The woes of Byju’s

Just as everyone thought the layoffs winter can’t get any more frigid and worse, looks like Byju is going to be laid off from Byju’s.

Every Edtech company has three components 1) Education 2) Technology 3) Business and management. That Byju Raveenran is an accomplished tutor is a well known fact. That his classes and method of teaching had immense potential to go online was also there which was why Byju’s grew exponentially in a short span of time and attracted the attention of global investors. So problem areas are not education and technology. Byju’s current woes are all on the business and management side.

There are several well known cases of VCs asking founders to focus on product development and appointing CEOs and hiring executives to run the business. Now that VCs are seeking to oust Byju Raveendran, it is puzzling as he had no prior experience in running a company then why did the VCs allow him to be the CEO and bring in his wife and brother to run the business. Byju’s situation was not at all complicated. Raveendran had to focus on education and the company needed a technology head with the potential to grow into CTO who could build a technical team from scratch. The VCs could have had easily set up the executive and management teams. Raveendran and his family members are not just the problem, the entire executive and management teams need to be dismantled and built from scratch.

I have heard several instances of Byju’s sales team being aggressively persuasive with the parents of children and making the parents feel like they are doing a crime by not giving their children Byju’s online classes. Raveendran seems to have clearly forgotten his own USP that made Byju’s touch the skies. It was the quality of his classes and word of mouth. Companies like Apple and Bose rely on the quality of their products to attract and retain their customers. Raveendran simply had to follow the golden rule. So what changed him?

Market valuation of a company is usually done based on the numbers on its financial statements and its business potential in the market segment it is catering to. Investors would ideally look at the past 3 years of financial performance for assessment. What they look at is profit margins, but with a catch. Ideally they would want to see increasing revenue and decreasing cost or expenses but even if the revenue remains flat for a couple of years they want to see decreasing cost because it shows efficient money management. This does not seem to be the case with investors and investments anymore. Market valuation can be conservative or inflated based on many factors. In the case of Byju’s it had huge potential with its online app, then covid struck and we literally started living on the internet. Byju’s valuation became like an endless pit because its business potential exploded into touching the entire population of the country. When investments started flowing in like water Raveendran spent millions on acquiring other edtech companies and running promotion ads with Lionel Messie and Shahrukh Khan and sponsoring events, notably sports events. The beleagured company’s valuation is now down by 95% from its heydays in 2022 which goes to show how inflated valuation can end up destroying companies (https://m.economictimes.com/tech/startups/macquarie-slashes-byjus-valuation-by-98-after-julius-baer-protest/articleshow/108165302.cms).

Terming startups that are loss churning machines year after year as unicorns is I believe the biggest crime investors and VCs are doing. Budding entrepreneurs all want their startups to get investments and become unicorns regardless of how poor their financial performance is because they know they can have swanky lifestyle, hire and fire employees when their business strategies fail miserably and can get away with everything even if their companies go bust.

Raveendran’s knowledge and teaching acumen were his heart and soul and investments pouring in acted as injecting venom into both. This is what happens in every case where we get more money than we really need. Education is more like the traditional barter system, we give money in exchange for knowledge. When we make education into a business, everything related to business takes hold, such as competition in the market, having to invest first to get returns, invest more for higher returns, commercialization and giving up on the core values of education.

Raveendran is accusing the investors of trying to oust him as the CEO of Byju’s and from the board of directors along with his wife and brother. He is also peeved now that investors have blocked access to money he has raised to pay salaries to his staff (https://www.reuters.com/world/india/indias-byjus-cant-access-rights-issue-funds-pay-staff-2024-03-02/). He needs to understand that investors are only looking to recoup their investments for which he has to either pay off all their money or step down and let them run the company. He doesn’t have a third option no matter whatever he tries.

VCs can do well by not being confrontational and convincing Raveendran to give up the executive positions and shift his focus back to education for the sake of his company and his future. If he gets ousted, the reality will hit home hard when he starts a new life without Byju’s especially if the investors decide to retain the name of the company.

The risk and reward of using AI in stock market

Got invited to a talk on “A.I. for wealth creation in the stock market” at an investor’s meet in my hometown and came away completely bamboozled. The speaker, the CEO of a brokerage firm, seemingly an expert on stock markets had zero knowledge about how AI works. He threw up a few slides on AI that were incomprehensible to the largely local non-tech savvy attendees and then started demonstrating ChatGPT as the way of using AI in the stock market to make better returns. But when he was asked to query ChatGPT to predict the next day’s stock market outcomes it couldn’t.

