A Warrior’s search for Synchronicity

The expression of reality is very different according to the beholder in terms of inclination towards each quadrant of the brains – Ned Herman says – the quadrants being Rational, Safe-keeping, Feeling and Experimental.  The way people interact and take decisions also change according to the inclination to each quadrants. Interesting fact is that the conflicts you feel against people simply dimnishes once you understand this difference in people. Rational quadrant dominant people uses substantial facts to drive decision making and is always in conflict with the emotional quadrant who lacks substance. Safekeeping people is always in conflict with the experimental quadrant and vice versa. Once you identify the dominant quadrant amongst your group, you are in a better position to lead decision making and drive actions. I am a dominant rational quadrant along with experimental self with an antipathy towards safe-keeping and little emotions.

This insight kind of explains why people call Steve Jobs an expert at reality distortiion – my guess he is a dominant experimental and emotional self.

Getting real comes from asking real questions and listening to more than words that are said. Bringing back your observations of the unsaid into the conversation, gets both parties into a different realm of conversation helping to uncover previously untouched areas. Thus by entering into a multidimensional exchange of ideas and emotions you enrich a relationship, greying the boundaries between professional and personal divisions.

Reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s  ’Eat, Pray and Love’ lets you enter into such a conversation with some one that near and holds a warm soul.

This is a dialogue from an old Jackie Chan movie. Can’t remember the name of the movie.

As a child I was given the impression by the elders that they knew much more about the world and they could point me to the right direction. A warrior at heart, I seldom stopped questioning the limits of their patience, like most teenagers. And like many men who refuse to grow up, I still carry that teenager with me and now when half my life is over and parenting a five year old I don’t try to portray the image of an omniscient. What intrigues me is the notion or audacity that my parents or family had when they were bringing me up, to paint a wrong picture of their abilities or knowledge – much like those wall street bankers. I guess that this is a notion that most Indian families harbour, that the elders know better and approach their offsprings with the mindset that they need to be taught about the ways of  the world, not celebrating the immense capabilities with which they are born with and the potentials they will bloom into without any interference. At some stage in my life there was a cross over and my parents completely abandoned this notion – what would have been the subprime meltdown in our lives – I have to still fathom it out.

When answering my five year old’s questions like what is a heart attack, how did that first woman come on earth, what is protector, why is Vishnu (the hindu diety) called a protector and Shiva (another diety) called a destroyer, I don’t hold back, but try to explain even the cycle  of creation, protection and destruction to maintain the balance of the world. And every time we hold such conversation I try to embed the message that I know very little, there is a vast world out there where you could find more information both first hand and from people who have experienced it before, there are multiple modes of enrichment available, which you can choose to your liking , youtube, images, neopets, facebook and so on.

In whatsoever state you are, having a strategy of your own counts and understanding how that strategy fits into the bigger jigsaw. Many a time it may not work out as you planned, many a time you may come across a much bigger game which was played in your favour and in the designing of which you had zero input. All you can do is play your game with fierce will and involvement and embrace the unknown with hunger and passion, for there are not going to be many knowns in your life.

Ephren Taylor has an impressive bio. Started his first business at age 12. Became a millionaire at age 16. Retired and sold off his business at age 17. And now on to socially conscious investing, biofuels chasing his larger than life dreams. He considers himself a resourceful guy who don’t need a classroom or a teacher to learn what he want. He can teach himself whatever he need, whenever & wherever he need it. With this empowerment he can choose to bypass what the system choose to teach him and go figure out meaninful people and meaningful ways of realising his dreams

I inherited an SLR minolta camera when I was 13. It should have been as old as me (1990). The photometer of the camera was not working and there was no feedback loop for the camera to tell me when to adjust the aperture or the shutter speed to get the intended result. So till I saw the developed photograph I had no way of knowing how my calculations would turn out. As a result I developed an acute awareness of what impact, factors like light, atmospheric conditions (heat or cold) would make on the photograph and how I could arrive at the desired result by adjusting aperture or shutterspeed.

With the advent of the digital cameras all these skills became worthless. You could see the final result the photograph along with the changes you made on the settings from the LCD display. This change enabled all unskilled to become as good as the skilled. What I miss is that acute awareness or oneness I uses to feel with my surroundings and the forecasts I made about the impact, the change I could influence by changing shutterspeed or aperture and the sheer triumph I felt when the forecast and the change I intend came true. The upside is all these skills became democratised and ordinary. Before the advent of excel mathematical geniuses and chart makers were highly regarded for their skills. Excel democratised mathematics and visual display of information a skill that can be acquired by all and sundry.
Personal loss and wonder of a selected group became collective gain and mundane utility of the masses.

