A 25 year old with technical and business degrees from IIT and IIM, the top Indian colleges and working for McKinsey, the world’s best consulting company. Everyone would say what an amazing guy. The mental pressure around the two statements is in itself unimaginable.
It is generally accepted that at least 3 years of work experience is required to take up an advanced or Master’s degree and in the case of an advanced business degree more experience is preferred. Academic institutions should assess the work experience and the candidate’s exposure and knowledge of the business side of things before granting admission for business degrees. The guy came straight out of IIT at 22 years and landed at IIM. What exposure does someone at 22 have of business and the ones who have will definitely not take up a business degree, not at 22 for sure. Out of IIM and straight into McKinsey. It is nothing less than maniacal.
It is clearly not just the work pressure that drove him to take his life. The deadly “pressure-to-perform” comes from downstream a long way back. Suicides among students preparing for entrance exam to get into the IITs and among students studying at IITs have been rising alarmingly over the years. That is 5 years of academic mental stress with the added stress of cracking the CAT exam to get into the IIMs and then 2 years of even more academic stress during the MBA program. When he joined for work, he had already spent 7 years of his life in the pressure cooker of intense academic stress.
Work pressure and micromanagement are common in most companies now but would depend largely on the ones managing the projects. Companies like McKinsey hire the best graduates from the top colleges and then the pressure to perform and the toxicity in the work culture is thrust upon them. Now the question everyone would have asked is, why didn’t he just quit and move on rather than drown himself in the mire? Because of social and peer pressure. Can’t someone who has gone through the grind of JEE, IIT, CAT and IIM absorb work pressure and continue performing at his peak? No one would have understood, not even his family. The problem with peak performance is, no one can stay at the peak forever and down the peak could become a free fall very easily and quickly. He was way too young to manage work pressure, push back micromanagement and survive office politics and toxicity.
It took me 10 years and enough exposure of working with international clients to understand how a MBA can add value to my profile and MBA from an international college would be the best to prop up my international work experience. With age and experience comes maturity and the ability to work smarter and manage all kinds of stress. Consulting is no easy job and consulting with McKinsey means working with the top companies in the world. It is impossible for anyone to live in sustained mental stress for a long time and the younger one is the more vulnerable they are to capitulating sooner.
From the time I heard the Dire Straits classic “Private Investigations”, a narrative of the daily life of the not so scrupulous private investigators, two lines have stuck with me.
“What have you got, at the end of the day
What have you got, to take away”
What we will all eventually take with us is knowledge and experiences and not the names of academic institutions where we studied, the names of companies where we worked and the expectations of people around us. Our well being is something only we understand the best. The stress and suicides created by pressure to perform will stop when we realize these simple facts.
LinkedIn has been inundated with posts about employees quitting jobs because of bad managers for quite some time. While this is true and I have done the same in my past jobs, a good amount of introspection coupled with plenty of reading has helped me understand my experiences better.
The origins of bad managers lies in the history of management itself. Industrial revolution gave rise to manufacturing and we started producing a myriad of items as our needs increased exponentially. Soon we realized that tasks are repetitive in manufacturing and we came up with processes to streamline the tasks. This in turn helped us to create documents which we call as manuals. Workers had to simply follow the steps mentioned in the manuals. This literally meant there was no work to be managed. When manager position was created it was to manage the workers and drive them to increase their efficiency and in turn the factory produce. Deming’s model or the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle embodies this culture of management.
When technology improved drastically and disrupted all industries it too adopted the same form of management, the best example of which is the waterfall methodology in software development. As technology matured it became evident that creating a software product and manufacturing nuts and bolts are as different as chalk and cheese. Also, unlike the erstwhile factory workers who were largely uneducated and followed the manuals and orders of their managers, technology professionals are educated, know what they are doing, have the ability to solve problems and can think out of the box. So the need changed to managing work and getting products out into the market as quickly as possible so that they can be monetized. This has given rise to the Agile methodology. One of the pillars of Agile methodology is self organizing teams that are absolutely clear about what and how much work can be completed in each sprint cycle. Such teams do not need managers, rather they need someone who can minimize/eliminate disruptions to work and can communicate clearly with the team members. In SCRUM, this is the role of Scrum Master.
