Thinking Big...Man and a mountain

This might sound contradictory to my earlier post but its not. It is just a continuation of the same theme. Just this other day, I met Dave who has been McGraw-Hill rep for Midwest for the past 10 years. He had gone for a vacation across the Dakotas, Minnesota, Montana, Idaho and Washington practically the entire belt from Mid America to Northwest Badlands.... I asked him what was his most important memory and he did not hesitate to say the Crazy Horse memorial... I had heard about this but my recollection was a bit rusty. Then he told me the story of how chief Raging Bull had tasked Korczak Ziolkowski a sculptor, to create a monument that will show the white man that even the red man has heroes. Ziolkowski was about 40 then decided to build the monument except he did not have governmental or any kind of institutional support. All he had was a mountain site to work on...He set to work...to carve a mountain on his own. People mocked him initially but he refused to give up. He dedicated his entire life... 36 years to single handedly carving the largest sculpture ever made by man. He asked neither money nor volunteers. He started with a chisel and continued with whatever people donated to him. Today the monument he started is still evolving and Korczak's children continue work on this monument...It is expected to be completed by the middle of the twenty-first century. It is a remarkable story of dream in action. Dave showed me a piece of rock he and his wife had taken as a souvenir. I wondered what makes some people dream about things they never can achieve in their lifetime? Most wouldn’t even climb the 700 steps to reach the rock face, but not Korczak he would walk back to and fro to start his vintage generator when it died on him which was almost 3-4 times a day...He never gave up on his vision even when it seemed to take forever.... A similar story I read was about Webster. He thought it might take him 2 years at the most to compile a book with every single word in English. Even when the work stretched on for decades, he never gave up always driven by a sense of optimism. Eventually Webster's dictionary was completed after a span of almost two generations...
What makes some people dream of things so big? It is not the destination...it is the journey.

Thinking small about Big things

I was gathering data on social entrepreneurs in India, when it stuck me how these people started. All of the entrepreneurs I am studying, from Muhammad Yunus (founder of Grameen Bank) to Ilaben Mehta (founder of SEWA); all of them started small. In fact this willingness to start small has been the hallmark of most entrepreneurs who have turned this to a strength. Take the case of Michael Dell (Founder and CEO of Dell Computers); he started by selling computers from his dorm room. His problem was he did not have infrastructure, he turned this weakness to his strength by building an entire company based on assembly and logistics of pre fabricated computer components. In this age of downward bottomlines, Dell with no infrastructure is the major gainer. How does this affect us? It does here's why...
Many of us don’t undertake small tasks, thinking this is too menial or by using the oft repeated phrase kya fayda... We don’t realize all of us have to start small but think big. It is easier said than done so what do we do... We think big and don't take the small steps necessary to realize our big goals. It's the same bug facing business school education that afflicts us all...we teach students as if they are CEOs of Fortune 500 firms, and students have to unlearn and relearn from the ground up during their first jobs .... we all want to do things top down (sample this: If I was the PM, I would do this and that... these politicians are fools..., we should have fought for freedom instead of nonviolence crap... etc etc...). Just take another look at any great person's life and you will realize they all started small, took small steps and eventually reached some stage which was again leap for most of us. I remember once my mother told me..."trifles make perfection but perfection is no trifle....

Reservations...

It’s funny that when people talked about reservations before.... they meant the trains.... but now it seems we have truly entered the 21st century as the debate on reservations has been hijacked by statistics. I question the word debate here coz debate means something that is inherently inclusive of differing viewpoints. The only debate I have seen on this issue has been in the elitist corporate media and the endless internet forums which serve as pastimes and ego-boosters for the sons of the other soil. I don’t mean to criticize people of my ilk but let us have some perspective in our rants. Here is my two cents...

1. About 200 million people form the Indian middle class and this middle class has been the primary beneficiary of reforms in the past decade. But obviously you cannot expect the trickle down effects of these reforms to reach the 900 million other people in a vast, stratified and diverse country like India. These people form the basis of the nation, they are the backbone of this country and even if some of them (just a few...) benefit from a higher quota at the expense of the some individuals from the middle class, it is an example of egalitarian justice and quite appropriate in a democratic (rule of majority) republic (rule of people).
2. Now of course there is the merit argument made by these very people who choose to send their sons and daughters to the very best institutions that money can buy. Of course this argument is fallacious at the very least.... methinks we have some thing like a selection bias in our education... If the IITs and IIMs select only the best how do we know what their contribution in training these supposedly best of the best engineers and managers; since these students would have excelled anyways in any institution. It is only when we have a large diversity in our pool that we will know how good these institutes are in reality. Even the so called do-no wrong universities like Harvard, Yale and Princeton have affirmative action and we do not seem to think low of their minority students nor has the aura of these universities diminished in the minds of our educated elites.
3. Methinks this has been the result of the self serving attitude of these middle classes, the result of ignoring the poverty on the roads, of creating magnificent sea-facing abodes in the desert of the slums not unlike the proletarians of Rome. How many educational institutes have been started by our elites? How many institutes have been started in the poorer sections? A little altruism is called for so that the elected government doesn’t have to step in to restore balance.

