Sherlock Holmes explains the Corporate Game of Shadows

Another day when the cubicle had to withstand the relentless barrage of insanity, another day when the mind clouded with confusion – resulting in outbursts of thunder and lightning.

And one had to bring in Sherlock Holmes to make sense of the madness, explain the curious incidents.

Let me begin by recounting what happened during the day.
...

The interview had reached an impasse.

The resume on my Lenovo screen was sparkling, almost gilt edged. The mere sight of the listed research papers on computational theory and algorithmic analysis; many of them registered for patent, and some co-authored with veritable pioneers in the field; whipped shut my recruiter’s instinctive snoopiness with the sheer weight of erudition. The stereotypical questions I could think of to throw at the earnest Hungarian at the other end of the line suddenly seemed lame, cripple and grotesquely deformed.

The account manager, at the third node of our conference call, was silent for a long, long time. I could sense him trying to bury the crushing feeling of inadequacy under a mountain of mundane mails which he was rummaging through importantly on his laptop, deluding himself into believing that his responsibilities as a business leader in Europe, right now rendered puny by the academic credentials of Laszlo Kovacs, granted him the status of superiority by default. The title Dr. in front of the Slavic name, in Heading 1 font at the top of the curriculum vitae, strategically placed to penetrate the protracted viewing zone of even the most myopic recruiting manager, did not help matters. Our combined qualifications were dwarfed. No follow up question was forthcoming once the man had gone over his career details.

The uncomfortable silence was interrupted with the connection disturbed by high pitched electronic interference. An sms filtered into my cell phone. It was from Ajay Yadav, the account manager at the third node.

“Carry on asking questions!” it commanded.

It was perhaps the exclamation mark which clinched the battle with professional patience.

“Laszlo, could you please excuse us for a minute?” I put the phone on mute and pressed the call button on my handset.

The account manager started without preamble, “Ask him some questions … you know I can only pitch in at the end…”

“Ajay, this guy is more qualified and educated than the rest of the team put together, you and me included. You want me to ask him how to create project dashboards with red, amber, green signals for half-witted managers?”

I assure you, I am not always like this. Right through The Best Seller, you have seen my innermost thoughts bubbling up only in the confessional confines of this blog. But, the maniacal mismatch between the interviewee and interviewer made me lose it totally. For a moment, it seemed that the spirit of my buddy had floated into me, and poor Ajay was once again being launched into the unchartered territories of truth.

“But, he has applied for this job …” he mumbled.

“Then ask him why he wants to rot in these cubicles, manufacturing data and preparing graphs, tracking so called project progress – charts that are to be discussed by a room full of confused senior managers treating them like patterns of tea leaves which foretell doomsday or coming of the messiah – Why does he want this life when he can sit in Hungary and do something which involves thought, makes sense and is of actual use to the world.”

“I agree that he is a little over-qualified ... ” Ajay admitted.

“A little?”

“May I interrupt?” a heavily accented Slavonic voice interjected, throwing us off balance. “It seems to me that you two are in conference, and one of you forgot to put the call on mute …”

“Eh?”

“Oh, man … Ajay…!”

The cascading effects of delegation had reached chronic levels. Ajay Yadav had allowed our candidate to hear everything that we said … at least everything that he said. I was filled with genuine remorse. Of all people, I, who had been withstanding an atmosphere tinged with this imbecile for over three years now, should have seen it coming. Expecting him to put the phone on mute on his own had been an unpardonable mistake in my management of expectation from senior management.

“We’re terribly sorry, Laszlo …”

“Pardon me for having heard what you said,” the gentle voice continued. “But, I think it is good that I can make out your apprehension. I only heard one side of the dialogue …”

“Thank God for that.”

“No … I mean, I am only too happy to explain. You find it surprising that I want to go to The Netherlands and work at a largely clerical job as a Project Management Office, umm, worker …”

I could make out he had scoured his vocabulary to come up with the last word. Specialist and expert would have sounded ridiculous anyway, oxymoron of the highest order. A social levelling could have been served with comrade, but it had remained politically incorrect and probably still induced nightmares in the country from where he hailed. Worker was a close enough approximation.

“Ah, yes, Lasozo, you see we are afraid that if you keep doing something you don’t want to, you might end up not wanting to do it any more … and leave us soon,” Ajay Yadav had as usual made a hash of the Hungarian name, but at least he had managed to step into the conversation with something approaching sense.

“It’s Laszlo. I understand you are not familiar with Hungarian names. Also, it can be a bit confusing if you are not familiar with the conditions. I can write algorithm after algorithm here, revolutionise computing theory, but I will get paid only a third of what I can make there – if paid at all. And believe me, with a wife and a kid to support, you need no more motivation. Most often craving for cerebral challenges is vetoed by far more basic demands of the stomach.”

Ajay called me back once we had managed to hobble through the stumbling blocks of truth during the remaining duration of the interview.

“Well, what do you think?”

I took a deep breath. “We can give him what he wants, Ajay -  a decent income and placement in The Netherlands. And he has what we want, a EU work permit and a salary expectation lower than the commerce graduates from India whom we scrape out from the bottom of the university barrels. We are a perfect match.”

There was something on his mind even after I had broken it down into rudimentary units of demand and supply.

“Er, yes, but his aptitude and intelligence …”

“That is indeed an exception of far more gigantic proportions than we have ever handled, but I guess if we can overlook his smartness, we will soon realise that he is smart enough to keep his mental faculties on a leash as he goes about generating graphs and dashboards …”

“I need to think about it. In the meantime could you ask Joost for his feedback regarding the Lasozo’s resume?”

