A Statistician Explains Escalations and Best Practices

NH Musica in Amstelveen has a name that evokes melody, something soft that combines with its being a hotel to bring up images of peaceful slumber.

However, even though the corporate class being conducted in its spacious conference room had the most forbidding of names –‘Statistics for Six Sigma Management’ – sleep was not the prevalent occupation in spite of the lulling allure of the name, comfortable plush chairs and excellent air conditioning. The man who was conducting the class, Aniruddha Sensharma, proved to be an engaging speaker. Not least because he had the ability to engage some of the audience in open combat. And to make it easy on our tongues as our minds struggled with the concepts, he asked us to call him Sen.

A tall, athletic man in his late thirties, he assured me that his presentation skills had not always been this good. “Well, there was a period of a previous life when I could hardly make myself heard on the first attempt …,” he disclosed over post class coffee. “On my first onsite trip to New York, I was – well – tongue tied, especially when the audience included pretty women ... blonde ones...”

Well, he had not only managed to make himself heard, he had proved to be a voice that was sure to reverberate in everyone’s conscience. And what could a statistician possibly say that would have such far reaching echoes? Well, the man talked with numbers and explained some phenomenons of corpocracy.

The attendees were from different echelons of our organisation. Some introduced themselves as Black Belts and Green Belts following the weird expertise ranking system followed by Six Sigma borrowed from the martial arts. When I confessed that I was not anything like that – and tai chi, the only martial art I trained in, did not offer coloured belts, he patted me on the shoulder and whispered softly, “Simon, you are better off than most. Given your martial arts background, let me use a Zen cliché. Your cup is empty.”

He proceeded to pose a problem for the group.

“Suppose you have the data of the number of days it takes for the support team to respond to very similar problems reported,” he began. “From the data collected honestly over the last one year, you have certain information. You now have a new project in which the client wants to set a Service Level Agreement on 4 days. From the past, you know the solution takes 0 to 8 days. What would you do?”
 A Senior Manager from the side smirked. “We cannot say no to the client, can we? And I hear several of these issues solved within 4 days or less. So, certainly we are capable of doing this.”

A smile touched the instructor’s lips. “So, if we manage to solve one of the issues within 4 days, we are capable of doing that?”

“Obviously,” the senior manager answered. “We have demonstrated our capability. We just have to follow whatever we did to solve that issue. You did mention the problems were similar, didn’t you?”

“Well, if Brian Lara scores 400 in one match, does that mean he can go on scoring 400 in every game?”

The Manager looked confused. “He definitely proves that he is capable of doing so.”

Sen shook his head.

“We are very susceptible to this mistake of confusing ability with the statistical definition of capability.”

The Senior Manager was one who had risen to his position by making his point stick. He did not yield.

“Sen, I don’t know about statistics, but I do know about business. I see no such thing as a marathon 400 to be reached. I see a lot of those numbers to be well within 4 days, and it is more like scoring a 30 or a 40 for a decent batsman.”

Sen looked at me and smiled.

“Simon, I apologise for the number of references to cricket.”

I laughed and informed him that I had worked long enough for Indian companies to have developed an idea of the game.

“Now, I will make it easy for you. What you say is right. 70% of these figures actually are less than or equal to 4.”

The Senior Manager shrugged.

“If we can do it 70% of the times, I’d say we can do it all the time if we made sure that the guys knew that their asses would be on the line if they slipped. I mean 70% is a damn good probability. I understand all the issues may not be solved within 4 days and some may slip the deadline, but again, speaking from a business point of view, what is required is a good first impression. If there are 10 issues that come in the first month and the team solves everyone of them within the SLA, I’d say they could relax after that. With 70% chances of keeping to the SLAs, with some commitment and accountability, we can do it.”

He laughed, and a lot of people laughed with him. Sen joined in. A lady among the Six Sigma Black Belts, however, differed in opinion.

“Well, I would approach it differently,” said the expert. “I would compute the mean and standard deviation of the numbers ...”

Sen responded readily.

“We have a mean of 3 and a standard deviation of 1.2,” he said.

The Black Belt Lady computed furiously in her mind. “That means probability of less 4 is than is the corresponding probability value of 4 minus 3.2 by 12. The z-score is .67 and we can convert into the probability value from the normal table ...”

Sen smiled at us. “Let me tell you the probability value of the z-score the lady has so efficiently computed. It is nearly .75.”

The Senior Manager clapped his hands. “There. You see, The Statistics vindicates whatever I said in layman’s terms. The probability of us meeting the SLA is even more than what I had anticipated. It is three fourths. I would definitely not stand for any screw up there. As I said. For the first ten issues, I would ask the team to deliver. Go beyond themselves if necessary.”

“Or else?” Sen asked.

“Or else? I would escalate the pants off them. Business has to go on. And what I found and the lady verified with her Black Belt expertise, the probability is as good as certainty.”

I spoke now, probing a little, implying that there was something unsaid in Sen’s reasoning. Why did he give me the sneaking feeling that he had a surprise up his sleeve?

Sen laughed.

“Well, my calculations are somewhat different, but let me tell you, it is hardly surprising to me. I have been around. I have been in the industry for around 13 years now, minus a two year forced break following the slow down after 9/11. And going by my experience, this is how business indeed operates.”

The Senior Manager nodded. “We have no choice.”

Sen smiled and moved to the board.