The general expectation from every employee is that they need to be at their maximum efficiency during their work timings. Employees have to be fully focused on their work for 8 hours. What this means is, employees have to turn off all other aspects of their lives in their minds as soon as they step into their offices. We know this is far from reality. Our professional and personal lives are not mutually exclusive rather they are intricately interconnected. When employees reach office their minds are filled with thoughts about different aspects of their personal lives and it takes time for them to start focusing on work. The exact reverse happens when they reach home after work. All body functions are performed using blood so when we have food blood is required for digestion. Depending on the amount of food we eat some part of blood from the brain is also utilized in the digestion process. This is why we feel sleepy after a heavy meal. Add to this all the conversations, meetings and other distractions. Taking all of these into account, out of the 8 hours, it is unrealistic to expect anyone to be fully productive for more than 5 hours.
Now, let me narrate why I quit two of my previous jobs.
I wanted to do MBA from my engineering days but didn’t have a substantial reason to embark on it. In a previous job, I joined a customer support project which had a security management system which I had to learn on my own to support and maintain it. In 2 1/2 years, I became an expert on it. After I was sent on an onsite assignment I won contracts for my company to upgrade the security management systems for two of its clients. The IT head of one client was a German and he put me through 3 hours of grueling technical session on the product. I also learned a lot about the businesses in different domains and business aspects of outsourcing in those years so finally I knew why I wanted to do MBA. I wanted to move into roles where I would be engaging with clients, solving business problems and making businesses streamlined and efficient. Meanwhile, a promotion would have made me manager and as the management sat for 5 years twiddling its thumbs contemplating if I should be promoted, they made two glaring mistakes. 1) They never asked me what I wanted 2) They did not define a career path for me in spite of seeing my capabilities and strengths so clearly. In the last project I did for the company, I went for knowledge acquisition to the client’s location which was outsourcing its IT operations for the first time and returned to India to set up an IT support team. The initial days were hard as the client needed support during non-office hours as well. I became sleep deprived and was on the edge of insomnia when I went to a friend’s place one evening after work and passed out after having a can of beer. Then, having beer to sleep started getting repetitive. It was at this point that I fell out with my managers. After working for 10 straight years without a break I realized I had to go do something else and the MBA was staring right at my face.
In another job, the company was known to provide work from home facility to most of its employees. My dad was not well at that time, my work location was far away from my hometown and dad was in no position to be relocated to a new place. Work from home was important so I didn’t mind joining at a lower salary. Precisely at this juncture, company changed its work from home policy, started forcing all employees to return to office and put a blanket ban on work from home for new joiners. The first two months I was on bench and had nothing much to do, third month I was assigned to a project, fifth month the manager changed and in another month the new manager had messed up the project. To add to this he targeted me and put me on Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) in just under two months after starting to manage the project which is unheard of.
In both cases, I did not quit those jobs because managers created adverse situations. They created the triggers which led me to decide to move on. My decisions to look ahead were not because I didn’t want to continue in those jobs or I couldn’t handle those managers and bad management. I already had enough to handle in my life, didn’t want to spend any of my time and energy suffering bad managers and had no stomach to fight to hold on to a job. I simply pulled myself out of the toxic environments they had created. Quitting jobs because of bad managers essentially means out of all the relationships and situations employees have to handle every day, a toxic manager is the easiest and least important one to get rid of. What is interesting though is, on the flip side, employees will brave every odds if they know they have managers with whom they can communicate openly and place their trust. Companies believe all employees can be retained by dangling the carrots of promotions and salary hikes before them. There will come a time in everyone’s career where mental health will assume greater significance than all other incentives.
These managers carry the legacy of factory management in their corporate genes where they revel in imposing themselves on employees and torture them in the name of micromanagement. Companies also believe employees cannot think for themselves, do not know what they want out of their careers and which career path to take so managers are assigned to decide for the employees. This is how employees get stuck in the promotion cycles and become disgruntled when they are passed on for promotions.
There are multitudes of causes and effects behind every employee’s decision to quit their jobs. Managers just light the match stick which results in the fire. Changing the factory worker management mindset is the most important step. Moving from people to work management is another crucial one. Employees spend 8 hours and more 5 days a week in office so they need someone who can manage their work load and be there for them to talk to. Manager mindset and management practices haven’t evolved with time which is what is required to control employee attrition because of bad managers and poor management.
