Anand Srinivasan: A society without motivation will not survive. Parsis are the first community that is going to vanish. They are less than one lakh persons today. They are one of the most successful and richest communities in the world. They have more than a lakh of flats empty in Bombay, which can be occupied only by Parsis for free. There are no takers, simply because there are not so many Parsis anymore. The next big society that is going to vanish is Japan. It’s a very sad thing. The collapse of Japan is an economic collapse and a social collapse, in spite of it being a society where most of things have come free. Japan is past the stage of being able to revive itself only because, from their great 1989 crisis onwards, the real wages in Japan have been continuously going down. Even today, there is not enough inflation in Japan. They printed and gave money free. Japan has had negative interest rates for 40 years now -from 1980 to 2020.

There are two major flaws, according to me in this argument of free economy. One is deeply philosophical and which is a root of Eastern philosophy. It is the difference between Buddha and Shankara, two ancient philosophers. The philosophy of Buddha is you can eliminate desire. Ashoka embraced it and it went to Sri Lanka and everywhere else but it died in India, because Shankara argued 400 to 500 years down the line, that if you eliminate desire, there is no way the human race will survive. That is exactly what happened to the Parsis and to the Japanese. The third country where this trend is now very clear, is Germany. It is now clearly accepted that in 10 years, there’ll be less Germans than what they were in 1950. So this free argument doesn’t cut ice.

Money is the labour exchange

The second is a misunderstanding of what money is. Money is not something that government creates. Government has no money. It just prints what you believe is money. Every year, in the budget, the government tries to balance what they have and what they don’t have. Money is nothing but a storehouse of labour. What you’re exchanging between two people as money is basically labour exchange. The reason why barter system failed is because people who had something that was in demand did not want to exchange it for something that was in excess. Therefore, to balance it out, money was invented. The original money was in all forms. During World War II, even cigarette was considered money. The Indian rupee has value only in India because people believe it and will accept it for exchange.

For the population to remain stable, the world needs to have a fertility of 2.1. In Tamil Nadu, it is coming down, like Western democracies. When you start thinking of children as liabilities instead of assets, the human race itself will vanish. The society’s greatest danger is not going to come from artificial intelligence. It is coming right now in front of us, simply because we don’t want to have enough kids.

Measure What Matters

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Under the “Read & Grow” series, MMA held a panel discussion on the theme of the book “Measure What Matters” authored by John Doerr. Mr Babu Krishna Moorthy, Chief Sherpa, Finsherpa Investment Pvt Ltd led the conversation with Mr Ramaswamy Perumal (Ram), Founder & CEO, H- Grab Informatix Pvt Ltd., and Mr Aroon Kumar R R, Chairman & Principal CFO, Touchstone CFO Services.

Babu: All of us have boundless number of ideas. But one of the things that we lack is the discipline of execution. If we are able to marry great ideas with great execution, that is what great corporate or organizational success is all about. The book ‘Measure What Matters’ written by John Doerr talks about the concept called OKR—which stands for Objectives and Key Results.

John Doerr is among the top 100 richest people in the United States. He is in the Fortune 100 list of rich people. He is also the partner of a leading firm called Kleiner Perkins, which is one of the early and very hallowed venture capital companies that is 50 years old. They have funded companies like Google, Compaq and Symantec. If you take 100 of the leading IT businesses in the US, at least 25 of them have grown using funds of Kleiner Perkins. John Doerr has been out there with Kleiner Perkins, identifying small corporate ideas and used his expertise in helping them grow and become large corporates. He’s today about 71 and stays in California. He talks about the magic of execution. Recently, he and his wife have donated about a billion dollars to Stanford and established a school within Stanford that focuses on the concept of how metrics can be used to grow organizations.

Marry Ideas with Execution

People like Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google are all students of John Doerr. The fact that they have used this metric and grown proves that this works. Incidentally, John himself was schooled in Intel, a chip making company. Right from the 70s, Intel has had an incredible growth. People like Gordon Moore and Andy Grove of Intel have played a huge part in the growth of the IT hardware industry. That’s where John Doerr first encountered the idea and concept. He has taken it and used it. I believe that the secret sauce to a successful organization is not the brilliant idea. It’s that brilliant idea married with great execution.

As companies grow large, it becomes very difficult to have shared ideas and shared vision. By OKR (Objectives and key results), an organisation must arrive at its objectives and it has to be in the form of a number. For example, how many customers I want at the end of a quarter or a year. Or it can talk about revenue but there’s to be a conscious number or an objective metric around it. The key result, on the other hand, is about the things that the organisation is going to do, to achieve that number and there has to be a metric around it.

For instance, if an organization tries to have a B2C business and it wants to have 100,000 customers at the end of a particular year, then the key result areas could be: How many enquiries I am going to generate digitally. One way to look at it is that if I want 100,000 customers, then maybe I must generate 1 million digital leads, so that it gets converted to 100,000 customers. Everybody knows very clearly what they need to do, if they have to make the company grow to the next level. So that’s a very broad level of this concept of objectives and key result areas. Many corporates swear by this concept and agree that it has helped organize themselves better and reach goals in a much better way.