“Laszlo,” I corrected half-heartedly and hung up.

It was some fifteen minutes later that Joost Kuiper walked past my cubicle, lips pressed in a perpetual silent whistle, the rakish hair standing motionless, in the rigid fetters of hair gel.

“Joost, a moment,” I called him.

“Simon, what’s up?”

“I was wondering whether you had a chance to look at the resume we sent you yesterday.”

He pondered.

“The Hungarian guy?” the stress was on the last word.

As I nodded, a nubile form walked by –  on her way back from the coffee machine. Neelam Verma was another Axiom recruit, one of the girls from Bangalore, whose short two month assignment was coming to an end, much to the woe of many a  Dutch and expat heart. Her two months of struggle with data mining had been an unmitigated disaster, but the tee shirts that she wore – the way they accentuated her assets, the amplitude of horizontal oscillations as she made her walk to and back from the coffee machine about two hundred and thirty times a day, all these more than made up for the wasted hours.

“Er…,” Joost hesitated. “Is there really need for you to recruit? Can we not use from your current resource pool?”

I followed his gaze and the hint was not too difficult to grasp. It would perhaps cost the company a little more because the Hungarian would request a much lower rate than the one currently paid to the Bachelor of Commerce (Pass.) from some obscure university in Central India. But, where manpower is sold as commodity, she had attributes that were far more valuable than patented research papers. She rocked in multiple dimensions.

“You want her to stay?” I asked, indicating the retreating, rhythmic swaying of the nymph like hips.

“Er, yes,” Joost seized the opportunity to follow my eyes and ogle the curves before they disappeared into the cruel office chair, “… and could you be explicit about her staying on in my project? She needs to know ...”

I nodded. “Sure.”

It was at the Bijlmer Arena Pathe, watching the newest mutilation of Sherlock Holmes, that I could actually make sense of the upside down microcosm of the corporate world.

In a grotesque mirror image of the corporate world, the commoditisation of one of the most cerebral characters of world literature into an action hero actually allegorised the plight of Dr. Laszlo Kovacs.

I have nothing against Robert Downey Jr., who was just doing what he has to … jumping through the directorial hoops, to be readily palatable to the wii and play-station happy cinema goers. The whirring within the brain, the categorisation and elimination of clues and the zeroing in on the solution by deductive reasoning cannot be projected on screen without stretching the imagination of the digital-dependant minds beyond their short threshold of patience and imagination. For intellectual analysis to be viewed by a current day cinematic audience, one has to attach gizmos which approximate the human brain on dumbed down virtual reality platforms of cheap pseudo technology – much like the innumerable crime scene investigation series that assault us today. No wonder the other Sherlockian avatar of the day is Benedict Cumberhatch, the cutting edge techno savvy manifestation of the sleuth on BBC, who conveniently delegates memory and detection to the external interfaces that look like iPhone apps and super windows.

It is strikingly similar to the patented research work of Dr. Kovacs that is too much of a mental mountain to climb, much more conveniently replaced by zazzy yet over-simplified red, amber, green dashboards of digitised corporate crap.

Jude Law too did his bit as Dr. Watson, the side kick of the action hero. Green Hornet and Kato probably put in more thought behind their action than this detection duo, but one has to dance to the music of time. Other than a couple of feeble attempts to throw some thinking in the foray, the difference between the master sleuth and his often bumbling assistant of the original stories was reduced to almost nothing – the mechanisms of the mind finishing as an also ran in the Game of Shadows. The focus on immediate action, levelling the mental faculties across the horizons of intelligence quotient, is much like the modern world of corporate circus. Brilliant ideas of the genius of Conan Doyle limping in a poor second to the demand for instantaneous pyrotechnics – a carbon copy of the way organisational and process management theories are applied on demand, catering to the results of the next quarter, in the cubicular world.

Irene Adler, one of the most enigmatic female characters ever to grace pages of fiction, whose powers of thinking toppled even the great Sherlock Holmes from the pinnacle of the analytical world, is reduced to a ravishing bimbo with scarcely a line but lots of curves, appearance limited to the first reel. Rachel McAdams hastens to die during the first action sequence, but not before creating enough impression on the audience with every attribute in her possession sans the mental. The female character who takes her place is Noomi Rapace, as the gypsy woman with enough mystery to be unravelled in the distant lands of her origin mingled with the wrappings of cloth around her ample bosom, to make up for all the brains that died with Irene. The Neelam Verma of the modern day Holmes world.

And as the final blow to sensibilities, even Mycroft Holmes has to prance around naked to penetrate the mind of the movie lover of today. To think of Stephen Frey reduced to enacting a topless scene is a fair summary of the grotesque world we live in today, the most sublime of brains traded for the most bizarre of bodies – inside the cubicles and beyond.

Sir Arthur would have been prophetic if he had exchanged names with his Professor Challenger novel and called the Sherlock Holmes canon – The Lost World. That is how it stands today.



The Lost World?



Shakespeare speaks about Corporate Meetings

I remember a book of quotations I used as an arsenal for my essays and articles in school days, to hit unsuspecting teachers with re-heated nuggets of borrowed wisdom.  Those were the days before Wikiquotes or ThinkExist made it ridiculously simple to integrate lines by a plethora of great minds into an original masterpiece. In those days, we had to laboriously look up either the topic in the contents or the author in the index to zero down on a suitable quote.