AI is mostly being used in automation and prediction now. Fundamental to AI is data and data analytics which leads to predictive analytics. The core aspect of AI is machine learning (ML) and there are two basic types of learning – supervised and unsupervised learning. All predictions from continuously changing data such as forecasting stock or trading outcomes and market fluctuations is through supervised learning. Pattern recognition is how AI systems identify patterns in data and then use those patterns to make decisions or predictions. One of the prevalent algorithms used for more accurate predictions is the backpropagation algorithm.

Now, an ideal investment portfolio would be a combination of high risk high reward investments (stocks, mutual funds) and low risk low reward investments (government bonds), the low risk ones to offset potential losses from high risk ones. Better AI prediction models can increase investment in high risk stocks leading to higher gains. But human sentiments and emotions play a major role in stock values and we are prone to mass hysteria. AI has no emotional intelligence so AI prediction models cannot factor in data on human emotions and can consequently lead to huge stock market losses.

The deeper impact of the Adani meltdown

A critical aspect of the fallout of the Adani group or any similar large business is how its lenders are going to deal with the aftershock and this is something I haven’t seen addressed anywhere. Post covid all big and small lenders are aggressively liquidating assets of borrowers whose loans have turned NPAs. I know this because I proof read ads of possession and sale notices published by banks and other lending financial institutions in newspapers through an advertising company. I have seen sale notice of asset for a measly Rs. 4 lakh loan. Why are banks behaving like extortionists? Because they are unable to recover business loans.

Businesses that borrow monstrously like in the case of Adani Group have fixed assets and very little in the form of liquid assets. They do not have a single lender but a consortium of lenders like in the case of Vijay Mallya and Kingfisher Airlines fiasco. When his airline business nosedived and went south he informed the lenders that he is unable to manage it anymore. The lenders got together and decided to invest more into his business hoping he could somehow turn things around. Finally, all that the lenders had were office buildings and airplanes to liquidate. Because of their vast influence over governments and civil administration these business leaders are unaffected by the consequences of NPAs.

So what can banks do to control their losses to some degree and repay investors who have invested with them? Turn to individual borrowers because they are helpless when the SARFAESI Act is enforced on them for forceful recovery of loans. What is worrisome is, if the Adani Group sinks even the recovery of all individual NPAs is not going to help banks overcome the catastrophic aftershock.

Indian opposition parties are up in arms against the Modi-Adani bonhomie. They are 9 years too late. When Modi was the PM candidate in the 2014 elections, he used to travel by helicopter to election rallies all over India from Gujarat and return the same day. The helicopter, pilot and fuel were all provided by Adani. This was in the public domain and everyone knew about it. Adani is a businessman and anyone who thought he was doing this merely out of friendship was being naïve. He was making a massive investment and what was he expecting in return? Now we know. Full and unfettered access to the corridors of power and to public money. The full extent of the financial damage that has been caused may never be revealed. What is required is a Supreme Court monitored fully independent financial audit, of all businesses of the Adani group and of all the financial institutions that are lenders of the Adani group. This is what the opposition parties should vehemently demand for. As long as the BJP is in control of the central government this will remain a fantasy.

Understanding Business Objectives In The Chaos Of Corporate Layoffs

News of layoffs from Silicon Valley heavyweights and the startup world are grabbing headlines and eyeballs each day now. Professional social media platform LinkedIn is inundated with posts from laid off employees expressing anguish at the way they were locked out of company premises and office computer networks abruptly. There are several reasons for what has been happening but it would be better understood by first looking at business fundamentals and other underlying factors.

All companies aspire to grow their revenue and profit margins Year-On-Year (YOY) and this is the mandate of their top executives. Business strategies are created for both revenue generation and cost saving (money saved is money created) based on market analysis and macroeconomic conditions. This results in the initiation of projects which when executed results in the development of products, services, etc which can either be commercialized and monetized to generate revenue or used internally to increase efficiency and thereby reduce cost to companies. Bigger companies will have multiple projects and startups will be mostly working on developing a single product/service. Now, there are business evaluation methods (NPV, IRR) to establish if a project can be successful but there can be hurdles during project execution, introduction of similar products/services and other market changes, changes in macroeconomic conditions and availability of funds that can fail the project and failure of companies in case of startups.