“Okay. So your assumption is that it is within the capability of the team to deliver the resolutions of the first ten issues within SLA.  Otherwise it is Escalation ...”

“Look, Sen. There are so many instances of meeting the SLA. Surely if we go deep into them there are a whole lot of best practices we can unravel ... I mean, I understand they are figures and can be translated into statistics, but it is business too ...”

A change came over our soft spoken instructor. His complaint tone made way for brisk, confident explanations.

“Okay. We will come back to you. First let me talk about the lady’s comments about the probability through a Z-score. The way the mean and variance were computed to get to the z-score and thereby the probability of solving an issue within 4 days was indeed correct but for a very basic error. The data of the days we have out here are integers. All between 0 and 8. They are essentially a set of discrete data points whereas you have gone ahead assuming it to be normally distributed. Forget that normality implies continuous data. Before applying the z-score, it is essential to perform a normality test.”

He paused. There were confounded faces across the room as people struggled with the concepts. Not too many understood the terms, but the situation was one of confrontation and some very axiomatic ideas were being challenged.

“Now, let us forget the z-scores and the normal approximation. We will go ahead with the first information that I derived from this data. 70% of the issues are solved within the given SLA. Now, our Senior Manager would provide motivational and escalation driven carrot and stick method to ensure that the first ten issues are solved within the SLA time frame. And since the probability of meeting the SLA is a high 70%, it seems well within capability. Now let us find out how feasible this actually is.”

He looked at us.

“Every time an issue arrives, we define success as solving it within 4 days. Historically, the probability of success is 0.7. Our Senior Manager friend got that much correct with his considerable intelligence. Technically, each issue is a Bernoulli Trial with probability of success 0.7.

“Now comes the second part. Our friend here wants the first ten solved within SLA. What it means statistically is 10 successes in 10 independent Bernoulli trials. Or 10 successes in a Binomial distribution with 10 samples with probability 0.7.  Whichever way you choose to look, it amounts to the same thing. However we try to compute it, the formula being 10 Choose 10 multiplied by 0.7 to the power 10 for the Binomial distribution, the probability of 10 successes in 10 trials turns out to be 0.028 which is less than  3%. So there is just about 3% chance given the current capability that the first 10 issues will be solved within SLAs and no escalation results from the efforts. In fact, there is just a 60% probability that we will get more than 7 issues resolved within SLAs.”

Sen stopped, eyeing the audience. The Senior Manager glared at the board. The Black Belt Lady looked chastened.

“It just can’t be true,” the former said. “I know it can’t. We can’t run a business that way. I know we can lie with statistics ...”

Sen smiled.  “In the supplied booklets, you will find brief write ups about Bernoulli trials, Binomial Distributions and Normal Distributions.  If whatever I said still surprises you after you have gone through them, I can offer you some help. But, believe me ... the human mind is not really tuned to understand probability by intuition. And this is why we have an industry that more or less runs on escalations. Because people forget to realise that the law of nature says that some things will go wrong. Sometimes even a Brian Lara can get out for a duck, although he has the ability to score 400.”

Now, as I sat with him in the cafeteria after class, he confessed something.

“Six Sigma is a sham, Simon. Human beings have used numbers to study a situation and figure out answers ever since they started to count. It is only a fancy term and a lot of propaganda. Oldest wine in sparklingly polished bottles. And unless a black belt has proper grounding of statistics, he is like a first aid trained social worker who tries to cure cancer.”

When I pointed out that he was a Six Sigma black belt himself, he sighed.

“I had applied for a job which had advertised for a process champion with a preferred black belt in Six Sigma. Till then I had had a day’s training in Six Sigma concepts and a Black Belt in Shotokan Karate. Both were documented in my CV. A search algorithm found me as a suitable candidate by matching strings. And time pressure and immediate assignment ensured that I was hired. So, although I already had a post graduate in Statistics, when my employers found out that I did not have a Six Sigma certification, they coaxed me to get one – almost at gun point. It’s such a wonder. Chance plays such a big role in shaping destiny.”

After initial doubts, I realised that he was not kidding. I mentioned that as a probability expert he should know the working of chance in this world. Particularly his explanation of rampant escalations that left many a manager red faced.  He became more animated than he had allowed himself to be in the class.

“Trust me, Simon. That is how the world operates. You did see that this sort of SLAs, which an ambitious decision maker will not think twice before agreeing to, is prone to bring in failures by lots. And with these black belts growing like mushrooms with five day crash courses in statistics, they will advised by flamboyantly ignorant men. This extraordinary lack of true understanding of reality makes the industry so prone to escalations.”

He paused for a while and winked.

“The funny part is, the chance factor will be ignored totally, and the successes that resulted in meeting SLAs in the first place may be analysed to limits for nonexistent best practices. Since it was chance all the way, for success and failure, there will be best practice reports written up on the fly, which is more removed from reality than reading tea leaves.

“Besides Simon. Escalations themselves. They always seem to improve performance. But does anyone analyse to see whether it has anything to do with the heat turned on?”

I asked him what he meant.

“Simon, escalations take place when outliers occur. When SLA is breached or something worse happens. That is a rare enough event. That happening twice in succession is even rarer. So, irrespective of whether or not the senior manager decides to deliver his tongue lashing, by the law of probability, the tendency will be to move to the better zone. It has nothing to do with the dressing down. The senior managers would be far better served to busy themselves learning some basics of probability than thinking up biting remarks and delivering them. But, they get touted as great motivators. Unknowingly leveraging on probabilistic laws.”