I could find the greatest of garrulous quoters of the past adorning the index in something that looked like this:

Shaw, George Bernard

10, 24, 55, 79, 133, 138-9,

162, 166, 177-9, 191, 211,

 213, 217, 223, 226, 238,

240-2, 251, 268, 271, 277,

290-3, 299, 300, 305, 311,

323

However, the system just did not work for the Swan of Avon. The compilers had given up the unequal struggle rather early in the game. Listed against Shakespeare, William in the index was a solitary word in italics passim.

His quotations appeared everywhere, with rare exceptions on every page. The Greatest Poet, the Greatest Playwright or simply, the Greatest Writer of the noble English language seems to have written on every topic of human interest, and several which interest perhaps no one. Not for nothing is he called, among his other names, the Myriad Minded Shakespeare. An index on him would probably amount to a separate chapter on its own. So the compliers were wise enough to sum it up neatly in one word.

Now, back in those carefree days I could not care less for the goings on in the corporate world, and never had the burning desire to leaf through and check whether the great mind had said something useful about how to run businesses, but recently, in my moments of contemplation – that is to say, senior management meetings – his corporate wisdom was suddenly revealed to me in a blinding flash.

The bard’s eye view of the future foretells with eerie accuracy the corporatisation of the world and the social evil of spending hours and hours cooped up in meeting rooms, time that could be used for making the world a better place.

In a famed short scene of just twelve lines, the masterly genius comes through with prophetic analysis of what corporate meeting rooms would look like in another four hundred years. The quill, in a flash surreal brilliance, documents what can be called the first minutes of meeting.

It starts with something that accompanies every managerial session – noise and flashy presentations – something that the greatest of all writers allegorically terms thunder and lightning.

Next,  as the participants of the meeting enter, he cuts a long story short and moves to the only possible concrete result ever taken out of a meeting room.

“When shall we three meet again?”  The only question that can be pondered with any hope of an answer in the millions and millions of dark and mysterious rooms around the world with sleepy men installed on comfortable chairs, huddling together beside round tables.

“When the hurly-burly’s done, when the battle’s lost and won.”  In amazing use of metaphors, Shakespeare does hint at the futility of wasting precious time when there is work to be done. Yes, he is all for a short one once the project is done and over with, retrospection, lessons learnt, but to gather again and again when the game is still underway is a strict no-no. Perceval, Verity and other commentators could have done well to dwell on this lesson, but whether it would have been included in managerial training sessions or not is a deep and dark question.

“That will be ere the set of sun.” Long before it was fashionable, the farsighted plume scribbles down the advent of the proverbial EOD. The witches call for the next meeting in now well known terms –before the end of day, the close of business.

Then comes the small thing of booking of the meeting room, and sending out the invitations. “Where the place, upon the heath. There to meet with MacBeth.” It was the subtle attention to detail with which the glorious pen documented the most mundane along with the most lofty.

 And once that is done, the following lines stun us with their detailed foretelling of how meetings would proceed otherwise.

“I come, Graymalkin.”

“Paddock calls.”

“Anon.”

Apart from the time, place and attendees of the next meeting, all that goes on in the gathering are cell phones ringing and calling the attendees away –leading some of them to leave immediately.

And they all depart with the most accurate description of the corporate environment ever penned in the history of the written word. A couplet that etches to perfection the depressing, fuzzy, uncertain cubicular life with its weird reward and recognition system.

“Fair is foul and foul is fair, hover through the fog and filthy air.”

Who Moved my Revolution?

(This piece also occurs in the Scroll online magazine. )

Download an audio recording of Hilary Clinton’s Freedom of Internet Speech.  Or stream in some other internet inspired rebellion manifesto by current day thinkers represented by the likes of Jared Cohen, or visionaries like Francis Fukuyama . The last named once proudly proclaimed 1989 to be the end of history.  

Close your eyes, forget the context and float away in the reassuring ramble. “Information freedom ... foundation for global progress ... tools in the hands of people for advancement ....deficiencies in the current market for innovation ... harnessing the power of connection technologies ... long term dividends from modest investments in innovation ... flat world ... connected communication ... Web 2.0”

The excessively empty jargon sounds like eerie approximations of McKinsey-speak. One can almost sense the darkened conference room, projectors beaming meaningless charts and data, with superfluous smatterings of inane inconsequential information on the screen.

The more Washington leans towards the Silicon Valley in rather puerile efforts to electronically re-simulate the samizdat operations of the Cold War era, the more the techno-mingled-drivel of such talks echo the colossal ignorance that reverberate across the corporate CEO meetings.

It is of little surprise that the Freedom of Internet speech of Hilary Clinton has been tagged by some alternative media sites with the keyword ‘ignorance’. Not unjustified. Asked about Twitter a few days before the Iranian revolution broke out, the leading lady had responded, “I wouldn’t know a Twitter from a tweeter, but evidently it’s very important.”

If one pauses for a moment of sanity amidst the furious beeps and clicks of a connected concept of cyber utopia, one cannot help but shudder at the thought of the world being liberated by leaders with self confessed unawareness of the very tools they claim to be magic pills.

We see at work the same wishful thinking with belligerent yet bird-brained buzzwords that characterise millions of Senior Management meetings. Only, in this case, the decision makers are people with phenomenal power, with actual ability to influence the world, who have in their hands technologically advanced and extremely interconnected tools that they do not understand. As discussed in another article, an email sent by one such ill advised policymaker to the administrators of a Social Media Tool can actually compromise the freedom and lives of actual dissidents across the world. Scary? It indeed is.