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.
Rishad Premji, son of Wipro founder chairman Azim Premji recently commented that moonlighting or working in multiple jobs simultaneously is unethical and amounts to cheating. Question to ask here is, why do employees in India moonlight? There are several reasons:- 1) The most important one – monetary needs driven by inflation, taxes, medical needs, supporting aged parents and children, paying loans and a ton of other reasons and salary increments companies give that do not even remotely match the ever increasing needs brought on by the above mentioned factors. 2) Dissatisfaction in their current full time jobs because of poor management and bad managers, poor salaries and salary hikes and work that is monotonous, nothing to learn from and devoid of challenges. 3) Taboo imposed by hiring managers and recruiters who look down upon employees who switch jobs frequently. 4) For younger professionals looking to grow, moonlighting gives them the opportunity to learn more quickly and compete better in the job market.
Rishad Premji can say what he wants from his position of inheritance and privilege. Company owners, CEOs and other top executives who take paychecks that are 100 to 1000 times of the peanuts doled out to regular employees will not have the need to moonlight. Only if he is in the shoes of someone who is moonlighting will he truly understand why employees do one full time job, come home exhausted and compromise on their health, well being and family time to work more.
Tax collectors in Delhi were colluding with businesses to help them cheat on their taxes. In 2015, the new Delhi state government started providing tax collectors with bikes to travel, paid their fuel bills and gave them laptops, mobiles and incentives on tax collection. Revenue generated from tax collection jumped exponentially in a year’s time because tax collectors felt guilty about cheating the government that was taking so much care of them. This is a great example for companies who are complaining about moonlighting employees to learn from and start taking care of their employees so that they don’t feel the need to moonlight.
It all started post World War II when businesses slowly got back on their feet, from the manufacturing sector & into the government sector. Work hard on 8-10 hour shifts through the entire professional life, save as much money as possible & the dream was to own a house by retirement. Owning a car was status symbol. When banks made enough & more money they started giving out loans for houses & cars & flipped the dream. Now everyone is vying to own a house & a car before they are 30. A few underlying factors subtly changed:-
1) Saving money in banks changed to repaying loans to banks. It didn’t matter if people couldn’t save for a few months but if repayments on home & car loans get stuck for a few months, banks could simply take away both. Living with that thought in itself creates stress.
2) Saving money for 30 years is commitment without stress but repaying loans for 30 years is lugging stress for the best part of our lives. Now it is simple enslavement to the corporate sector, house, car & everything else bought on loans.
3) More salary means more money goes on to taxes. Add inflation, repayment of loans, supporting aged parents, providing children with quality education & a host of other needs & salary hikes that are insignificant when compared to the ever growing financial needs means people are being forced to moonlight in a second job or run some gigs in parallel to their regular jobs. Add the stress of having to hide their other sources of revenue from their employer.
4) When this entire ecosystem of stress got built, people were sold another dream. Insurance. Keep paying insurance premium & it will take care of medical expenses when people get sick. So now there are hospitals & treatment & no one cares about not getting sick & having wellness centers. The best part of all this is, banks now sell insurance. The entity that is the major contributor to the stress in our lives is taking more money from us with the promise of taking care of us when we are sick. It is a different thing that insurance helps with cashless treatment only in cases of planned treatment. For urgent health issues, we have to pay first & then chase the insurance companies for months who in turn will keep finding ways to reduce insurance payment as much as they can.
Barter system between time & remuneration has existed from the beginning of human civilization. But now, we are having to trade both time & health for money. I see houses everywhere with only aged parents living in them. Their children have all gone to other places, bought houses and settled there. Then there is investment on real estate, taking loans & buying houses/apartments to save on taxes. On a planet with 10-12% of habitable land area we are building far more than we need. Human needs are already spiraling out of control, if we do not see what we are doing to ourselves all the talk of mental health is not going to make sense. Working in night shifts has completely disrupted our circadian clock and is making our body a haven for all kinds of diseases to thrive and spread. Our species is simply going to implode in the not too distant future.