There is a business evaluation model called PEST which is used to analyze macroeconomic conditions to determine the success or failure of a business initiative. PEST stands for Political-Economic-Social-Technological. PEST was later extended to PESTEL to include Ecological and Legal factors. Ecological can be largely divided into two factors – natural disasters and diseases. Companies have traditionally ignored ecological factors during business evaluations. The first time I came across ecological factor becoming relevant was after the devastating Mumbai flood in 2005. A client that had outsourced its IT operations to a service provider based out of Mumbai asked for a disaster recovery (DR) team to be set up in Bangalore. But diseases were completely ignored.

When the COVID pandemic struck in 2020 and countries went into lockdown, supply chains got massively disrupted. Companies were forced to modify their strategies and operations with immediate effect or close down. As the lockdowns extended, many of the ongoing projects became reduntant temporarily while new business opportunities started coming to the fore. Online home delivery and educational platforms popped up and thrived. Hiring increased substantially to implement and support new projects. It was evident that lockdowns had to end or would cripple economies of countries but where companies seem to have grossly mistaken is in their assumption that businesses would not or take a long time to return to pre-covid situation. My understanding is, if businesses had done their evaluation by considering ecological factors and specifically the factor of diseases and understood the implications, the world would not have had to go through what it had to for two years of the pandemic.

It is well known that majority of projects initiated by companies and majority of startups fail. Companies try to absorb employees in failed projects into other projects whereas startups are left with no option but to let go off their employees. But organizational consolidation amid fears of impending economic recession, disruption caused by Russia-Ukraine conflict and rising inflation and interest rates have resulted in the layoffs we are seeing now. There are different categories of employees that have been impacted now.

1) Employees on bench – Employees who are not assigned to projects or are out of projects and yet to get new projects are assigned to bench where they are trained on new technologies and topics while they continue to receive their monthly salaries. Normal practice is, most employees on bench get assigned to new projects and those who don’t are let go after a specific period of time. When layoffs due to consolidation is initiated, bench employees are the first ones to be affected.

2) New/recent joiners – When projects slow down or become redundant, new/recent joiners get impacted first when projects are shut down or team sizes are trimmed.

3) Senior employees – Yes and no surprises. All companies expect their employees to upskill themselves along with increasing experience and move up the ranks. While it is true that the corporate pyramid becomes thinner with increasing height, employees who choose to do nothing or continue staying in specific roles become redundant with time and replaceable. In a previous job, I have seen experienced people of a specific skill being let go and people with less experience of the same skill being hired to fill up those roles. Senior resources are needed in projects only till the time the projects become stable and all information is documented. Then projects can be run easily with a couple of senior people and team members with lesser experience who need to be paid far less salaries. This is also a way for the companies to reduce expenses and make the projects profitable. Moreover, new graduates are leaving colleges with the knowledge of latest technologies and who need to be paid only a fraction of what the senior employees are being paid. This is also making senior employees redundant and expendable.

Top executives are needed for businesses to ride through the storm so they will not be let go off now. In the recent past, some companies were offering high severance packages for top executives to take voluntary retirement because new and young leaders bring fresh perspectives into leadership roles.

It is important to note here that as employee headcount increases the number of internal staff in human resources, facilities and other departments also increase. These employees play no part in revenue generation and add on to cost to the company. Employee reduction also results in the reduction of internal staff count.

Do we need to fear or worry about layoffs? Lush green forests dries out in the summer heat and just a single spark of fire is needed to burn it to the ground. All that smoke and heat, in turn. rises up and brings rain. From the ashes, life springs up again. Life is cyclic and this is the Universal truth. Difficult times force us to introspect and is the time for reality check. These are the times which help us to understand if we want to learn something new and get back into the market or find our true passion and set our lives in a new direction. Any transition is difficult and no one is living happy, peaceful and stable lives which is what everyone is aspiring for. Challenges will come in everyone’s life at some point in time. Overcoming them and moving forward is what makes us truly successful. 

The startup ecosystem is all about money and nothing about innovation

The recruiting head of a startup company based out of my home state in India contacted me recently for a senior role. Seemingly buoyed at my profile being a good fit for the role, she immediately set up an online interview. I went through the company website and checked out the team. When the interview invite came, I saw that the CEO was in the list of attendees and checked his LinkedIn profile. Turned out he had done all his education and all his work experience was with companies in my home state. He has never stepped out to work and has experience only in working with small to medium local companies and not with large and multinational enterprises. Having the polar opposite of his background I would have been a complete misfit in his company. Just as I had thought, during the interview it was evident from his body language and his way of speaking that he had no intention of hiring me. Couple of takeaways from this.