While the phrase ‘Internet Freedom’ is searched more frequently from Washington area than Iran and the fragmented former Soviet Union nations put together, the policy makers are gaga about the new social media avatars of the samizdat press and the Radio Europe movements that supposedly managed to crumble the Berlin Wall, and folded the Iron Curtain into storage rooms of a half remembered past.

Buzzwords – another very corporate phenomenon – raise their noisy heads with the ingratiating yet convincing smiles. The architectural magnificence and geographical prominence of the Great Wall of China lends itself to the creation of misleading metaphors such as Great Firewall. The legions of politicians for whom 1989 is a self proclaimed feather in semi-thinking caps, pronounce aphorisms influenced by another Wall:“As networks spread around the globe, virtual walls are cropping up in places of visible walls.”

Leaders who have smugly fitted  into the political power-works by manipulating the bipolar world prior to 1989 harp that the Iron Curtain has been replaced by “a new information curtain descending across much of the world” where it is claimed that “viral videos and blog posts are becoming the samizdat of the day.”

The dangers of such proclamations and the pitfalls of celebrating bloggers as modern day dissidents have been discussed in other articles of the issue, notably by my lovely friend Shruti Rattan. Here I am looking at the unnerving similarity of these declarations with similar decrees in the corporate world – where each and every company of the day is trying to chisel its social networking strategy into a silver bullet with the same chronic short term thinking that is the signature of the industry and, perhaps, the cause of cycles of booms and busts.

In the mid to late 90s, the software world was being steered by senior management made up of experts in third generation languages like COBOL. Simultaneously, there was a lot of excitement about the relatively new Object Oriented Technologies.  There lie in several archives of the industry huge quantities of code written in new generation syntax and semantics, feebly powered by old, procedural design. The platform of coding was changed to imprint the stamp of progress, but the erstwhile experts who engineered the changes often did not have the knowhow to benefit from the features of fourth generation object oriented languages. Enormous systems still chug along on these Jurassic algorithms in the then cutting edge outfit. The result has been a huge waste of money, manpower and efficiency.

In current events, we witness a similar trend in the political scenario. Historical parallels and inviting metaphors can make for great rhetoric, but it is ridculous to base decisions on wordplay and play havoc with the lives of other people.

Reusing the so called best practices of the pre 1989 era, implementing a blanket model that has supposedly worked in remarkably different conditions – along with a bull headed initiative to tweak every innovation into such propaganda are pathetic parallels of the uncommitted world of corporate cubicles.

While the oedipal obstinacy to come out of the cold war parentage while dealing with completely different global situations can be of professional interest to Freudian analysts, basic questions still remain about whether the samizdat offering of leaflets, propaganda, books, photocopies, Radio Europe and so on were actually driving forces behind the fall of communism. There have been arguments that people in GDR were more interested in shows like Miami Vice than in assembling for protests. Was it really the underground photocopiers, or was it the chain of events leading to plummeting oil industry and rising food prices that led to the wall going down in 1989? We are not discussing that here, although it would not be ill-advised to pause and think about it before tweeting propaganda.

In other articles we have pointed out why the current platform of Social Media, with its messy electronic footprints, is far more dangerous for the activist than Samizdat.  We have also dealt with the online version of slacktivists, reverse propaganda and the effect of cheap entertainment triumphing over dissidence. Here I would like to add that millions of connections between millions of people on the internet is a very, very complicated affair. Generalised optimistic jargon filled proclamations about cyber utopia and the messianic merits of the Socially Networked World can be fine for fifteen minutes of spotlight. But, no one can honestly predict the future of such a connected world yet.

The complexity of the electronic mesh that entangles everyone consists of too many parameters. It is prone to the chaotic phenomenon of small changes creating an immense domino effect. It is impossible to predict which way such a connected world will react to the ripples, through integration or falling to bits.

Till such a time that we can form an informed prediction in this information chaos, it may be a good idea to take the deafening optimistic sound and fury about cyber rebellion with the same cynical nonchalance with which we attend management review meetings.

A 'Closer' look at the Cosmos of Cubicle and Clicks

There are many who consider Patric Marber's 2004 bitter romantic drama, Closer, to be a loose, modern and tragic adaptation of Cosi fan tutte, Mozart's opera buffa on partner swaps.

In fact, in the Julia Roberts, Natalie Portman, Jude Law and Clive Owen starrer, the hand and handiwork of the great composer can be seen and heard everywhere. The opera is featured in the film and the sound tracks keep resonating with highlights from the eighteenth century production.


For the musically inclined, or those who revel in witty dialogue, attractive people and complexities of relationship, the film is highly recommended as a visual and aural delight.

However, even as I watched mature performances combining with excellent editing to produce a rare symphony for the senses, the most lasting impression was somewhat surprising.

All through the 100 minutes, a feast of feminine charms were portrayed with the most sensual camera angles on two such fascinating female forms as Roberts and Portman. And it is perhaps testimony to the warping of my cubicle calibrated senses, that the most striking scene for me, the one I am currently writing about, took place between the metro-sexual Jude Law and the dashing Clive Owen. Curiously again, in a film which cruises on the sonorous sound-waves created by the genius of Mozart, this particular sequence was enacted with the overture of Rossini's La Cerentola playing in the background.