I said that the statistical insights were eye openers.

“It goes beyond this industry, Simon. It is everywhere. You see, there was this 3% chance of all the 10 issues meeting SLAs. So 3 of every hundred stupid managers will be success stories by sheer chance. And they will be the celebrated model managers. Most of the business gambles are the same. There can be analogous ventures in the business world with a probability of success something like .01 per cent. By sheer law of probabilistic chance, 1 of 10000 imbecile CEOS who take this gamble will come out winners. And then they will be worshipped as world leading Innovators, as superstar CEOs, appearing on Forbes. There will be books analysing their backgrounds, parentage, links to holocaust, seven habits, movement of cheese and all such nonsense. They will author books too – telling the world how to do business, how to invest, how to take decisions straight from different parts of their anatomy ...”

I laughed. “Now you sound very much like someone I know ... who, in fact, ghosted one such book for a Superstar CEO ... ghosted blogs too ...”

“I would like to meet your friend very much,” Sen smiled. “You know, this entire statistically ignorant caper is like watching a 1000 monkeys typing away on type writers. Sooner or later, one of them is probabilistically bound to come up with a line by Shakespeare. And when that happens everyone starts analysing the type of banana he eats, the trees he swings from, the monkey friends who groom him and so on.”

I was laughing very loudly by now.  There were odd looks from the other tables. Two of the managers were staring at me with a frown.

“Oh well, since you have left a couple of managers more than a little embarrassed, I ought not be laughing out loud at your comments. It might become an attitude problem and my annual appraisal may go for a toss ...”

He winced.

“Ah... the dear old bell curve. Don’t even get me started on that.”

Aniruddha Sensharma, aka Sen, is the hero of  Big Apple 2 Bites by Arunabha Sengupta.

Blow (Up) Job

My buddy – as now famously documented in The Best Seller – had once shown an excerpt of Woody Allen’s Everything you wanted to Know about Sex and Were Afraid to Ask during a corporate presentation. The specific fragment of the movie he showed dealt with whatever goes on in the body during an orgasm, depicted with Woody’s signature humour, the body transformed into a science fiction set with the different organs and systems taking up roles of different characters. Woody himself played a sperm, going into the unknown, not sure whether he would be splattered against the ceiling through masturbation or end up against rubber walls as heard from trusted sources.

When I spoke to him about it in one of our many discussions later on, he dismissed it by saying that it was not really the result of inspiration.
“Simon, my friend, whenever I look at the pathetic playing fields of the corporate world, I find parallels in two genres of moviemaking. One which are the classics that encompass  symbolism, and the other suited to the blue hued multiple x rated productions which are cruder, but depict the common employee in stark reels. This Woody Allen classic sort of brings the two genres into one package.”

Needless to say, I almost choked on the Chinese food I had been eating at that point of our conversation, and we had been forced by my endangered oesophagus to abandon this fascinating line of dialogue.

However, these conversations came doubling back the memory lane as I ended my day with my weary feet on the coffee table, my plasma TV set screening the romping depiction of London in the '60s by Michelangelo  Antonioni in Blow Up.

It had been a fatiguing day ending with another of those ritual dances that are called Senior Management meetings - which is more or less enough to test the sanity of a normal person. Additionally, I had been busy all day, preparing presentations with manufactured figures – fictitious inventions which I am quite proud of by now – that showcased to the management our highly matured process of using historical data.

I had been assigned two guys to help me come up with this high maturity presentation – whenever I gave them a data set, ostensibly of the past projects that we had carried out, created on the fly by my trusted random number generating spreadsheet application, they industriously put it through complicated, forbidding sounding tests – Anderson-Darling, Mann Whitney, Kruskal-Wallis .. The inferences they drew, after sufficient number of massage sessions, found their way into the final deck.

In fact, we managed to do such a magnificent job of this data deceit, my manager ended up puffing out his chest with undisguised pride and the hallowed vice president who had come in to go through the choreographed motions of the senior management meeting actually reeled off some of the excellent work that the company had done by CMMi Level 5 compliant highly mature handling of data from the past, and added that this would be one of the major selling points in future business. My two collaborators beamed with gratification as they saw their important tests with the figures had conjured up a fanciful case study for the organisation. Was it only I who remembered that the historical data was generated on the fly by my trusted spreadsheet program?

Obviously, the talk was not limited to just these numbing numbers, but all the other regular figures came into play. The million dollar earnings of the different lines of business, the hundred and fifty or so new clients killing each other to get their projects out of the proverbial pipeline and shoot the profit meter screeching  to the limit.... And of course, there were questions – time tested politically correct questions, asked by the same souls, with the same answers and everyone parting with contented smiles in metronomic manner.

So, late at night, I was sitting with the beer bottle in my hand, watching David Hemmings shoot the glamorous models and then get embroiled in an awful lot of complication. My semi stoned mind, deadened by the day’s stupidity, struggled with the underlying message of the masterpiece. I could just about make out the surgical precision with which the superficiality of the society of those days was exposed with each reel, the telling tale echoing off the fabric of the current world as loudly.
It was the last five minutes of high symbolism that reminded me of that statement of my buddy.