1) Recruiters look for match between job description and candidate profiles and largely ignore the cultural fit aspect. It isn’t about the organization culture but the specific team culture for which the hiring is being done and the tone of the culture is set by the hiring manager which is defined by the manager’s personality, technical and people management competency and at times even their academic background. In the case of startups the CEO/Founder sets the tone of the organization’s culture. When candidates are rejected before/after interviews cultural mismatch is one major reason which is never mentioned. Whenever people have asked my opinion about joining companies I have told them any organization is fine what matters are the role, the manager and the team’s culture. At the lower levels of the corporate pyramid, team culture doesn’t matter much but assumes significance as responsibilities grows with roles.

2) The head of a department in a government engineering college in my home state once told me that students are no longer interested in completing their degrees and are obsessed with starting companies. This startup culture is being fueled by the glorified stories of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg being college dropouts and going on to build Microsoft and Facebook, Sabeer Bhatia founding Hotmail and selling it to Microsoft and by the relative ease of acquiring funding now. The new trend is the growing obsession of having one of the CXO designations. Startups are largely associated with innovation which has distorted the meaning and purpose of innovation. Innovations have impacted, improved and drastically changed the entire human race. Radio, TV, Telephone, Fan and Penicillin are some of the best examples. For me, an air conditioner is not an innovation because it is still a luxury and hasn’t reached the majority of human population but a mobile phone has. How many of such innovations do we see coming out from the startup ecosystem and impacting humanity positively? Now it is all about money, go-to-market strategy is all about commercializing ideas and monetizing them, raising funds, achieving breakeven, becoming profitable, paying back investors, equity and financial ratios and percentages. The concept of innovation and business being for the people and by the people has largely eroded away. When I asked the CEO what his future plans for his company was he replied that he wants to expand internationally but not in India. Someone who knows nothing about international work culture is having lofty aspirations to go global with his business. Clearly, his focus is on generating higher revenue by leveraging on the weaker Indian Rupee compared to the Dollar and Euro. With such narrow vision these startups and CXOs aren’t going a long way ahead.

A Year On After Her Suicide Toxic Work Culture Continues To Haunt Swapna

Swapna was an alumnus of the engineering college where I studied. She was forced to take her own life last year after she was unable to bear the work pressure she had to endure at Canara Bank where she was working. A friend and another alumnus of the college informed me of her demise and after almost a month I got to know that she was the elder sister of the wife of a doctor whom I befriended during my morning walk and is a good friend now.  

Indian banks set unrealistic expectations about their yearly revenue generation and the entire hierarchy of employees is under constant pressure to meet and exceed the targets given to them. But branch managers are the ones that suffer the most. It is the employees of the branches that deal with customers every day so they are the ones expected to generate revenue by selling insurance etc. Loans are also disbursed from the branches so branch managers are responsible for repayment and NPAs pile on more pressure on them. The catch here is, authorization for large business loans comes from higher management of the banks and when business owners stall and evade payment due to bad investments or market downturns those loans become NPAs. Banks mostly run into losses because large sums of money gets stuck in business loans. Then the pressure is on the branch managers to close NPAs of as many loans of individuals as they can regardless of whether they are unable to repay due to genuine reasons.  

Swapna’s husband passed away 3 years back and she was a single parent raising up her two kids. No mother will take her own life knowing fully well that her kids will be orphaned and they will become the responsibility of her immediate family. So it is amply clear that what she was being made to endure at her work place was insufferable.   Swapna had taken a housing loan from the bank for building a house. Her immediate family has rightly put the blame on the bank for her suicide because it is the toxic work culture of the bank that has claimed her life. All they have asked is that the bank take responsibility of the loan and close it. The bank is still considering this largely because of the fear that if more such incidents happen they will have to close more such loans. Ironically taking responsibility of such loans seems to be more important to the bank than improving its toxic work culture and preventing more suicides of its employees.

Swapna’s death should not be allowed to be swept under the carpet and should serve as a deterrent and warning to all banks to treat their employees as human beings and not revenue generating robots.  

Couple of weeks back, the bank sent a recovery notice to her family and they approached the print media. That the bank is continuing to haunt her a year after her death was published as news item in all leading Malayalam newspapers. The Kerala GM of Canara Bank subsequently called her family to apologize for sending the recovery notice and blamed it as human error when it is abundantly clear that the bank was testing the water to see if her family’s wrath has mellowed with time. 

There has been national outrage over her suicide all over the media and whatever the bank does to avoid taking responsibility of her death will only dent their image further in the public’s eye. Their sole way of redemption is to take responsibility of the loan and go to her family with the offer to assist her children in every possible way till they finish their education. This will go a long way in regaining at least some of the credibility they have lost in the last one year.