In this curiously interesting scene, Law, a writer, sits in his home and logs into a chat forum impersonating a woman and strikes up an on-line conversation with Owen, a dermatologist sitting in his chamber. As the two indulge in crude and explicit dialogue that is stereotypical in such encounters, Owen gets horny and takes the phone off the hook to go the full cyber-sexual distance. It is a combined tribute to the directional brilliance, musical genius and acting talents that the entire routine comes off as poetic rather than gross. The fermata, allegro and crescendos are masterfully combined with the smutty suggestions, prurient passes, lewd language and the resulting raise of the eyebrow, rolling of the eyes and other facial expressions.
Even as Law works Owen into a hard on, asks him to take out his member and finally indulges in a typed gibberish denoting orgasm (ooooooo $#&* 000agdfyugefwyfw%%%%% and more such junk), the music synchronises with perfect harmony and the outcome is melody mingled hilarity. The amusement, in fact, is carried on to the next level as Law, posing online as Julia Roberts,  unintentionally sets up a meeting between Owen and the pretty woman, thus becoming the most vulgar version of Cupid ever.

One way of looking at it is to appreciate the ingenuity in synchronising heavenly music to the basest act of fulfilment. While it is relatively common to use accompanying classical music with the rhythms of physical lovemaking – one can remember the pre-internet age Julia Roberts starrer Pretty Woman as an example – this small cinematic burletta does its bit in acknowledging the cyber world as an extension of our own three dimensional one.

However, ever since my buddy screened the famed episode of Everything You Needed To Know about Sex and Were Afraid to Ask in a corporate team building session (now documented famously in The Best Seller) I have been afflicted with the bug of mapping movie masterpieces to the analogous make believe world of corporate circus. As with the earlier observations about Blow Up and Eyes Wide Shut, this particular scene from the poetic drama on silver screen got me drawing compulsive parallels with the world of the click and cubicle.

Think about it.

 Fabrication and impossible promises manufactured over the electronic medium, crude packets of age-old delivery in new fangled form to 'delight' the recipient, ultimately resulting in orgiastic euphoria at something that translates to elaborately typed non-sense. The provider even goes to the extent of lying about his assets, highs and lows, as he tries his hand at customer satisfaction. Throughout, the background score orchestrates music for the uplifted soul, ethereal exhilaration, cerebral ecstasy at the consummating crescendo – while all the while, the transactions take place at the lower depths, with the onus on the bottom line, making ends meet.

In a curious correction that completes the metaphor, at one point of time during the instant messaging, Law asks Owen about the size of his organ, and in his haste, the latter responds with the unit £ rather than inches – underlying the corporate axiom that whatever be the measure, of the source of life or pleasure, everything boils down to a monetary value.

Cybernetic screwing with background sound effects hinting at the exalted and esoteric. The metaphorical retelling of the cubicular cosmos in a cinematic reel.

The Corporate Genius - spoof of Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell's books always fascinate me.

He has not written this, but may well do so after reading this article

Written with the professional elegance of language, they discuss facts that massage the grey cells, passively exercising without stretching them too much. They delight readers by hinting at the possibility of there being something more to reality than is apparent. Pleasant and free flowing, they sometimes do away with scientific rigour – especially when making unverified claims about birth time windows maximising chances of becoming millionaires, highly connected hubs for successful networks and so on. However, they deal with complex sociological phenomena in the simplistic language even the modern twitterature and blogosphere addicts can follow.

In keeping with the fleeting attention span of his wide range of readers, the dimension that the writing probes are breadth and variety without becoming entrapped in despairing depth. So a lot of it is superficial, merely scratching the surface. However, that is to be expected from an erstwhile scribe for the Washington Post who currently earns his royalty-aside bread as a columnist for The New Yorker.

For me, there are a lot of corporate lessons in his works. The books, with their pristine white get up, a concise subtitle and an economic picture of an out of box object, such as a match stick or a shoe, give an exemplary demonstration of the working of visual branding. This has been dealt with by the excellent caricatures of Cory and Blett in http://www.malcolmgladwellbookgenerator.com/.

They are also a lesson in how simple facts strung together by scratching the inner peripheries of something that sounds like science can fill pages on pages of engaging thought. Had I been in charge, his entire collection would have been compulsory reading for proposal writers bent on delighting time challenged customers. His latest book What the Dog Saw is an excellent example of reusing old ideas when nothing new seems to be forthcoming.

However, when I say that corporate proposal writers could learn from Gladwell, please don't misunderstand me. I would urge the reader to refrain from concluding that I am equating the works of the writer with the outputs of our cubicle constrained creativity. Many of the ideas penned by him, although often stating little more than the obvious and frequently challenged by scientists, are genuinely thought provoking.

In Tipping Point he talks about the disproportionate influence of a select few, which Joseph Juran had quietly outlined more than half a century ago.In his self effacing way, Juran had named the effect after the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto. In Outliers, Gladwell proposes that success is the result of situations, circumstances, talent, repetition and hard work – a statement that almost challenges the inanity of axiomatic core messages of most corporate innovations.

Picture: Cory and Blett

However, the crux of his argument is interesting. He maintains, and I agree, that situations and circumstances far outweigh the other factors and actually provide the opportunity for talent to be sharpened to the level of the genius through repetition and hard work. Specifically, he comes up with the 10000 hour rule, which indeed what this article deals with.

Based on a study by Anders Ericsson, professor of Psychology at the Florida State University, Gladwell claims that genius does not always need colossal talent, but almost always requires enormous amounts of time. The magic number of hours roughly translates into 10000 across diverse fields. It is the defining claim of the book that a reasonably talented individual will be likely to rise to the level of a genius if fortunate enough to spend 10000 or more hours practicing and perfecting his art.

The Beatles, according to Gladwell, performed live in Hamburg over 1,200 times from 1960 to 1964, amassing more than 10,000 hours of playing time. Gladwell asserts that all this time The Beatles spent performing shaped their talent. They were 'made' by this experience, chiselling themselves into something people had never heard before.

