A Warrior’s search for Synchronicity

A great read – pointing at human limitations and the notions with which we lead our life and inject certainty into our everyday existence, where none exists.
Man modelled his physical world taking into account his limitations. Physical world has stairs, elevators, bridges, cars, trains, airplanes and so on. The intellectual world does not take into account any limitations. The notion could be that of an intellectual giant who can see things that others can’t.
The reliability on this kind of talent ended up on disasters. If you are trying to sell something common man can’t understand the likelyhood is that it is a castle built on air. – Idea from Dan Pink

http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/

Men occassionally stumble over truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened – Winston Churchill. This holds true for most of us.

Mohammad Yunus decided to stop and change his course when he was exposed to the excitement he experienced first hand, the difference  $42 could make to the lives of a group of poor people. All of us would have come across emotions and mindsets which reiterated the fact that just money does not bring well being and meaning to our lives and it is in the pursuit of higher goals that we find our fulfillment in. As most of the coporations (profit motivated vehicles as Mohammad calls them) does not have this streak embedded in them he created a different set of businesses called social businesses.

One of them with Danome , named Grameen Danome which produced fortified yoghurt at affordable prices to serve malnourished children of Bangladesh and another one providing lifeline of communication to poor Bangladeshi villages (300,000 telephone ladies who owns mobile phones and sells mobile services to people in their village – a business that is being transformed into information providers through mobile internet)

The book discusses extensively the philosophy, history and projects of Grameen more details available

http://www.grameen-info.org/

Go through this great presentation – it teaches you how to achieve the unachievable (perceived)

Didn’t like the start of the book when the author started making promises of some sure shot panaceas, however later on when it progressed through a number of stories of real people (CEOs) it was an amazing experience. My key learnings are ask a lot of dumb questions, publish your strategy for everyone to see, communicate what you are doing, don’t benchmark against your competition – benchmark against your inner yardstick of quality and success.“

After Reading this book , I am convinced that I qualify as an asshole – a temporary one – who behaves like one knowingly, because at certain times it is much needed to elicit quality performance.

Personally , I did not get much from this book, as I live with a rich innerworld and internal quality measures, so that an asshole cannot create a negative influence on me. So, in short I was not at the receiving end, because of the conscious choices I made which includes my life path after being dismissed from school when I was 14. Any experience can be made to work for you provided you know how to tame it and take advantage of it.

I would love to work for Steve Jobs , or any leader who pushes me to my limits and believes in my potential, even if the world sees him as an Asshole.

I was drawn to this book because of 2 previous books of Robert Sutton – ‘Weird ideas that work’ and ‘the knowing doing gap’. I am disappointed at the irrational choice I made to choose this book, inspire of it’s title, expecting another set of brilliant insights which I got previously from Robert. I. Sutton

In this fitting sequel to his ‘Our Iceberg is melting’ John describes how to build  a sense of urgency within an organization and how to turn that urgency into action. Very relevant book in today’s times as organizations are trying various techniques to create the urgency and use the recession as an excuse to build the agile and competent organization that they wanted to build always, however all these while they were not ready to rock the boat. Now is the golden opportunity and they are going for it.

Video of John about ‘Our Iceberg is melting’