Utpal Writes          On Project Management, Leadership, Technology and Self-Help

You are considered an expert in your field and you have recently changed your employer for a good package.

To produce great output in your expertise area, you need to spend only a few hours a day – you don’t need to come at a fixed time and go at a fixed time but your output are just excellent.

The other persons in your organization with similar experience level and position spend the whole day (and sometime nights also) to produce almost the same (may be inferior) results. They come before the office time starts and normally go hours after the office time is over.

Now there are 2 types of organization cultures.

1. Type – A: Organizations who measure your work by results.
2. Type – B: Organizations who measure your work by the time you spend at the office.

Wonderful if your organization culture falls in Type-A, annoying otherwise.

Such annoyance may lead you to do the efforts of changing organization culture – trying to convert it to Type-A.

In your career, it would be a very costly mistake. Organization Cultures are like countries – they seldom change!

Better decision would be to find a culture where you will be valued by the results you produce.

In my decennium long experience journey, I have seen organizations which have a great vision – a vision to become a world class company which is super-positive. 100% win-win for all the entities involved, performance centric, employee and society friendly, ultimate customer delight centric… the best!

But with very little actions.

Little actions lead to fewer results and thus little experience to count on.  But they have great measurability of the results.

Measurability is the lens of their vision.

The other type of organizations is “Action” centric. They do not have any permanent vision to stick with. For them “crafting vision” is an overhead. They are in fascination of actions.

High actions lead to more results and more experience to count on.  But they lack the essential – measurability.

And, anything which cannot be measured cannot be repeated with 100% surity, no matter if it is success or failure.

Actions are in harmony only when they are measured, chaos otherwise.

Better if software services organizations have only a few simple and strong regulations for their people.

Regulations are substitutes for faith…faith in your people’s goodwill, faith in their competence and faith in their commitment. The more the organizations doubt their people, the more rules and regulations they impose.

Some organizations treat their software engineers like illiterate laborers of 1970 and impose pointless regulations which greatly influence them to be unproductive. For example:

• The software engineers should sit on their seat for the whole day and do work, work and work – what the heck is ‘thinking’.
• If they go out to for refreshment or a tea break more than once a day, it is not tolerated.
• If they are 30 minutes late from their regular day in-time, their half-day salary would be deducted – it won’t be considered that yesterday night the same engineer had spent 3 additional hours  to support an important client.
• Etc.

Such regulations do nothing better for the organization’s growth but make employees de-motivated and managers annoyed.

Ability to produce great results never comes from imposing a thousand strict regulations on your people. It comes from trimming out the complexities from your systems and replacing it with creative freedom and self-possession.

As an organization, do you have a mission…a long term goal that is based on specific values? Do you believe in your people? Or do you want to hide behind the list of regulations?

3 Idiots is one of the most enjoyable Indian movies of this decade. The director Rajkumar Hirani has shown us a bollywoodified yet marvelous view of the masterpiece – Five Point Someone from Chetan Bhagat.

Here are nine rock solid thoughts you may love to revisit from the movie’s perspective.

1. Knowledge is just a dead thing without its timely application. (Salt water is good conductor of electricity)
2. Do whatever gives you utmost enjoyment . Do what you can do effortlessly – if you don’t enjoy whatever you are doing right now; it’s the time to revisit your goals. (Farhan with a passion for photography drops engineering and opts in for assisting a world renowned wild life photographer)
3. You need to know what you are doing. Doing without knowing leads to disasters.(Chatur’s Chamatkar speech)
4. Common sense is so uncommon.  (Definition of ‘machine’ and ‘book’ in the classroom)
5. Thinking outside the box is not common but if applied properly it can lead to new innovations. (Baby’s delivery using vaccum cleaner)
6. Don’t run after success; chase the excellence in whatever you are doing… and success will follow.(Phunsuk Wangadu!)
7. Even if you win the rat race, you end up being a rat. (Virus’ encounter with Rancho)
8. Degrees earned just by rote memorization are not valuable in real life but actual learning is.(400 patents by Phunsuk Wangadu compared to Chatur’s position)
9. Keep your heart as your foolest friend. Tell him that ‘All izz well’ and things would start becoming well…in your perceived world at least!  (many instances throughout the movie)

The best thing about 3 Idiot is, it feels like a real team effort than just to be an Aamir Khan centric movie. If you take out any character (even the character of millimeter!) and the effect would be dimmed. Watching 3 Idiots (again and again) is a rattling experience to learn how to live life powerfully and add some “meaning” to it.