Understanding the Better.com layoff fiasco

A lot is being said and written about the layoffs at better.com and people I know are mortified by the way the CEO terminated the employees over a video call. When we hear such news, our natural response is to assess them with our emotions.

Business is all about revenue generation, profits and financial statements. Money and emotional quotient (EQ) never goes hand-in-hand. When business goes down, it is not the matter of if the business will bounce back. It is all about time. How long can a company sustain itself before business picks up again or it is forced to consolidate its finances is the burning question. Reducing the workforce is one of the ways to reduce the company’s expenses. Hire and fire is not the way to manage people but is a very efficient way to run businesses especially when the supply of people far exceeds the demand for them in the market.

It is not really lack of empathy on the CEO’s part, just that emotions cannot come in the way of doing business which is why he says in the video that he cried the last time he fired his employees and he hopes to be stronger this time. Termination over video call is undoubtedly terrible but it helps to keep the emotions out unlike in a physical meeting. If his job is to make the company profitable, consolidation is also his call. The timing is also not so bad I suppose because companies open up for recruitment in January.

This isn’t a one-off case, IBM closed down business units and terminated 15,000 employees globally in 2014 and WeWork reduced 20% of its workforce in 2020. We are not used to seeing layoffs in the traditional businesses but in the startup ecosystem we can expect to see a lot because its all about investment and ROI and companies are accountable to its investors for everything it does and doesn’t do.

The company receiving a cash infusion and supposedly going public according to this article is irrelevant in the context. An external cash injection is not necessarily the sign of a company bouncing back as exemplified by how a consortium of banks kept on infusing cash flow into the now defunct Indian airline Kingfisher when its business floundered and showed no signs of picking up. IPO is just an eyewash to cover the investments of the company’s investors and help them reap profits as this post about Zomato’s IPO journey illustrates.

So irrespective of all the backlash, after the global market devastation caused by COVID, expect this to become a precedent if market conditions do not improve.

My dad’s journey from cardiac arrest to cloud kitchen and the importance of healthy lifestyle

This is about my dad’s journey from an active to sedentary lifestyle which almost took his life, 8 years of wobbling health and how he is transforming himself now. He is 6 feet tall and had developed a hefty physique with heavy eating and an extremely active lifestyle from his younger years. He always believed that eating heavy is the key to staying healthy and did not reduce his food intake with advancing age. To add to this, we moved from our ancestral house where he was very active to a sedentary lifestyle in our new house. He developed Gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) induced heartburns which culminated in a cardiac arrest in 2013. Though he recovered, his health didn’t go back to how it was before. To top it off, he developed additional ailments.

He was advised to follow a salt restricted diet but he misconstrued it as a ban on salt and I started observing radical changes in his behavior. Turned out his sodium level was fast decreasing and in another couple of days, he may have ended up in coma. He had also developed swelling on the back side of his palms and feet. Cardiac conditions could result in decreased flow of blood to the kidneys and the brain would signal the kidneys to start retaining water. Because of the false alarm, water starts getting accumulated first on the hands and feet resulting in the medical condition called edema. It was then that I checked dad’s medicines thoroughly and found out that the medicine for edema, called diuretics which forces the excess water out of the body through urine was never prescribed to him. If left untreated, water will start getting accumulated in the lungs leading to the condition known as pulmonary edema which would have forced dad to undergo bypass surgery. The cardiologist never even referred dad to a nephrologist to get his kidneys checked. To top this off, dad had to visit him once every fortnight and he kept asking me when we are doing dad’s bypass surgery. I understood that his sole objective was to make money by forcing the surgery on dad. I immediately consulted another cardiologist, he referred dad to a nephrologist, was immediately put on a course of diuretics and the swelling went off. Now this cardiologist, whose father is well known in the city as the poor man’s doctor removed some of the tablets prescribed by the previous cardiologist and told dad only to visit him if he develops any further issues. Patients are one source of income for every doctor so how many doctors would tell his patients not to visit him unless it is necessary? Though we didn’t know at that time, dad’s younger brother had similar gastric issues and he underwent angioplasty after he developed cardiac issues but it did not solve his gastric issues. He lost trust in the doctors, stopped taking medicines, eventually water entered his lungs, he refused to do bypass surgery, suffered a stroke and passed away at the relatively young age of 66 years.