My favorite women can be found working in supermarket and apparel stores across India and I am thankful to my dad for telling me about them from an early age. Born into socially and economically backward families, they neither have the environment nor the motivation to excel in education. Instead they are conditioned to be married and sent packing from their homes as soon as possible. Their vulnerabilities are exposed when they are forced into the lives of wayward patriarchal men who indulge in everything except managing their homes and are forced to look for jobs to earn money. These men, though useless to their families have no hesitation in impregnating their hapless wives without having any thought about how and in what circumstances will those children grow up in. When we see the next generation kids going wayward and crime rates going up, one of the most important reasons is this.
I love talking to them at the supermarket store near my house and they tell me about how they wake up by 4 in the morning, finish off all their household chores, cook food and get their kids ready before travelling to reach the store and inside the store they have to wipe and clean the floor of the store, what they just did in their houses. They have to stand the entire day near their designated areas even when there are no customers and they tell me about how tired their back and legs become by evening. I warn them to be careful about developing varicose vein and they give me rueful smiles. Then they travel back to home, cook again, take care of their kids and end up sleeping by 11:30 pm. That is hardly 5 hours sleep for an entire day’s work. Even worse is, they have to work all days in the week. Every sick day is loss of pay for them. Their callouses filled hands are the best indicators of how hard their lives are. When they put their heads down and bear with borderline abuse from the store managers for even the slightest mistakes it shows how fragile their lives are.
My parents and I are very particular that we engage with them to the minimum. In apparel shops we tell them to stay back, do not touch any clothes on the racks and ask them to show us only what we want to see. In supermarket stores I forbid them from bending to put anything in my basket. Bending forward without breathing in and without bending the knees is why most people suffer from back pain. I warn them to be careful about their back, I get their rueful smiles again and I understand why. When the soul is broken what will anyone care about their body?
Every day they go to work in the fear of losing their jobs and not knowing where their next meal will come and what will happen to their kids if they lose their jobs. Women empowerment is just a fancy word for me when there are thousands and more of such women out there who are forced to face the harsh realities of life and are wearing down their body and mind every day just to survive. The best customers can do for them is to smile at them, be warm and nice to them, talk to them and show our gratitude for making our lives easier with shopping. All they might need is someone to hold their hands and tell them “I understand you and I am with you”.
The picture I have put here is one I found on the internet. I will never take their pictures and objectify them. Already deprived of warmth and appreciation they need not be burdened with unwanted sympathy and publicity.
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.
Inspirational quotes are being increasingly short sold and aspiring professionals are getting misguided by the interpretations of the self proclaimed experts, motivational speakers and career coaches. Below are two I have come across.
Confucius said choose a job we would love doing and not to make our passion our profession which clearly do not mean the same. We do jobs for money which helps us to meet our physical needs. Doing what we are passionate about leads to our mental and emotional fulfilment. Because we have to barter more of our time to earn more money we are fooling ourselves by finding mental and emotional fulfilment in the objects we buy for our physical needs. Monetizing our passion is never a good idea because passion releases our mind from the stress of meeting our physical needs and money suppresses our emotional quotient which means we stop getting emotional fulfilment from our passion. Moreover money creates competition and that is where value for money trumps our emotional needs.
Someone told me about a motivational speaker who tells his audience “work like a dog live like a king”. For one, animals do not “work” like us. The only time they work is for food and there is a better word for it. Hunt. If work like a dog means tire ourselves out to complete exhaustion then there is no time and nothing left in us to live like a king. Commonsense and human anatomy goes out of the window. Its hilarious. Constantin Brancusi said work like a slave, command like a king which means when we work, work hard and when we become a leader be a strong one. Also, command like a king is not the same as live like a king.
English is a quirky language so it is being shamelessly arm twisted and maligned by some among us for their own benefits with scant regard for the negative impact they are creating on the people who look up to them.
I was explaining Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to a good friend and that is when I realized how it can be used to understand patriarchy. We have come across patriarchy being interpreted and described in a variety of ways but we still do not have a good understanding of its evolutionary aspects. For those who are new to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, it is a simple illustration of our needs in life and has to be analyzed from bottom to top. There are new and hilarious versions of the model now, with internet and mobile battery being the most important of our needs.
Our needs in life begins with the most basic ones which is why they are at the foundation of this model. According to priority our physiological needs can be further subdivided into
Air and water Food Sleep
These are our most fundamental needs for survival.
Then comes shelter which offers us protection and that is when we step into reproduction.