David Hemmings, the photographer without a name in the movie, watches a group of mime artists engage in a tennis match –without rackets and ball. Two of the artists go through the motions and the other mime artists follow the apparent flight of the ball by moving their heads. Soon, the camera starts following the imaginary ball. Hemmings, who finds the whole show amusing, also starts moving his eyes after the supposed ball after a short while.

And then comes the moment of superlative storytelling. One of the mimed shots go wide and high and out of the tennis court into the field. One of the players approaches Hemmings and asks him to retrieve the ball. Hemmings hesitates at first, but then runs towards the spot where the ball has apparently landed, picks it up and throws it back. His own camera dangles in his hand, with the capacity to capture reality, while he conforms to the imagined truth of many. The game goes on and he continues to watch it, moving his eyes to follow the ball.

I drift off as he merges into the grass in the background and I take his place. My eyes follow the match and I suddenly see the two data masseurs in the court, playing out a rally while our Senior Manager is in the press box, vividly reporting the game. The rest of the organisation watches on, moving their head from side to side to follow the imaginary ball.

Did I really drift off? Have I already returned the ball when asked to throw it back? How long will it take for me to walk forward and join the rest of the crowd watching the game?

Parallel Universe of Corpocracy

(Adapted extract from The Best Seller)

My continuation in the  role as the official buddy, of a fellow employee who has just had his short term assignment converted to a lengthy one, has been dubbed LESSON – Logical Extension of SeamlesS ON-boarding. When you scratch the surface of this pompous piece of rhetoric, it actually means continuing to point out bars and shopping malls of the city to the new member. The maniacal euro pursuing corporate organisations not only try to manufacture a common soul by propagating brand values. They also develop their own poetic version of the mundane for that soul to be uplifted.

However, critical as I am, this microcosmic world has its uses. Concocted philosophy in form of brand values, laboured poetry in the garb of elaborate euphemisms, pseudo science in the guise of innovations, petty politics in the cloak of relentless back biting, ersatz society under the mask of people living virtually in each other’s homes long after office hours, frequent musical soirees with the inbuilt sham of philanthropy through small change associations with NGOs masquerading as an apology of culture – all these have their utility.

What if some shifty eyed account manager, for example, had not reacted with jerky gestures at every sneeze of the client? What if some senior manager had not sung her cheery greetings and made her domineering presence felt across the length and breadth of the client organisation, threatening all and sundry with the next instalment of family stories? What if everyone had been free spirits like me? 

Would then a bunch of largely mediocre people have found a satisfactory life abroad? A life that many of their friends and family are proud and envious of. The truth is that every business has to run in accordance to its own rules. If the more sensitive and intelligent of the lot get disillusioned at the contrivance, they have the choice of playing along, getting out of there or becoming an entrepreneur-visionary and trying to create their own royal game.

Ritual Dance of Meetings

Dr. Suprakash Roy was leaning in his familiar languid way, the perpetual patience tinged with a hint of amusement on his face. The Cafe by the Herengracht was bustling with clientele as I shut the door on the snow-kissed wind and hastened to join him thirty seven after the agreed hour.

“I have heard that the children of this country receive their first diary in school. The buitenlanders complain about the horrors of the Dutch man living by his appointment book.”

I smiled sheepishly and informed him that the Dutchman in question had been held up by some of the good doctor’s own countrymen. Quickly getting rid of the waitress with an order for cappuccino, I placed a weary head on the backrest of the chair.

“Perils of working for an Indian company?” he asked with a smile. “Time stretched across personal boundaries?”

I laughed. “Normally I am spared the elastic hours that bind others,” I observed, hinting at the peculiar privileges I enjoyed as a firangee (a term I have picked up from my recent Indian adventures). However, today the Vice President himself had dropped in for his monthly visit, and the conference room had been a temporary concentration camp for everyone till all the pent up important words had been communicated to eager and not so eager ears.

The doctor’s eyes shone with that particular gleam of interest I recognise so readily nowadays.
“Ah ... but, Simon, tell me something. In an industry that swears by cutting edge technology, why does your Vice President travel around visiting locations? Can one not communicate whatever there is to be communicated through the various forms of networking media?”

I thought about it. For a period of initial frenzy, podcasts did spare us the monthly misery. But as the novelty wore off, the grand footfalls resumed gracing our cubicular existence. I told the psychiatrist as much and added, “I have often wondered about the same. Sometimes these guys shuttle about Prague, Budapest, Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris and London. A video conference is way cheaper. I guess one of the reasons that they don’t use communication media is that there is seldom too much to communicate.”

The doctor raised his eyebrows. “What do you mean?”

I explained the rigmarole of a stereotypical senior management address in a corporate environment.
“Well, there is hardly anything new said in any meeting. It is more of a repetition of the company being a one big family to live with and grow with theme that keeps recurring – sometimes with a dash of the difficult market and successful expansion thrown in. And there is always a peculiar pitch about the vision and mission which confuses everyone, I guess that includes the man himself. It is a kind of ritual, with him visiting, our assembling and then his delivering the talk. And ultimately, the meeting always gets prolonged because of some members of the team – always the same people – having more or less the same sort of questions every time.”

A smile lit up the psychiatrist’s face as I sipped my coffee.
“It’s very interesting, Simon.”

“I assure you that’s not exactly the right adjective.”