Dad’s dream of setting up a restaurant never materialized but the emergence of online food delivery partners helped him set up a home based cloud kitchen in late 2019. Another cardiac arrest, though at a much smaller scale hit him again in 2020. Doctors kept advising him to walk on flat surfaces but where would he find flat surfaces other than at home? He couldn’t go out of the house anymore. I finally realized that medication and care alone was not going to help him. He had to become physically stronger again to handle the heartburns which in turn will make him mentally stronger. So I told him that if he wanted to be ambitious at this stage of life and run a business, he will have to put priority on his health first and persuaded him to join a gym for cardiovascular exercises. But making him invest himself in it was important so I made him buy walking shoes. He couldn’t even walk for a minute when he started on the treadmill but he slowly started picking up and started working out on the air glider.

When I dragged him and embarked on this journey 7 months back, little did I know it was going to become probably the most important project of my life. Dad didn’t have any hope of regaining his health so I gave him a milestone, kicking out the tablets he has been on for the past 8 years. He was taking 4 tablets, 2 for blood pressure, a blood thinner & one for cholesterol. I didn’t know how much time it could take, but I woke up at 4 in the morning 5 days a week, pushed him out of bed and into the gym. I also had to figure out the most effective workout schedule for him. Last week he started complaining of headache after taking tablets for blood pressure. I immediately got him checked without taking tablet and it was 110/80, the same as mine. Checked again the next day morning without tablet and it was 130/80. Then I took him to his cardiologist and it was 135/80. Blood pressure rises as the day goes on and falls as dusk approaches. One glance at his ECG report and a cursory check of his heart using the stethoscope was enough for the cardiologist to stop one tablet for blood pressure. The headache has vanished. One tablet down and it is a momentous achievement in such a short span of time. Another 6 months and all other tablets could be gone too. Doctor also said he need not worry about his kidneys as he is active now. He used to feel a bit shaky when walking and that has reduced after he stopped the tablet. He used to get heartburns while cooking when we open our cloud kitchen but not anymore. He was always fearful that reducing food will make him weak. I have put him on a diet of banana and papaya in the evening which has improved his digestion and decreased heartburns considerably. Now he knows that he has to eat healthy and keep working out to get rid of the tablets to become fit.

He is navigating through the treadmill and air glider easily now and I have put him on the machine fly to make his chest and back muscles stronger.

Now I am contemplating upgrading him to weight training exercises slowly. So how about a new milestone? Participating in a body building competition for 70+ guys? He is aghast at the thought. I asked him how many people can do what he is doing so why not be ambitious about it? Looks like my project may have just started after all.

I am writing this to let the world know about the importance of staying fit throughout our lives. My mom started going for morning walks after dad started going to the gym. She has lost weight, started feeling better and her thyroid condition has improved. It is also important to understand that the medical system we follow only treats us when we are sick. Hospitals are not wellness centers and very few doctors advise us to live healthy lives and prevent diseases. Ironically, cardiologists check the condition of the heart by making patients undergo treadmill test (TMT) but they do not advise patients to work out on treadmill every day. We have been living our lives as we used to, none of us have got infected with COVID or any other disease and we are yet to take our vaccine shots. Goes to show how important daily routine, exercises, healthy food and mental health are to maintaining a robust immune system which in turn will protect us from diseases.

We have all been conditioned to believe that our value is in the money we have, our jobs, size of our house, size and number of cars, quantity of gold we possess, etc. and our social status is measured by these parameters which forces us to chase them our entire lives. What we conveniently forget or ignore is, we are social animals and what is truly important for us are health and relationships. Only when we have these will all our accomplishments truly make sense in our lives. We don’t really have to take any extra effort to improve our lives, we just need to understand this one simple fact.

Does our jobs match our personality?

This is the analysis about the jobs we do and our personality I have searched for many years. The classifications Jordan Peterson has made are quite simple but the underlying factors are extremely complex. From the business/corporate perspective, entrepreneurial/creative types have a synonym. Innovators. The problem with innovation though is, it can only be a continual and not a continuous process. So there will be time periods between innovation when management becomes crucial. The best example is Apple and its products. Every time Apple releases a new version of its products into the market, the focus shifts towards maximizing sales. What he says about innovative people starting a company and then the company getting swamped with manager type people is absolutely correct and there is a reason for it. Any innovation ultimately leads to revenue generation (or cost saving) which happens through projects for which managers are required for project and people management. Then there will be finance management, facility management, etc. Problem arises when the company’s focus shifts entirely towards revenue and profits. This is why Apple has a pipeline for new versions of its products and Bose apparently spends 60% of its profits on R & D. These are conscious attempts to maintain innovation at the heart of these companies.