To those protesting, I would just repeat what Gandhi once said, "Be the change you want to see in the world". If you feel strongly about this issue write to your MLA and/or MP, collect signatures of a majority of your citizens, or better still create your own college that works on your ideals... If the government doesn’t accredit you, make your own (ISB doesn’t have govt. accreditation for some programs and they don’t care....). Just bring a little more perspective and think about 1 Billion for a change....

Long time...no see

When you dont talk with someone for a long time....you feel a trepidition intaking that first step..I feel the same way...just didnt get time to write something...but if you have ever talked with a friend after a long time.... after the initial awkward silences... an old familiarity seems to envelope you...
You know the other day I was thinking...We see so many things, read so much news infact our generation is just overloaded with information. Do we have the time to make sense of it?
Do we think about our actions and how they influence our lives, the lives of others and the whole world? It all sounds philosophical but it seems to be more relevant than any of our actions. It's a wonder that with so much information we dont teach philosophy, we leave it to each individual to figure it out for themselves....
It's a shame not many make the effort to understand meaning... and then Life moves forward but we make sense backwards.

A ray of hope?

When were you never alone?
Even when you had a crowd....
you were but one of a mould...
You thought you knew the rules
You thought you were very cool...
But in there, you always knew...
a platonic truth if there ever was one

A life where you never had control...
Always a passenger as you strolled
A lie that was comfortingly old...
of constraints, expectations and hopes, none were of your choosing...
so all you could do was hope...often against hope

A restive spirit you tried to control
A calmness that hid a turmoil...
A deep rooted angst searching a voice..
An ambition murdered bereft of choice...a mind cajoled.
All that was left was a ray of hope...

In your heart you always knew....
Yet you decided on waiting....
An endless wait that stretches for eternity...
Waiting for that train that reaches infinity...

Here it comes, grinding albeit slowly...
A realization dawns that has a familiar sound..
Again a passenger... again a crowd....

Boys will be boys???

A very interesting conversation I had yesterday….. fighting over something trivial as a cat that we would like….never knew mundane things like that could unravel long held notions…its true when they say small doors often open into large rooms. As fate would have it became not a question of cats but a larger one of perspectives, about guys and gals…. stereotypes and expectations…. wants and desires… Then I realized that in this male dominated society of ours, we have been so conditioned to think in our own way that we are simply blinded in our realization of others desires (read girls). Men do what they think is best for them despite the hypocritical sounding everyone is equal…..blah… blah… we all know the truth men rule this world and make its rules…. We expect our mothers, sisters, girlfriends … to follow and support our every decision…. But what of their hopes, their desires and their wants…. oops... never thought of that…or the more politically correct….. I think this is best for you....... it’s so strange this perspective suddenly puts the spotlight on us men….. and frankly reveals us to be quite hypocritical…Our entire history, and indeed our lives can be seen in perspective..... What of the mother who nurtured her son despite the death of her other two sons and no family support?….Would she be given less credit than the son for his achievements…What of the wife who supported the family sacrificing her budding law career to raise children…Is she any less than her husband who became the President of United States…. I remember the president is said to have remarked that no one will write a book about his mother although volumes will be written about his speeches….It is ironical that we have very pithy sayings to cover these blemishes almost like the dab of makeup to cover the warts…Behind every successful man there is a women…Its time we give women their due….

Persistence….

The last few days I have been thinking …. 2005 is over and 2006 has started…I think I should feel happy and elated but somehow I don’t… I feel one year has been lost…. Lost to the anonymity of time… Television and news papers faithfully followed the tradition of reporting the newsmakers, the best and worst, the headlines the photos that defined the year gone by…. Sometimes I think they miss the hidden undercurrents in the zeal to cover the top stories…Something similar is happenning in the business world. In our zeal to look at the Gates’s, Walton’s and the Mittal’s we miss the Fred Smith’s who might linger anonymously amongst us…. (For the uninitiated…While an undergraduate student at Yale, Mr. Smith wrote a paper on the basic premise of FedEx and the hub-based distribution model for airfreight. What grade do you suppose a paper containing one of the best value creation ideas of the last quarter century would get from one of the finest academic institutions in the U.S?..... How about a "C."…… That's right, FedEx was only a "C" idea.). … the really inspiring part of this story is that Mr. Smith took his "C" idea and went on to build a successful company anyway.

What if a Fred Smith lingers in all of us but dies an unacknowledged death due to apathy….the lesson for me is to never look at a snapshot and say someone is a failure and someone is a star …. the latent churning and the path is more important….
It should be encouraged within us and unleashed to realize our true entrepreneurial potential....Persistence and insistence my friend…