A story of triumph, feels like a class war victory. Is it really so?

Who benefits when people use excel, who benefits when people use Canon or Nikon digital SLR camera? Who benefits when people use photosharing sites like flickr or facebook or picasa or Twitter

That question is discussed in Life – How the World became a corporation and how to take it back. What I want to discuss is the loss of depth, the sense of wonder, the sense of oneness that happened as a result of the demorcatisation of the skillset. And when generations go by you lose knowledge even the existence of such skill sets and pass on to a different mindset altogether. That is discussed in ‘Avatar’ by James Cameroon.

When I look at Florence Nightingale’s charts which was used to tell the Monarch that soldiers were dying more of unhygienic living conditions than from wounds from war, I can pitch the skill of Hans Rosling, the celebrity who statistician who does magic with charts on TED stages in the light it belongs. (Nightingale did not have any software or excel)

Similar depth can be experienced when you watch Anupam Mishra’s TED talk

Tara Hunt has done an excellent job at explaining the power of online relationships, need for building reputation online , need for helping out , need for helping people to help out, need for serving a higher purpose and how all these are transforming the world we live in. She also predicts how all this will become part of the job despcriptions of future. There are a lot of stories on Twitter, Craiglist, Flickr, Threadless – all amazing stories of extraordinary avhievemnts of ordinary people

Whuffie infact relates to having a network of people or community to whom we add value to and that value taking a natural turn inorder to serve back. It is realising that it is not about you and it is all about them. In Parallel streams I wrote about 2 streams of people, one going for the beeline and the other trying to milk the network to get things done. In Tara’s world both these merges into one and teaches me, if the beeline does not go through people’s hearts it will not go far.

The idea that stuck to my mind from “In search of excellence” was the abundance of data and intelligent use of software, where you could change few variables and get an accurate estimate, triumphed over long term business relationships to establish new standards of efficiency and decision making. Tom Peters illustrated this through the story of an electric appliances company, if I remember right. Much water has gone down the lane, the data driven decisionmaking is not new anymore and is pretty much taken for granted. Now most of the customers are looking for the human emotional connection anyone has to offer, over and above the correct solutions. Much of the decision making gets weighed towards the emotional connection rather than a rational choice. Very often the question people ask themselves is, “is this the kind of partner I want to be with when I face trouble?”

A very similar phenomenon happened in the world of marketing. When broadcast media was new, there was a strong relevance for ads and the premium you paid for eyeballs. Now the broadcast media is loathed and the Ads despised, because of the overuse of marketing messages. People respond better to genuine human voices and recommendations – this is where amazon and facebook thrives

Each idea has a life of its own. It mostly has more than one life. Each organisation or individual adopts the idea at a different time period and the life of the idea is greatly influenced by the nature of that entity. For example the idea mentioned at the beginning of this post entered my mind 4 years ago and now it has transformed into something new. The same idea may have ruled through many of the organisations for a much longer period

A detailed account into the lives of so many common men from different parts of India, with all their baggages from the past shadowing their present and future, how psyche evolves over decades, how each  influences the life – whether it be the British or Portugese rule or the local rulers and how the life is torn between several manipulations for power and business between state and central governments and above all how people thrive, even with all their fears and limitations. An interesting insight is that of inhabitants of Bombay having lived in spatial constratints enjoying a rich social life due to the proximity they share with a wide array of strangers – who cease to be strangers after a while and the way they adjust their life to living in such conditions. When these sort of people move out of Bombay into a place without such spatial constraints, they feel nostalgic and develop a longing for Bombay and the rich social interaction spun out of the lack of space.

However the account is of the India before 1990, before the economic liberalisation and the “banglored” era. Luckily for me the cosmic force has trusted a copy of the “Age of  Kali” through the hands of a dear one. On to that now

As the name suggests this amazing book tells a lot of stories about irrational behaviour of perfectly rational people. Some of them you may have heard before like Harvard Graduates paying upto $200 for a $20 bill. However Ori and Rom pulls together such stories and build context for us to be aware as well as to understand the intricacies behind certain decision making and preferences. After reading this book I am determined to read Dan Ariely’s Predictably irrational

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’