Bill Gates met the 10,000-Hour Rule when he gained access to a high school computer in 1968 at the age of 13, and spent long hours programming on it. We need to remember that in 1968 computers were nowhere near as commonplace as they are now, and access to one was reserved for the very elite or the extremely lucky. Gladwell claims that without this circumstantial advantage, Gates could have been successful given his entrepreneurial acumen, but chances of being worth 50 billion US dollars would have remained remote.

Gladwell’s arguments about the hours are quite thought provoking. It raises the question, and sometimes concern, about how an initial edge driven by nothing other than plain strokes of fortune allows some people to experience this ten thousand hour luxury. An analysis of the birthdates of the US national league hockey teams reveals that most of them were born in the months of January and February which enabled them to be the oldest in their classes in junior school, thus enjoying an early physical advantage. He goes on to show how this advantage becomes the differentiating factor as these select people carried forward by timely birth were continuously selected among the best players, thus clocking hours and hours of best competitive hockey time, till the equally capable but born some months apart are left way behind for lack of equivalent practice.

 While all that rings true, and I am a firm believer in chance and opportunity playing a rather unsettlingly dominant role in the shaping of success stories, my rather sinister sense of sarcasm was provoked into wondering how this rule translates into the land of the clicks, beyond the cubicle infested antiseptic boundaries of the corporate world.

Well, these are his actual books

Working fo an Indian organisation, I can hardly open my mailbox without facing a 360 degree bombardment of innovations and accolades, stories of exceptional achievers and fables about delighted customers. The Key Responsibility Areas of managers are being mapped to idea generation by people who believe that time has installed publicity as the mother of invention. Hence, a common employee like me constantly finds his own thoughts slashed to ribbons by so called cutting edge conceptions, and the peace and quiet of the cubicle blasted to bits by the drums, bugles, bells and whistles that accompany these measures and drives. I would say we are lucky that almost all of these revolutionary ideas turn out to be brain farts and damp squibs, preventing a disaster of the nature as perpetual innovation had triggered in the banking industry not too long ago.

However, even with mails, mailers, podcasts and newsletters paradoxically showcasing out of box Einsteins at every nook and corner of the cubicles, not even the most deluded star employee can honestly claim to be a genius at his work by any stretch of his stilted yet flexible imagination. With all the hours booked and salaries drawn by the workforce streaming in and out of the cubicles each day, pitifully little work is done that can be translated into even an infinitesimal paradigm shift. In the form of tools, spreadsheets, reports, metrics, meeting minutes and soiled coffee cups, the resulting output from all but a very small percentage of the hours put in by the workforce comes out as decadent debris of waste – products that can neither be used nor recycled, with the sole exception of the Styrofoam coffee cups. It is also a well known trait in the industry that the higher a person rises, the more incapable he becomes at performing useful work which actually benefits the customers.

So, does the 10000 hour rule draw a blank in the industry? Are all the monumental man years billed to grudging customers and spent in front of futuristic laptops immune to the Gladwell genius syndrome?

Let us take a deeper look.

One of the factors which contribute greatly to the lack of expertise seems to be the phenomenal hankering for

Picture: Cory and Blett

 the next level. To the workforce, promotions and change of role is the Holy Grail, elicited through periodic reminders, strategic whining and a lepidopterist like passion for collecting appreciation mails. What this ensures is that organisations play along and keep promoting people, often creating room at the top and adding layers in the middle to accommodate the continuous corporate climb. So, the seasoned athletes competing in the perennial rat race end up with a maximum of 3 years in a particular level, doing the same job.

A person spends around 1700 hours in office per year. The amount of work done in these 1700 hours is a complicated function of the designation, but seldom is it more than a very liberal estimate of 50%. With emails, internet and coffee machines, it is neither possible nor fair to budget for more. Refreshing the mind and body becomes more and more necessary, especially given the extra hours that people insist on staying in office and wear as a medallion during the cycles of promotion.

Hence, with a maximum of 2600 hours on the same job, the drones rarely have enough time to make them deft, skilled geniuses. Even when they perform the same role while spanning three different designations, they fall short of the required amount of practice that makes perfect. Another factor to consider here is that with each passing year and change in designation, the time spent working diminishes, making way for many channels aiding celebration of work in the form of caffeinated coffee, cigarettes, conversations, cell phone and ipod generated music, curriculum vitae circulation, cricket discussions, character assassination, cribbing about reward-less slogging and canvassing for a change of role.

We seem to have dug out the root of the problem. The unfortunate cubicle creatures are handicapped by the lack of opportunity of spending enough time on the job. Maybe a relook at the structure of the industry, the cycle of promotions and change of roles and some psychiatric counselling reigning in the fascination with growth and moving up the ladder can bring about a radical change in the quality of work. Maybe with such a change, suddenly innovations will resemble something worthwhile rather than an excel macro imitating Macavity in working out complicated long division sums.

But, the next question is, what about the hours put in now, piling upon one another, amounting to a mountain of experience so frequently translated into company capability? Do all those logged time amount to nothing? All spiral into nothing because of the change of designations and roles necessitated by promotion cycles? The promotion cycles in its turn are necessitated by the conviction that the most important feature in an individual is not the presence or absence of a sizable paunch, a working knowledge or absolute ignorance about George Bernard Shaw or a fantastic relationship or the absence thereof with spouse and kid, but surfaces only through the word manager and its derivatives printed or absent on a business card.

My view is different.  Malcolm Gladwell does hit the nail on its head. In spite of changing roles every three years, corporate cubicle creatures do develop sophisticated skills at some of the activities demanded by the job. Because, regardless of designation, some things never change.