Suprakash laughed.
“The problem is something about the parallel world of networks that always bother me. No networking tool, social or corporate has as yet replicated body language. You see Simon, historically, a great percentage of communication between individuals have taken place through gestures, relative body positions, looks, glances and so on. Even in a video conference, that sort of communication is difficult to achieve.”

I looked at him quizzically and wondered why body language should be important in senior management messages.

“Ah,” the doctor closed his eyes and began speaking. I could tell from experience that he was stepping into the pedagogical mode. “You say there is hardly anything to communicate. So, why these meetings? You hit it on the head when you used the word ‘ritual’. It is a primordial characteristic of society. All animals use body language to establish social pecking order. From the mighty lions to the lobsters. The dominant and the submissive are demarcated by their posture and behaviour. Don’t you see the same thing in the deferential smiles, in the apologetic cough, the tentative rise of the hand in order to ask a question on one hand, and the patronising smile, the busy super important air at the other end? From animal huddles to tribal dances ... this is played out everywhere. In fact, this is a requirement for the ancient human genes to assure themselves both ways – for the leader to feel his acceptance and power, and for the subordinates to ...”

I interrupted even as he spoke.

“For a moment I thought you would classify us as bipeds rather than humans – a la Schopenhauer.”

Dr. Roy smiled apologetically. “Don’t get me wrong. Unlike our mutual friend, I am not overly cynical. I just observe. And here I find fascinating primitive rituals being played out in modern day board rooms. And the other stuff you said about incomprehensible mission statements ... Is it not like the cryptic chant one associates with rituals?”

I laughed, but then the thought hit home.
“Actually, you can say so.”

“I do say so. If you consider the ancient Spartans, they had an annual festival in which the entire populace chanted the Laws – set to music. Through this chant, even difficult decrees were memorised. A shared ritual leading to mutual understanding ...”

I interrupted again.
“But, there is hardly any mutual understanding here, Sup. Mutual confusion is more like it. And I cannot really place this obnoxious orang-utan – to copy shamelessly from my official buddy – at par with the ancient Spartan Strategic Planner. His myopic vision will need a colossal telescope to stretch to such levels of scheming manipulation of our combined minds into remembering...”

“Ah, but, my friend. You forget that I don’t credit him with coming up with the whole thing. This is followed through the dictates of the human genes. Every senior management meeting a ritualistic dance where people keep the rhythm and are pulled up for having ‘attitude problem’ every time they step out of the defined line or step on sensitive toes.”

As the pretty waitress appeared and I rewarded her for the lovely smile with another order of coffee, I closed my eyes and mentally played back meeting after meeting, metronomic monthly ordeals ... pressing the mental mute button to cut off the painful chant.

And I almost saw the steps of this strange dance being performed to the music of time. The big boss flashing a smile, the shimmer of complying laughter at the lamest of opening jokes, the rhythmic nods at the shared thoughts that would sink into oblivion without a trace, there the combined burst of laughter, the same earmarked virtuoso dancers getting into step, raising their hands, mouthing their stereotypical questions – and then the final words, the smiles in unison, the synchronised rise from the seats, the shake of important and privileged hands – I myself taking part in an orchestrated tango, being the local hire who merits a couple of questions from the very important person ... and then the departure followed by harmonious relaxation of postures.

The ritual dance of the tribe of homo cubiculum.

The doctor sat back and enjoyed his latte, but with this new insight, I was hungry for more, and the discussion stretched into the night over approximately half a gallon of coffee.

So watch this space for further analysis of our bizarre commonplace world.

Crystal Ball Report Card 2010

As I look back on the year that has almost passed, I tend to revisit the thoughts I have been regurgitating and inflicting on everyone over the server-space of blogspot. It is a quaint way indeed to see not only how thought process tends to flow, hit the harsh rocks of stark reality and readjust itself into a different stream. The magic of the weblog is to ensure that thoughts not only flow on their own, but also get stirred, diverted, dammed and unclogged by others whose streams of consciousness cross ours on the connected path of the world wide web.

As I meander about the currents of thought I stumble on to a new found surface of realisation. The trend of reaching a conclusion and then being forced to modify the earlier analysis is the way of not only the bloggers and other amateur thinkers of the world. This is also the modus operandi of the so called trend watchers and analysts who make a living out of reaching learned conclusions about the events of the world.

In an earlier post, which is now a part of the novel The Best Seller, I had pointed out that prediction is not really a pastime or profession we are good at as human beings. Especially where factors of people interaction get into the equation, we miserably fail to foresee what will happen in the immediate future, let alone the distant days.

Most corporations continue to live in the fool’s paradise of a deterministic universe. Data collection has never been so rigorous or so ridiculous as in these days of electronic footprint, something that my cyber psychiatrist friend continues to remind me of. However, can all this data, even with super number crunching computes give us a glimpse of the future?

Two years back, when the economies tottered, and the account manager of Axiom Consulting in HMH, Amsterdam, Ajay Yadav, was publicising his new patch-worked model of Defect Prediction to compensate for his lack of a vertebral column, I heard these immortal words from my buddy. It is the ancient fascination of man to look for the signs of the future in the present. It started with tea leaves, constellation and palms, and now find their modern manifestation in Economic Predictions and Defect Prediction Models.

Although my friend is often dismissed as cynical, I did present my theory that when the human element comes into the picture, there are too many parameters involved to perfectly predict the outcomes. 

However, at the end of 2010, let me try to provide some real results – going beyond pure theoretical analysis.