The difference between entrepreneurial/creative and managerial types have blurred in recent times because of the advent of startup culture and venture capital funding. Entrepreneurial/creative people have always been risk takers but investments were hard to find in the past. Now, with investments readily available, it has become possible for even managerial type people to become entrepreneurs. Moreover people with managerial background get hired or elevated into top executive posts because companies focus largely on revenue and profit generation. The corporate mindset of not changing what is working fine led to the demise of companies like Kodak. Companies getting filled with managerial type people is the reason why there is always a gap between any form of innovation (that includes corporate restructuring and changes in business strategy) & management which needs to be addressed through change management processes.

What he doesn’t talk about though is at the individual level, whether individuals are doing jobs that match their personality. In the past, every profession was important in a community so a blacksmith’s son was raised to become a blacksmith. Now, education, job, social status, even marriage is associated with money. So very few people get the opportunity to evaluate themselves and choose their professions. The academic ecosystem smothers our creative side and prepares us to become good employees in the corporate world but not good leaders. Working for a few years in a particular role in a company is not a yardstick to become eligible for promotions but that is the culture companies follow. So corporate employees are majorly neither entrepreneurial/creative nor managerial types and this is why their careers stagnate and another important reason why companies stop being innovative.

Corporate employees are largely under the illusion that spending time equally in the office and at home is what leads to work-life balance. Our lives are so intricately interconnected that it is impossible to separate our professional and personal lives and here also the common denominator is money. We have to go to office to work to earn money with which we meet the needs and commitments of our personal lives. Doing what truly interests us and we are passionate about is the key to finding the balance between our professional and personal lives. The other important aspect is to have an engagement, activity or hobby that provides us gratification in our personal lives and the confidence we gain from it will spill over and improve our professional lives.