A standard issue worker consumes about eight cups of coffee per work day. If we put it in the well encouraged and appreciated quantitative numbers, this amounts to nearly two hours per day of taking the walk, washing the cup, choosing the brew, pouring and stirring, adding milk and sugar, networking with colleagues and customers in the highly connected hub called the espresso machine.  This amounts to nearly 450 hours per year. Given the normal 20-25 year career climb to the secluded office with a buxom secretary who will serve coffee and more, one generally ends up spending 10000 hours in quest of caffeine in the corpocratic quarters.

One should also not forget that with growth come additional responsibilities. There are frequent requirements of getting together with customers or colleagues, disgruntled or sycophantic underlings, planning sessions and motivational pep talks. All these mean steaming Styrofoam cups of hot brew.

The trick here is not to change allegiance between beverages. Dividing time between tea and coffee and the occasional hot chocolate like a fickle fresher ignorant of the bigger picture will end up in being neither here, nor there. Definitely not transformed into a genius.

Another aspect where I see excellence regardless of rapid change of designation, is in the phenomenal capacity of self promotion. If 50% of eight hours is spent working per day, nearly an equivalent or more is spent talking about the way the clicks of mouse and the taps on the solitary keyboard are keeping the world from disintegrating into the primordial soup we came from. No wonder people often spend way more than ten hours in office. There are ball by ball descriptions of the complications and challenges, coupled with the innovations brought about to overcome the same. Exceptional skill in every line of code written, every excel cell populated, every audit report filled. The Nobel Prize seems to have just about eluded the excellent and capable grasps in a cruel twist of fate. A fifteen minute interaction with most is enough to fill three and a half chapters of their biographies. Four hours a day engaged in this occupation, with whines and groans to spice things up as promotion cycle approaches, is another constant which gives us a semblance of stability in an ever changing world. A mere twelve years of this enables one to fulfil the Gladwell requirement. Every corporate creep who is worth his salt and has been around for little more than a decade is a genius at convincing the world that it exists because of his exploits in the cubicle. Atlas may have shrugged, but not he – for the organisation, the clients, the industry and the world is balanced on his weary and capable shoulders. Like a deep sea creature, he prides himself in surviving under immense pressure.

So, that is the Malcolm Gladwell verified image of the corporate genius.

Coffee cup in hand, a non-chalant smile taking the focus off bleary eyes, talking about achievements against the odds, about thriving under pressure and about coffers rich with received accolades, yet morose at being not rewarded with the step up to the next level. The air gradually filling up with the rancid combination of coffee and crap.

Innovation Idolatory and Idiocy

The unmistakable sound of a process specialist tripping over the network cable made me look up from my machine even as I was slipping into the morning mode of phasing out.  The face that peered at me was etched with a smile that I interpreted as ominous. The zeal in his eyes spoke of untold owes about to be unleashed on my hapless self. It was justTuesday, a long way to go beyond that sun-kissed weekly horizon beyond which lie peace and quiet.

“Hi,” said the smiling face, a member of the newly formed Inno-culation Squad. From the barrage of mailers that clogged the organisational mailboxes before going through the religious shift delete routine, some did linger long enough for me to know that they were a special bunch supposed to find ways to innovate operations and spread them over the rest of the organisation like a shroud through intelligent circulation. Hence the composite moniker.

“Hi,” I replied hastily, clinging on to the slim chance that it was a casual stop on the way back from the coffee machine. But, I knew better. The Innoculator was already planting his uninvited butt in the unoffered chair. Talk about being proactive.

“Simon,” he greeted warmly, flashing another smile. “A minute of your time?”
I said that I could afford a minute but not much more. But, he translated it as a full blown invitation.
“I wanted to ask you something. Could you share your Outlook calendar?”

Now, let me tell you something about the Dutchmen. They are very touchy about calendars and diaries and appointment books. The average Dutch child gets his or her first appointment diary before puberty and uses them unceasingly for the rest of their lives. Although my ancestry and upbringing have left strains of the Irish and American in me, I am still as meticulous and possessive about my schedule as any Hans or Geert or Jaap.
I politely asked him why he wanted me to do that.

“We have a new idea,” he answered, eyes shining with parental pride.
I winced. Ideas and Innovations had brought the world economy on its knees not too long back. Luckily, our industry of dealing with the software of the Bank leaves us little elbow room to nudge the financial system out of balance. The thought waves are generally too feeble to cause a destructive tempest. Yet, the fear remains, along with the abhorrence for pungent brain-farts. I guardedly asked him what his idea was.

“This was the result of our Ideration,” he informed. “We were discussing ...”
I stopped him and asked him what Ideration was. He smiled proudly. “It is a composite word – for Idea and Generation. We call these sessions of Brain Blizzards ...”

I remarked that all along I had heard the term Brain Storming, and misnomer though it was in the liberal use of the first term, it was probably more accepted  ...

“Well, our first Innovation was to coin a new term for these sessions. It is for a regular Brain Storming session which is also cool. Hence Brain Blizzard. We had gone to Budapest for this Brain Blizzard ...”

“Budapest?”

“Yes. The different accounts have identified Idealisers. I am the Idealiser of this Account. So, as I was saying, all the Idealisers had been sent to Budapest to be trained in Innovation Techniques by our Innovation Centre of Excellence.”

Even attuned to the Internet, Social Media and Television News Channels, I found myself suffering from advanced stages of information overload. I asked him what on earth an Idealiser was.