I am currently looking at some of the predictions made by one of my favourite political magazines at the beginning of this year. As they say, now the scores are in and let me see how the forecasters of the famed publication have fared.

Before proceeding, let me put forth the disclaimer that the magazine continues to be my favourite and whatever evidence I state are the results not of their incompetence, but of the pure perils of prediction. It is the profession of journalism that makes itself vulnerable to pitfalls. Normal reporting is the first draft of history while columns that look ahead attempt a first draft at the future. That is just not easy.

My favourite magazine did an excellent job in predicting the changes in Britain’s political landscape.  They foretold the call for the British general elections by Gordon Brown, and his subsequent loss to the new David Cameron government. They even foresaw that there would be a Miliband as a leader of the Labour party. However, they failed to foresee the Tory coalition with Liberal Democrats.

In the United States, they did predict (as who did not?) a tough year for Barrack Obama. They also did a good job in anticipating the healthcare reform situation and the continuing issues in Afghanistan. However, when it came to factoring in the popular reaction, they – may I say, predictably – failed to predict the rise of anger on the right wing, the tea party movement et al.

Moving on to the world economy, the relatively safe prediction of a slow, gradual, and backbreaking struggle to get back towards recovery in most of the rich countries did come off pretty well.  China was a pretty safe bet as it surged ahead of Japan to become the second largest economy of the world. So were the predictable performances of the other BRIC nations. However, as with most other modern day economic soothsayers, they missed the struggle of the euro regions, missing out completely on the toppling of Greece and the resulting perils of Angela Merkel .

On the other global domains, they did raise some warning flags about the controversy over online privacy, but my friend Dr. Suprakash Roy did the same in quieter, but more convinced manner. They also did manage to foresee FaceBook’s face off with Google, the rise of Kindle, Sony, iPad and other eReaders.

However, there were plenty that were plain unpredictable. The debacle of Kevin Rudd, Australia’s foreign minister, was unexpected and therefore even the best political forecasters did not bet on it. Thailand’s political violence was another major miss in the game of telling the fortune of foreign affairs.

Most importantly, there were other black swan events, which underline the absolute frailty of the human species at playing god while poring over data and trend charts, sporting honourable diplomas and degrees.  We still cannot predict the calamities and disasters like the earthquake in Haiti, the floods in Pakistan, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the volcanic eruption in Iceland with long-lasting effect on the aviation industry or the plane crash that killed Lech Kaczynski, the president of Poland.

There is absolutely no way that one can get round to predicting the events of the last paragraph, at least not yet. And as it often is, these are the occurrences that stamp their presence most indelibly on the history of the future of mankind.

We continue to make unparalleled leaps, accelerating to a level of scientific and technological sophistication that may prompt us into the false sense of security that we are in absolute control of a connected universe, where all that matters is known, deterministic and predictable, or just a click away. But, as we face the coldest winter in 1000 years it may be handy to remember that in the face of some of the most random events of the world, we are nothing but a bunch helpless creatures sitting with an illusion of power on a frail pale blue dot of a world.

Lessons amidst Red Alert

Last week I learnt of the passing away of Professor P. Lal, the lyrical poet based in Kolkata, transcreator of the Indian epics, the one man publishing force behind Writers Workshop India that unearthed writers like Vikram Seth, Asif Currimbhoy and numerous others.


I received the painful news from Shruti, whose usual infectious animation was subdued, almost absent. The Professor had meant a lot to her and my buddy. Also, the limited number of times the noble path had brushed mine had left a healthy residue of erudition and respect.

 My first encounter with him had been when Shruti had ingeniously hooked him up with her cell phone from a dingy Amsterdam coffee shop. It was that evening when she, my buddy, the shrink and I had been trying to figure out a plausible antidote for the financial crisis, our collective thoughts aided by the fumes of cannabis. That day, even our dope fuddled senses had been dazzled by his lucid commentary that cut across spiritual materialism and transcendental smoke.

I had not been able to travel to India to attend the celebration marking the fifty years of Writers Workshop, although I did receive an invitation letter etched in exquisite calligraphy – with the scholar's own hand – delivered at my Utrecht residence. However, I did hear the details of the fascinating evening from both Shruti and my buddy.


When I did make it to India early this year, during my self imposed year long banishment from the corporate world, I did visit the Workshop at 162/92 Lake Gardens.


Professor Lal by then was very sick and I was informed that he would be unable to meet me. I had to make do with an afternoon among the great man's labour of love in the cramped, dusty kiosk – the bibliophilic equivalent of diamonds amidst coal. I did return that day with an armful of newly acquired precious possessions, hardbacked volumes with covers stitched with saree cloth, the names in brilliant gold zaried calligraphy. The books themselves were works of art … and how could one even hope to Kindle sufficient electronic spark to hold candle to such products?


However, a delightful surprise waited for me when I reached my guest house in the evening. Professor had called up himself and left a message saying that he would be at home and ready to receive me if I was free the next morning. "It's difficult to keep oneself dammed up from one who has travelled all the way from behind the dykes," his missive said.


The meeting was brief. "The doctor has decreed that I cannot meet anyone for more than half an hour," he greeted me from his chair in his much written about study. Books peeped out of every nook and cranny and the learned man sat in white traditional cotton clothes on a chair while Yeats, Tagore and Frost looked on from portraits. "Like in the battle field of Kurukshetra, we must end our verbal jousting the moment the thirty minute sun sets on us. And there are trusted generals in my wife and my grand-daughter to enforce the rules and regulations."