Ram: OKR is not necessarily for the IT companies, like Google or Intel. It has spread across various sectors. I read there’s a pizza making company called Zume Pizza which implemented OKRs and succeeded. Management by objectives is more in terms of setting the objectives top down. It cascades down to the team. Whereas when you come to OKRs, it is going to be across the organization. Here, the teams start creating the objectives and they will be interacting with other teams in doing this. There’s going to be an intrinsic way of setting the objectives.

You can have two types of goals: aggressive goals and committed goals. You can aspire to get to aggressive goals and if you reach 70% of that, it is good. Committed goals are the goals that you need to complete in the normal course of the business and that needs to be completed 100%. The goals are going to be set by the teams and then shared between the teams. Google follows these two types of goals.

The second is, in setting a goal, you need to know how it is going to be reached. And that is called the key results which will be measured numerically. The key results must be time based. Tracking the overall performance is not done once in a year. This is going to be ideally done once in a quarter. Companies like Google follow a monthly review. The Bill Gates Foundation has implemented OKRs for their Foundation and they have seen success. Companies like the Khan Academy, which is into education and Coursera have also implemented OKRs and tasted success.

Aroon: In our college days, we studied Henry Fayol’s theory of management for our line assemblies and the progress we made with this. Then the father of management Peter F Drucker came out with MBO—Management by Objectives, which was successfully implemented for a couple of decades. At Intel, Andy Grove was very impressed with Peter Drucker’s MBO but he felt that it was not so effective for his company’s growth. He then modified it and called it as IMBO—that is, Intel MBO. It was a tool of thought.  

In OKR, we talk about Objectives and Key Results. The objective can be achieving a market share of 10% or a simple one like delighting the customer. It can be a big and audacious goal. The goal is primarily derived from the mission statement. The methodologies and the metrics are important in going towards the objective.

How Google Adopted OKRs

Normally, in our work life, we see that most of the objectives and mission statements come top down. There is hardly a semblance of understanding at the lowest level. When John Doerr presented his idea to Larry and Sergey of Google in 1999 and asked them about their goal, Larry said that they were looking at 10 Bn$ revenues. Google at that time was not the first search engine. Already, six or seven search engines were in place.

Then they looked at achieving that objective within a timescale and worked on the key result areas. They broke it down to products in design, products in production, ways to reach the market and so on. Each vertical or functional head was assigned their key results. The person who was going to execute was taken into confidence. The metrics to achieve the objective were determined.

The organizational structure was flattened in the process. So instead of having seven layers, you may end up with just three layers. The impact can be profound when you have multi-geography firms operating on a time zone difference. OKR enables participation by all the team members or contributors who adopt a business partnering approach in setting the objectives and key results. The reporting structure was made broader and concise and they brought in agility.

When Intel was established, they used the concept of agility to challenge Motorola, their main competitor at that time. We are familiar with budget setting process. Normally we start working on budget in January, interact with other departments, collect data and produce something and then build it up for the management and thereafter for adoption by the Board. This is not going to work in a company which looks at very rapid growth plans. So, they changed the review period to quarterly at the most and to make it successful, the objectives could be amended on the fly and the means to achieve certain goals can also be changed. Google went a step further and adopted reviews on a monthly basis, so course correction becomes easier.

The second significant element is that it was more participatory. Buy-in from the executing person was really deep. There was alignment vertically as well as horizontally with other departments and diagonally too. What they did is to make the management responsible and the goals were made public. As a result, the goal of a Vice President was known to the factory supervisor.

Babu: Many times when we set goals, we’re always looking at it incrementally. If I did a sales of 100 last year, my sales number this year is going to be 120. This book talks about setting challenging goals. It means that if last year sales was 100, the next year goal can be 500 or 1000. We wonder if we are dreaming. They call it a moon-shot, which was first used when JFK announced that America was going to make a trip to the moon by sending human beings in a rocket. At that time, it was so ridiculous an idea that people laughed at it.

One of the ways corporates can grow and achieve extraordinary growth is to have two types of objectives. One is quite an extraordinary one, which is not in the normal realm of thinking. The author goes on to say that it doesn’t matter if you don’t hit it. It’s perfectly okay if you don’t achieve 100% of your audacious goal. Even if you don’t achieve it, you will fall somewhere significantly higher than where your competition is. That’s one big takeaway.

The second is to make sure that you achieve 100% of your normal goals. Just because you’re thinking about an audacious goal, it does not mean you can give up on doing your day to day stuff. Also, the simplicity of the way in which OKRs get implemented is very interesting.