“He is an Idea Evangeliser. So, every account has an identified Idealiser ...”

“And all of you went to Budapest?”

“Yes. To learn about thinking out of the box, lateral thinking, Creative Discussion, SWOT Analysis ...”
I politely asked him how long he had been in Hungary.

“Three days. We had some practical hands on sessions on innovation.  We also learnt about the process and templates to follow.”

“You have a Process for innovation?”

“Indeed. It is very rigorous. We have regular process checks to see if new Ideas are being implemented according to the guidelines.”

I sighed.

“And the company paid for this jamboree?”

 He was confused. It was probably too out of box a word for his cubicle and innovation honed vocabulary.

“Yes, there is a lot of focus on innovation now. It is a high visibility project. Every account lead is supposed to show innovation in at least one area every quarter.”

“Ah, so you have goals as well?”

He laughed. “Very defined ones. It is all in the Innual – or the Innovation Manual. We have to go strictly by the book.”

“And is someone keeping score?”

This lateral piece of dialogue foxed the Idealiser. “Score? The World Cup is over ...”

“I mean is someone keeping a tab on the expense of such Budapest Brain Blizzards and Idealising Investments?”

The Idealiser nodded condescendingly. “We are trained to save money with every Idealisation. All this will reflect very positively in the bottom line. In fact, there is a euro-value attached to the goal of one innovation per quarter – we have to demonstrate profits.”

I shrugged. “So in three days you have learnt to save money through Idealisation?”

He nodded. “That’s what Innoculation is all about.”

“And what has it got to do with my calendar?”

He became efficient and businesslike, a man of crisp words and lots and lots of action.

“We will look through your plan, note the deadlines and mark your calendar so that you get timely alerts.”

I waited for him to continue. I waited long, the paragon of patience. But, not another word came out of him, straight or lateral.

“And...?”

“As I said,” he repeated. “We will look through your plan, note the deadlines and mark your calendar so that ...”

“And that will save the account money?”

He smiled enthusiastically. “It will lead to Innov-ofit, that is to say Innovation Profit.”

I nodded. “I don’t doubt that will be enough of it. You have filled the manual with all these terms, haven’t you?”

“We were trained to think out of the box. All these terms were derived in the three days of training. “

“What else did you do those three days?”

“We listened to lectures or – as we call it – Idolatries ... or Idea Lauding Oratories. Now, Simon, could you share your calendar?”

I pressed my thumbs against my temples. The distinct throb was alarming.

“Has it ever occurred to you that Dutch blood runs through my veins? Contaminated by the Irish side of parentage and the American upbringing, but about half of the red blood corpuscles are from the heart of Holland.”

He gazed back, groping inside and out of the situational box, unable to make sense of the innovative angle of argument.

“Okay, let me break it down for you. I am Dutch and I work in the Project Management Office division. Every plan that I keep is tracked to the limit. All the milestones, deadlines, meetings, deliveries, releases for the next six months are already in my calendar. Now what possible value could you add by re-marking my calendar?”

Contrary to the extreme limits of my expectations, the Idealiser smiled knowingly.

“Simon, you made my task so much easier. Now the In-cubation will be so much easier. I will proactively mark your calendar by copying and pasting your appointments and reminders. And, well, in-cubation is placing an innovation in a cubicle.”

“And what will one appointment on top of another do, other than giving me two simultaneous reminders and one continuous headache?”

He frowned and made a note of something in his notepad. Probably the attitude problem of an Incipient – well I was already thinking of myself as a conglomerated being – an Innovation Recipient.

“You don’t see the bottom line do you?”

“All I see is a blot on my horizon.”

I don’t think he understood my sarcasm. He started scribbling on his notepad.

“You see, every deadline you could have missed has a monetary equivalent, an euro value associated with it in terms of loss, rework, penalty payment ... So, already, by copying and pasting your calendar, the innov-ofit will show quite a turnaround. We built a secure solution for you never to miss a deadline.”

I clutched my hair.
“Could you idealise another ground breaking idea?”

He frowned.
“Since you are not an official idealiser, any idea from you will have to be approved by the Idealiser of the account, followed by the Location Innoculator and finally the Grand Inquisitor – that is, the one in charge of Innovation Acquisition. That’s according to the Innual. However, I can try to get it passed.”

I slumped back in my seat.

“Why not leave me alone and let me carry on as usual. You can put down whatever I did not screw up as an Innovofit. Just don’t come to my cubicle again ...”

Obviously, such negotiations did not mature to fruition. To get rid of him, I had to ultimately share my calendar.  And then I popped down to the Apotheek to get myself an NWC 30 SFT for throbbing temples.

The ceaseless strife for the fifteen minutes of limelight has now been reduced to such serious levels of ridiculousness that company mailers increasingly look like badly exaggerated spoofs.  The implementers come and go, unknowingly producing fascinating periods of stand-up comedy.

A previous article I had written about Deming’s first principle rings true here as well, although in notes bellowing out of a grotesque tragicomedy. The trouble is still with the constancy of purpose.

In the 1990s, the Sears, Roebuck management reset the sales goals of automotive mechanics to $147 an hour – presumably to increase the speed of repairs. What it resulted in was overcharging for their services and repairing things that were not broken.

This is just a one-off example.  The business world is littered with such case studies.

In the almost pathetic parallel played out in the cubicular world, the goals are set to one innovation every quarter for every manager. Obviously, they will try and fix what is not broken, idiocy taking the guise of ideas, business as usual retrofitted as innovation and hallucination poured in large quantities into empty reality to conjure up figures showing return of investment.