I told him that I was wandering around the country, visiting places that took possession of my fancy. He nodded, smiling. "Oh, to be young and carefree. I am carefree too, but only my mind remains young. However, India cannot be discovered through the guidebooks written for the West. One needs not only the atlas and map for navigating through the immense space, but also similar devices to understand the glorious journey through time. Otherwise, all you see is an inept superficial caricature of the Western world."

I spoke to him about his autobiographical Lessons which I had picked up from the store. A year ago I had seen my buddy peering over it along with the autobiography of Neville Cardus. He laughed.

"You know what my name means in English? Lal literally means red. So, if I had chosen, I could have called it 'My Name is Red' and then Orhan Pamuk would have had to search for another title. So, I just decided to talk about others. Anyway, I was not too keen to be the miniaturist for myself."

I told him that it was precisely what struck me as unusual in his memoirs. It seemed a sum total of lives that had somehow intersected his own.

"Ah, but what is man but a sum total of all the deep connections he makes with the people in the world. In 1989, I was what I was because of the experiences with others that had shaped my life. In 2010 I have evolved. I now communicate through email, am called upon to join conference calls from Amsterdam's coffee shops, have a miraculous website of my workshop. I am an aggregate of all these excellent things that have happened to me, but could it have been possible if I had not come across the wonderful people who have shown me how to walk these new fangled paths of the global village?" He smiled. "Where would I have been in the electronic world if my grand daughter had not painstakingly typed in every email that I have sent in my life?"

I wondered whether connections really mattered all that much in the modern world. Nowadays men connect more than they communicate by virtue of the Web 2.0 phenomenon of social networks.

"Law of 10%," he smiled as he answered. "Something that I have learnt from my more than half a century of teaching. There will always be the select 10% that will make it meaningful. It applies to every mass endeavour. However, I am too fascinated by the marvels of technology. Internet reshapes the world in a way that I had never thought of as possible. The workshop has been there for over fifty years and the web site was set up only in 2004. And since then there have been orders from all around the world."

He paused and looked at me.

"Simon van der Wiel. You have strong Dutch roots if your name is anything to go by. No doubt you have read Herman. Williem Frederik Herman?"

I said that I had. Since we did not have too many great authors in our heritage we had to read at least Herman and Mulisch.

He shook his head, "Never say that, Simon. You never know. The Dutch are very protective of their privacy. Self propaganda is something that is out of necessity limited by their nature. With the publishing world being the racket that it is, who knows how many Hermans lie unread, unnoticed, even unpublished behind the dykes, in some box in the quaint brown, red and chocolate brick buildings? But, I am diverted, absent minded professor that I am. Herman. In Beyond Sleep he says something striking about photography. In the portrait age, people were defined by the artist's rendering of themselves in one single pose and posture. One solitary moment of time that brought out their qualities and virtues. Come the discovery of the camera, human beings woke up to realise that every moment they present a different face to the world. Features change with mood and medium. Man is not uniquely characterised by his static features, but by the dynamic sum total of expressions across time. Internet probably brings on a new dimension with un-thought of technological enhancement. Never in the history were connections more important in the life of an individual – something that characterises him, shapes his very existence."

He paused, and I wondered how much sense his words made in the day of Facebook.

We talked on for well beyond half an hour till his ageing yet charming wife, Shyamasree Devi, looked in to declare that it was time for him to rest.

"The ladies of our lives," the Professor sighed. "Ever since the days of Mahabharata they bind you with pledges."

Before I left, I promised to link him up during our next Cannabis Conference and, if possible, visit him again during my next Indian trip.

Well, we did speak again in a couple of Cannabis Conferences, and I guess Shruti or my buddy will want to tell the tale in full sometime down the line. With their superior writing skills they can do fuller justice to the nuggets of wisdom shared by the great man in his final few interactions with us. However, I did not manage to visit him again. The next time I looked at him, he was younger, peering into a book from a page of The Economist, inside a well researched and restrained obituary of his noble life.

I got on the web and tried looking up some of the local Indian dailies for a more detailed tribute, some welcome beam of light into hitherto unknown facets of his life. It was a disappointment.

All I came up with were three articles – two in dailies from Kolkata and one from Delhi – brief, apologetic attempts at journalism, lousily researched, callously misstating facts. One of them claimed that Professor had finished the trans-creation of the Mahabharata three decades earlier, whereas he had been at work even on the day I had visited him. Others were more or less trumpet blowers for the writers of the pieces in their pathetic attempts to rise that extra foot in the eyes of the world by stepping on the great man's departed soul.

When I contacted my buddy he laughed through the voice that wavered uncharacteristically.

"You are trying to find greatness under limelight? Things don't happen that way, my friend. Especially in India. We are too busy trying to remodel ourselves to fit the Western templates, to jump on the wagon to earn in the strong foreign currencies … we have no time to look inward and discover the treasures that lie in our backyard. The only people you will find under the glare of spotlight are the showmen acting their part since all the world is now their stage, their vast play-field due to the boon of globalisation. They can do no better than mouth words scripted by others, flickering shadows on a  screen that is as blank as nothingness."

I wondered how people could actually digest this pulp as the truth.

