Management Lessons learnt from Vasudeo – Part 1

Vasudeo is my father’s name. In a normal middle class Indian family of 70’s and 80’s me and my siblings grew up enjoying the freedom of calling him by first name within the four walls of our house. While we enjoy his friendship - his status for us is nothing less than that of a god…. This in fact is a first lesson… you need not follow any rituals to get your natural respect….. He being a man of few words, I learnt innumerable lessons through his simple actions…though the meaning of many I was to understand much later…..these are the few moments that have always stayed with me …..management lessons learnt from Vasudeo

Dusshera is a festival where we follow a tradition of giving gold to each other…well not the real gold, but the leaves of a particular tree that is accepted as symbol of gold in this part of the country. As a part of this tradition, younger ones visit the elders and give them gold while touching their feet.

On one occasion on a Dusshera day, my father and I went to Dadar (a central suburb of Mumbai) near the famous Shivaji Park. One of my father’s colleagues – Mr Bapat used to stay there so we stopped by. My father was a senior government officer with central government and worked long years with BARC (Bhabha Atomic Research Center). Mr Bapat worked under him….in today’s parlance may be my father was equivalent to his two-up manager. If I remember it right, Mr Bapat was a Sanskrit scholar. He was also elder to my father in age.

As Mr Bapat and my father sat chatting, the tea and refreshments were served. My father got up, took out the gold (the leaves of course!) from his bag, offered it to Mr Bapat and touched his feet…. The most natural Dusshera ritual ,which no one ,except me, felt odd. Well, I knew my father’s rank and I was not sure I exactly agreed with what I saw. As we walked out, I couldn’t resist asking, “you are his boss, right?” “Yes” he smiled, “that’s in office”….nothing more was said or discussed but this incident stayed with me since then for some reason (I was just a High school kid then)

Later on when I witnessed a lot of debate around the stuff like protocols, whether to call your boss by his name, how friendly you can be as a boss and still be effective in the results…. I could somewhat understand the significance of what I witnessed as a schoolboy

You have a position in an organization for a specific goal…your designation is not really your identity that is meant to separate you from the rest… can we ever keep it aside when we are not interacting for a task?....do we really have to carry our corporate identity all the time….

Though these things sound idealistic, they are actually more pragmatic….

My father was known to be an absolute no-nonsense manager, but whenever as an individual he took any risks, people working under him could go and tell him exactly what they felt….please remember this was Government environment in 70’s and early 80’s….even at home as kids we could always speak up if we thought he made a mistake…

Segregating you from your designation is meritorious in more than one ways:
you always know who is interacting with you as a person and who is interacting with your designation
You are not slave of any pattern that your designation can beautifully weave around you
You can enjoy simple pleasures of life

Some of these lessons helped me a great deal, when for a part of my life I was an entrepreneur – I neither had a corporate logo, nor a designation on my visiting card….after a few initial nervous days I must say it was a very powerful experience!

Well, can I do what my father did on that Dusshera day? I’m not very sure… But then I am not Vasudeo… hopefully I’m learning!!!

Rewards of Failure

I was watching the promos of a film that was launched recently with lot of fanfare. The film talks about the ill-effects of current education system, with the director boldly displaying his educational exploits below his name – “12th STD Fail”. The director being one of the well-known successful directors, it was a great marketing tactic.
I wondered – Was he always so proud of his educational exploits – especially at the time when he failed. How much time and how much pain he must have suffered before boldly displaying that failure?
Its interesting what a failure does to you. When I look back – one bold failure that quickly comes to my mind is my own 12th standard. I completed by bachelor’s degree in science. However, in my time rarely anyone went to B.Sc. out of choice – one was either a failure in securing engineering admission or medicine admission. In my case it was medicine. Life suddenly looked bleak….. out of the bunch of guys that used to hang around with me till 12th Standard, I was the only one left behind with everyone else gone either for an engineering college or a medical college..... its little difficult to imagine now, that I actually behaved the way I behaved that time…. For six months in my graduation, this was the pattern I followed:
1. I genuinely believed that I do not belong to my B.Sc. degree but its just a sheer mistake that has got me there – almost always behaved like a martyr however weird it may sound.
2. I did not bother to make a single friend ( I also remember what helped was a long teachers’ strike where colleges were closed down for more than a month)
3. Anyone who cared to listen, I would make it a point to impress that I missed my medicine admission only by 3 marks (big deal!)

As the time passed, I started realizing that I was going to be in that place. I also developed a faint suspicion that people were avoiding me….. I think people generally do not hang around a failure not because the person is a failure but actually avoid him/her because of the way a person behaves in failure…. Who would hang around someone who is perpetually mourning?..... Of course, I must confess that this learning did not touch me that time and came much later after I almost mastered the art of failing.

That time I had no enlightenment that changed me…. It was just boredom with my state of being at that point of time. I reluctantly started looking around… and life around was quite interesting (pun intended!) …. Library suddenly became the most interesting place to hang around, apart from canteen (could you believe – we actually had separate canteens for boys and girls!!!) …. Rose-days and valentine days came and went by… not that I had any luck but taught me to be an eternal optimist!! Not that I became careless about my career but it just did not consume me…. I made some great friends…. My own patterns got shattered – Till my 12th standard, friends would generally come from similar background and with similar aspirations…. Talking to girls was earlier avoidable (how stupid we could get!!) – then I landed in Microbiology class as the only boy with 25 girls!

Life had its own way of holding my hand and taking me on a great journey that was not marked with any great achievement in conventional sense, but strangely I was on a high!!

Strange was the effect of that phase on me – I remained as competitive and ambitious as I ever was – I just could take string of failures in my stride better…. Ability to bounce back after every failure became better….. these shorter cycles post-failure always allowed me to experiment more….. even today there is no great success but I have realized the journey of struggles and experiments itself is lot of fun….. life has its finite beginning and a defined end…what you do in between is entirely up to you!!

Every time I achieve something…. I chuckle… as my first educational qualification flashes some where at the back of my mind….. a failed doctor!!