Humanity’s fantasy world has been shattered by a virus

I had a very interesting conversation with a friend (who is going to read this) about whether COVID-19 virus is a zoonotic virus or a man made virus. There are many articles and videos that have been circulating on social media proposing to provide evidence that the virus was created in the virology lab at Wuhan, China. What my friend is worried about is, if these allegations turn out to be true, it means we have interfered in nature and tampered with the natural evolution of a microorganism. He wants strict regulations on biological testing similar to the ones imposed on nuclear and chemicals testing so that we do not end up engaging in a biological war with one another like the atom bombs in Japan and chemical warfare in Vietnam. My answer to him was in 2 parts. 1) Human interference in nature We started interfering in nature when we started cutting down trees to build our houses. We did not pause to wonder why animals are not doing the same. Rather, in our arrogance of having superior intelligence we looked down upon the supposed lower intelligence of animals. We never wondered from where did we get this ability which no other living being on the planet has. Nature will never give the intelligence and ability to any living being to destroy nature’s ecosystem. Nature is a closed ecosystem which means everything that is born or created within it will or has to return to it. Animals build nests using items available in nature which gets recycled by nature after use. When we die our bodies are recycled by nature. Fully knowing this, we created tar, concrete, plastic and a zillion other things nature cannot recycle and knowing that nature cannot recycle our waste, we keep forcing it on nature which nature has duly started returning to us during natural calamities. So we have come a long way to worry about human interference in nature now. 2) Tampering with the natural evolution of a microorganism My friend believes biological testing in labs is essential to understand about microorganisms so that we can build medicines and vaccines to protect us from them. First of all, every organism in nature is in continuous evolution. So there is no end to biological testing. Why are animals not doing the same? This is not about higher or lower levels of intelligence. Nature has a sophisticated and effective way of handling this situation. Immune system. Diseases are simply conflicts between organisms of higher and lower orders. All living beings when exposed to nature will constantly be under the attack of microorganisms. Immune system keeps learning about more microorganisms and becomes more robust in protecting us. So we do not need to test microorganisms in labs for our protection from them. The bigger problem with this is, not everyone will have good intentions. These genetically modified microorganisms could be stolen and released into nature. We will have no control over them once they are in nature and consequences could be catastrophic. We have found ways to splice genes in lab and now we are working towards repairing genes in human genetic structure that cause diseases. I am all for it because it can cure genetic diseases like diabetes permanently. But any lab experiments that can potentially involve nature has to be strictly forbidden. Even if COVID-19 is a man made virus and we let it out into nature, did it affect nature? No animal died because of it. 3 million humans and counting have died. Every time we go against nature, the consequences will come back to bite only us. Most importantly, it is inconsequential whether the virus is natural or man made because in either case it has broken the glass houses we have been living in for so long. This goes back to the conversation I had with another friend (who is also going to read this). Every aspect of human life has become untenable in nature. Our food habits have become extremely inorganic and unhealthy, our sleep cycle has vanished and our entire lifestyle is in disarray. We are no longer in communication with nature because of which our immune system gets to learn nothing and has literally become idle. One virus of moderate virulence has raised a question mark over the survival of our species itself. Diseases are one of the ways in which nature controls population of every living being. So death is inevitable. Greater the size of population higher the mortality rate and more number of reasons to die. If diseases don’t kills us, accidents, murders and so many other reasons are lurking. We do not even know if we will wake up from our sleep the next day. Common reasons for death during sleep – silent cardiac arrest, brain hemorrhage. But we are “existing” in a blissful fantasy world. We take housing loans and agree to pay EMIs every month for the next 20-30 years. In interviews, candidates are asked ” where do you find yourself in the next 5 years or what are your professional goals for the next 5 years”. Education is linked to profession which is linked to money which is linked to social status. Health has become irrelevant. We take insurance policies and swagger around in arrogance that when we fall sick, the policies will take care of us. Health is wealth has become wealth is health. We rush to hospitals where we get treated when we fall sick. Note : Hospitals are not places that ensure we do not fall sick. Doctors do not take us off tablets and tell us how to become healthy naturally. We no longer seem to remember that prevention is better than cure. Moreover what diseases are doctors and hospitals curing us from anyways? We are given medication that suppress diseases. There is still no cure available for even common cold. Google and see the classifications of headache. There is a type of headache called stress headache the cause of which medical community has no clue about. This is how little the medical community and doctors who treat us know about human anatomy. Medication for pain simply interrupt the signal to the brain that indicates pain so we stop feeling pain. This is called workaround in other professional jobs and cannot even be considered as treatment. Suppressing a disease and keeping it inside the body long enough can result in the genetic information of the disease getting encoded into our genetic structure. This is how genetic diseases are created and passed on to future generations, thereby making the entire species unhealthy. This is what has happened to us which animals with their lower intelligence avoids by identifying and abandoning/killing unhealthy offspring. Even more ironical are the facts about medication and vaccination. Diabetes is a genetic disease and medicines only help to keep it under control. Can pharmaceutical companies manufacture medicines and vaccines to repair our genetic structure? Human body is tuned to absorb vitamins from nature and food on its own. I have read about people in western countries who live on diet of vitamin tablets completely ignorant of the fact that human body is incapable of absorbing vitamins from tablets properly. I have heard of people suffering from Vitamin D deficiency in India which is literally unbelievable. I can understand this in the colder western countries where there is less sunlight but in a tropical country all it takes is soaking our body in sunlight for a while. We are all made to believe that medication will cure us and vaccines will protect us from diseases. In reality, medication and vaccines are top ups for our immune system, a miniscule external intervention which provides more information for the immune system to fight diseases and protect us. If our immune system is already weak, medicines and vaccines can never protect us on their own. These are the reasons why keeping ourselves healthy is so important for the survival of our species. We have no control over diseases and death. The healthcare system we have does nothing to protect us from diseases. All we can do is to stay healthy, maintain a good immune system and hope that it will protect us from diseases. We cannot run away from nature, live inside concrete buildings and hope to have a good immune system. People are being kept under lockdown now and are being told that staying at home will keep them safe from COVID-19 virus when the reality is governments are completely unprepared to handle a health crisis. Staying at home without enough physical activity and away from nature can drastically affect our immune system and make us vulnerable to other diseases. It is mind boggling that almost the entire human race has become so ignorant about themselves, about nature and have become so gullible to live in such an artificial world. There is a business evaluation model called PESTEL which evaluates uncertainties in the business environment such as political situations, economic conditions, etc to find the associated risks that can impact business prospects. The 2nd E in the model is for evaluating environmental factors which includes natural disasters and diseases. Very less importance is given to this as I came to understand from the experience of a local businessman. Even though some corporate companies do give importance to natural disasters, diseases are largely ignored. We saw how much companies have struggled after the COVID-19 pandemic broke out and it has taken a year for employees to get used to working from home. Just like fever is our immune system’s indicator that a foreign organism has entered our body, nature sends out signals when there are changes in its environment. Animals understand signs of natural disasters in advance and are able to protect themselves. We have lost that ability somewhere along our evolution. I do not know how useful is our higher intelligence if it does not even help us to survive in nature. I do not know if we are too late to break out of the glass houses we are living in and return to nature, but it is never too late to try.