"The truth has changed form, Simon. It gradually metamorphosed itself to dollars and now with its ethereal presence in the electronic form, it is the unseen deity, the ever present God that can grant all your wishes.You have philosophised in the same vein, my friend. George Soros and Donald Trump are the philosophers of the day, the seekers of the truth. In India we had a term called satsang. Literally it means company of the highest truth – an internal glow that you feel after spending an hour with people who have reached the pinnacle of their spiritual being…"

I said that I knew what he was talking about. In my interactions with Professor Lal, as in my other encounters with people like Sifu Oelschalager and Sifu Subramanium, I have felt something within me which is very like the glow he mentioned.

"But look around you, Simon. The phenomenon of sat-sang has been redefined. People nowadays equate it with power lunches. The way a few chosen ones are given the privilege to sit around the table discussing ways and means to make more and more money with the One Seeker who has made the most. Money is truth. Professor's philosophy is relegated to a relic, and his death is manipulated into yet another stepping stone for many to utilise in their drive for power and plenty. But, let me not go into the ranting mode, my friend. Let us not soil the noble life."

I close my eyes and see people firing off mails, memos, circulars, news items –to the high and mighty in office, to the publicity sections of the newspapers, in the television channels – painting their words in red to highlight their contribution and hence worth. Sound and fury is the way of the world, flickering loud images on the backdrop of nothing.

And to think that the one who could have literally scripted an autobiography called My Name is Red chose to limit himself to Lessons.

Pizza Corporosa - Over the Topping

How would a corporate organisation go about cutting pizza?

There is a new catering service recently hired for our office canteen. They seem to be a  very professional, experienced and elaborate unit from the way they go about their work. And while they make a uniform hash of every item of their La Place style Asian Wok, their Pizzas are definitely some of the best in town. In Amsterdam that is quite a certificate.

I know that some Pizza outlets and their burger siblings, especially those belonging to the large chains, are right up there when it comes to waste minimization and the application of process maturity principles of Lean and Supply Chain. It makes sense too, the results of their endeavours are generally immediate, sometimes affecting their bottom line that very lunch hour. There is a lot of readily available material on this and I don’t really want to go into all that theory.

However, a lot of my buddy’s irreverence and curious lateral views on life have rubbed off on me, and I can’t help thinking in terms of parallels in the cubicle infested corporate world. A rather striking thought hit me when I was waiting in line, absent midedly following the action of one of the sharp, shining Norpo Pizza cutters that they use. The rolling piece of steel cuts through the delicious baked dough with a simple grace that is fascinating, not just because it happens to be the last preparation step before the  hot crusty preparation becomes yours to hold and to have, but also because of the sheer efficiency with which it performs its function.

And as I watched the metal in motion, my buddy's recent influence made me indulge in a thought experiment. How would such a tool pan out in the corporate environment, in the project management office? What if we thought of the excel spreadsheets and management dashboards in terms of pizza cutters?

In the cubicle colonies, simplicity needs to be avoided like the most pernicious plague. Simple solutions generally end up in meeting expectations and that is a proverbial dread of every corporate drudge. It is the blueprint for the stamp of mediocrity in performance appraisals. The onus is on delighters, the extra step, that particular piece of innovation that would make one shine and bask in the glory of appreciation from the upper echelons of the organisation. The ones that would echo off the reverberating walls of the meeting rooms and would leap out of laudatory notices. It is a different matter that on the way to becoming such value added delighters, it is not unusual for the solutions to stop some way short of actually being solutions. The extra step does not just take you further, it often becomes the step.

Mathew Dixon, Karen Freeman and Nicholas Toman point out in their recent article on Harvard Business Review, customers actually look for basic services that cater to their explicit requirements rather than over the top delighters. Value added products seldom manage to retain or grow customer base unless we are talking of some specific industries like hospitality. But nevertheless, delighting the customers is the fad of the day, linked to performance appraisals, management presentations at all levels of pecking order, selling pitch and business conferences.

So, when I think of a pizza cutting parallel in the Corporate world, I find myself afflicted with daytime nightmares involving crack technical team, futuristic deviants of Swiss Army Knives – touted to have far flung features as diverse as being able to perform basic limb amputation, removing specks of dust from in-growing nails, trimming the smallest asymmetry in a handlebar moustaches and prying open seventeenth century caskets retrieved from pirate shipwrecks under the sea. When I roll it over a Pizza in my mind's eye, however, it brings all the physical characteristics of mincemeat into the fare, reducing the circular sensory delight into a mangled, mutilated mess with one clumsy movement of its blade – after taking several aeons to come out of the packet in the first place, all the while sounding like a Harley Davidson engine powered lawn mower. An enmeshed mass of cheese, meat and flour closely resembling the Italian Pizzeria version of the primordial swamp. And then I see the crack technical team receiving an award for innovation, a kind of conceptually mangled mass of deception in itself, a Pulitzer, Oscar and Nobel rolled into one, the holy grail of the cubicular microcosm.

Corporate tools have this uncanny ability to suck at what they are supposed to do. And the mystique goes much further. If the purchase of the knife amounts to a substantial number of negotiations, big names and figures in the bottom line, it will be touted as an epoch making innovation. Soon the entire organisation will be eating the mutilated mass, sharing accolades and blogging about it – with Pizza pandering evangelists spreading the word that this is the very way the Italian gods had intended pizza to be had.