Review through colour coding

In the typical review mechanism of OKRs, the various key result areas are codified in colour forms. Many times, we are overwhelmed with numbers. Colour coding is similar to our traffic signals. If a goal has been reached to the extent of 70 to 100%, it’s marked in green. If it is between 50 and 70, it’s marked in yellow, which tells you that you need to do better and review your process. You have a chance of hitting the goal but you got to change some of the things. The third is in red. If you are achieving less than 40%, then it’s really a red alarm. There’s something wrong either with the way you’re approaching it—either in the process, the idea or the measurement. So go back and revisit. It is easy to look at a colour code rather than trying to figure out numbers.

Ram: John Doerr introduced another concept called CFR, which is like a twin sister of OKR. CFR stands for Conversation, Feedback and Recognition. There has to be a conversation between the manager and the contributor. The contributor can give feedback to the manager and vice versa. There has to be recognition for the contributor. Like OKRs, CFR is also going to be a continuous process, which means you don’t have to wait till the end of the year for annual performance review.

I worked in large companies and my HR would tell me that I need to have a bell curve in ranking the performance of my team members and make sure that I don’t have a right tailed curve or a left tailed curve. John Doerr goes against it. He talks about helping the contributor and the team to improve and go forward. In fact, OKR is not tied to compensation and rewards. Google says that when it comes to the compensation and rewards, the OKR is not even brought in. This is a very key takeaway. I started my company five years back and we are a small team of around 40 people. Tomorrow, we have our Annual Day for the company and my objective is to implement OKR. We are going to write down the key results for that. Along with OKR, I am also planning to implement CFR.

OKR can also be applied on a personal front. Changing your job within 1 year or buying a house within 6 months can be an Objective. You can write down the Key Results for this objective. The key results can be the amount of savings you need to have in your bank account. Though we have been doing this subconsciously, it is better to put it down into a document.  

Aroon: There is no additional cost in implementing OKRs. It only requires a change of our thought process. Startups, SMEs and mid-sized MSMEs can make use of this tool in their day to day management as well as to achieve key objectives. For a small scale entity, 100% growth in three years can be a key objective. Capital for expansion is scarce and we are dependent on others including financing institution. The key results can be improving the credit score, so project funding happens. The next steps down the line are the sales target, production to match that, the kind of margins you can afford to get in sales and the terms and conditions for your procurement of raw materials. You need to break down, even in a smaller organization.

Measuring what matters is very important. Wrong goal setting will lead to disasters. A prime example which is quoted is Wells Fargo, which was incentivizing managers to open up new accounts. They went ahead and used their relatives to open multiple accounts and later 5000 people had to be sacked. Here the management set a wrong objective. So, the objective setting must be very clear. Review once in quarter. Cross functional alignment is a key element or characteristic of OKR, apart from vertical and horizontal alignment. The next step is bringing in accountability. 

Separate Compensation from OKRs

When compensation is divorced from the objectives, the stress for the employees is removed. In a bell-curve assessment, even if two employees perform very well, only one will be rated in the top and it leads to disgruntlement and demotivation. Continuous Performance Review and 360 degree performance review can help to do away with the bell curve assessment. Also, when annual performance review happens, recency bias sets in and people remember only the recent achievements or failures. In fact, having quarterly or monthly performance reviews helps in better employee motivation and fitment and eliminates recency bias in evaluating the performance.

The next interesting aspect of OKR is the stretch goals. When we exercise and stretch our muscles, we don’t get killed. When we stretch, our muscles get strengthened and toning happens automatically. Dhirubhai Ambani was a prime example of setting stretch goals. In 1998, when a major cyclone hit the Jamnagar Refinery project and it was about to be derailed, Dhirubhai stepped in and said, “Nothing is impossible.” Within 15 days, the project was restarted and the plant was commissioned in less than 36 months.  Honestly, I believe OKR can be used in various scenarios like project execution, cash burn, working capital management and even profit orientation.  

Babu: The author is very candid in saying that OKRs will not succeed for everybody, which is why you have only one Google. What barriers do you see in implementing the OKR in an organisation?

Ram: It is the visibility of the goals. You must have visibility of top level goals and the goals being set by the individual teams that must be aligned to the top level goals. There should be some platform to implement it and an application of this goal to ensure connectedness and visibility. The peers would be able to see their related teams’ goals and objectives.

Aroon: The cultural issue will be a barrier. It’s a question of belief. If you’re going to bring in and institutionalize OKRs, you need to check out who is going to travel with you in the bus and if they are willing to take it. The top management need to take a call as to the continuance or otherwise of those who are going to do this. Without this, there will be chaos and a stressed environment. Next would be the infrastructure and system requirements to enable this.  

Babu: One of the secret sauces of using this tool is the visibility. Everybody gets to see what the others do. Sometimes it can be very unnerving for senior leaders. Suppose the MD is in the Red and a junior executive is in the Green, can the MD face up to it? It is also the culture that matters. There will always be people who will be negative to any new ideas. New initiatives of this nature often fail in organizations, because the top leadership is not on board. If the MD thinks that he has given the tool to the employees and it is up to the organization to implement it and if he goes about his task in his own way, then it is never going to work. The leader must be the person who drives this initiative. The organization will behave exactly as the leader does.