I will go no further than what Morgan Freeman’s character Professor Norman says here in the stunning and eye opening movie Lucy. When the habitat of a living being is not conducive enough for life it will choose self preservation and when the habitat is conducive enough it will choose reproduction. It is an evolutionary fact in all animals that a major portion of their energy is meant for reproduction because for the survival of their species reproducing as many as they can is critical since nature controls population of all animals primarily through predator-prey relationships and diseases. So in difficult environment animals choose their own survival over reproduction because even if they reproduce their offspring will not be able to survive. This is evidently how Turtles and Crocodiles survived the asteroid strike that made dinosaurs extinct.
Reproduction leads to security in Safety needs because we need to protect our family. Then, to work and take care of our family, we need health and work to do. For the longest time in our evolution, being able to meet the physiological and safety needs led to directly to Esteem. Being physically stronger it was the men who went out, faced the dangers in nature and weathered the different climates to hunt for food and find wood to burn. So men who were able to meet all or most of the physiological and safety needs were recognized and respected within the families and community which lead to attaining higher social status and being considered as a community leader.
Love and belonging are not characteristics in nature, in fact what we get to see in animals during their courtship is different aspects of the process involved in mating and breeding. There is no place for love and belonging in the harsh and uncertain nature where life expectancy is very low. It was only after we became more intelligent beings we became civilized and started leading societal life did our emotional aspects evolve. In those times when we had to brave nature’s extremes there was only the need to work together to hunt, fish and cut wood. Friendship and camaraderie are products of our evolution into the societal life we live now. Life was all about survival so intimacy was not even known or required and the only form of love required was affection for the children when they were growing up.
Patriarchy is essentially men taking care of physiological and safety needs and expecting esteem in return from their families. Nothing exemplifies this better than a particular scene in the biopic Bhaag Milkha Bhaag of celebrated Indian athlete Milkha Singh. The young Milkha and his older married sister had managed to cross over into India from Pakistan during the bloody partition of India in 1947. They were in a refugee camp and his sister is shown in a makeshift tent cooking food when her husband arrives. There is no emotional reunion, he ignores Milkha and heads straight for the tent, enters, sees his wife and closes the entrance. This is how men were from the cave dwelling times. All the male testosterone and adrenaline rush from hunting and fishing and bringing home food and wood is further bolstered by the exhilaration of returning home alive. They had no time to understand women and their needs. Women were simply meant to satisfy them in whatever ways that made them happy and put them to sleep after a long day outside. This patriarchy is clearly visible in the epic Ramayan followed in India. Ram, the protagonist travels all the way from the north to southern tip of India and crosses over to Lanka in search of his wife who was kidnapped by the demon king of Lanka. After slaying the demon king and rescuing her, patriarchy overpowers his love for her and she is asked to walk through fire to prove her “purity” for him.
We have evolved in all aspects of life but we are still holding on to some remnants from our past, notably religion and patriarchy because their effectiveness in controlling us hasn’t waned. A lot hasn’t really changed from our ancient cave dwelling past, hunting first got replaced by agriculture, livestock and barter system and now there is the additional factor called money. We have created a new world that stands on the foundation of money and with money we can buy all the utilities and services we have created to meet our needs. There is a simple tradeoff though, there is a barter system between time and money now. We get more money in return for giving up more of our time. The ancient patriarchal mindset has simply shifted to earning more money, buying utilities and services with money and expecting esteem and stature in return.
Our patriarchal mindset is blinding us to the simple fact that what we build physically is a house and the house becomes our home only with love, togetherness, sense of belonging and emotional contentment. Ancient Indian texts have a very sensible classification of human lives. Till 23 years it is time for education, attaining knowledge and becoming wise of the world. Then from 24-48 it is family time. From 48-72 it is time to step out of the family and serve the community and after 72 renounce all earthly needs and attachments to make our death and journey to the afterlife easier. The hidden secret here is the population control aspect. By the time we become 48 our children have to be old enough to live on their own only then we can step into community service. So what we have is 24 years to raise our children with the right balance of physical and emotional health and contentment. Patriarchy and patriarchal mindset ignores these simple things which is why without emotional understanding and bonding we have lost the connection between our souls and are increasingly becoming individual isolated beings searching in the virtual world for what we have lost in the physical world.
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.
Ranjeet Menon's Blog 