Milk of Value : Entrepreneurial Nectar

More than 20 years ago, I found fancy with a line of curiosity. It was this. What do entrepreneurs do to make their firms ‘professional’? If we had answers to this question, we would know what new entrepreneurs could do to scale businesses, grow revenues and provide employment to India’s teeming millions.

I was amply warned. “You’re going after a tough problem”, said my research guide. College friends and scholars said “entrepreneurs don’t give that time for us researchers in real life”. Suffice it to say, I persisted. I came close to the phenomenon of my original question. I was fortunate to present the linkage between Entrepreneurial Orientation and Learning styles at the Entrepreneurship Development Institute of India. Prof. Dwijendra Tripathi’s words for me were very encouraging. He announced at the panel, that my research was at once ‘exploratory’ and ‘intuitive’ in design. But that is another story.

Let me first say I am glad I at least tried with the resources I had to meet with Dr. Verghese Kurien, whose memory today is commemorated as National Milk Day in India. On one of my trips to Village Bhat, I took a detour to Anand, where my mother’s cousin and her husband had served for years in social service and community health. Their local knowledge helped me at least see the utilities of the place and the rural economic engine. Folklore has it there, that Dr. Kurien impressed a Swedish delegation enough that he too was seized by the opportunity in reciprocation. That his cousin Ravi Mathai was IIM’s first founder came a distant second in reasons for the Amul Story. For some reason, the cause was so overpowering, that some of Dr. Kurien’s approaches were domineering enough to keep away middlemen and their support systems. In hindsight, the ‘situation’ he experienced may have had clues to his style, and the survival of the institution beyond his lifetime!

I saw some entrepreneurs from up close. One was Clyde Cooper, the dashing and energetic Managing Director of Blue Dart Express. He probably slept less than most professionals, and when at work, had the attention of an eagle. To pass Blue Dart’s Personnel Policy Manual through him was an experience in itself. When I saw the draft return to me via my supervisor, the affable Vasudevan Srinivasan; I was in for a ride of my lifetime. With bold red upward revisions of per diem allowances for drivers of inter-city surface transport trucks, I realized; Clyde paid more than an opportunity cost to operationalize his ‘fleet’. He knew operating realities from up close. In another instance, the grand big-hearted Homi Mistry took me to witness the entrepreneur’s dealing with ethics. He asked me to accompany him to a consignee’s address. He took a letter from Clyde explaining how a shipment was wrongly passed through the operations hub, due to poor vigilance, and a compensation amount was given to the consignee. Clyde was not a mere perfectionist. He set standards, despite infrastructure constraints through example and untiring consistency.

I visited Narendra Kumar Dhand, the creator of this unique firm called Parishuddha Sadhan Yantra in Ghaziabad. An engineer from California, but at heart the patriotic Indian, he set a shining contrast for manufacturing firms. His firm had no unions. They created India’s finest CNC machines for clients such as Mico-Bosch, and other automobile giants. Sensing my zeal, he gave me 90 minutes and more in interview. The lasting impression I have of him is his generosity of character. To endear an industrial worker in a restive manufacturing cluster required extraordinary compassion and focus. Extended further, the practices on the floor spoke for the mind-set of their products. Quality circles for continuous improvement, meant that the intrinsic worth of employees, irrespective of their educational backgrounds was core to the sustenance of the organization!

Another entrepreneur I only had a peep of was the indomitable spirit - Rohinton Aga. Suave, commanding in respect and empowering in accountability, his writing spoke more for me than any direct experience. But his wife Anu Aga witnessed a summer project I did during my post-graduation at Thermax. In those little interactions I had then, I realized that running a scaled up enterprise, was not just about ethics, professionalism and commitment, but also about integrating several roles in a life time- spouse, son-in-law, leader, industry spokesperson and influencer of business policy.

Today, we live in an era of serial start-up stories, none as epic as the ones I have quoted for their tenure, but gargantuan in appetite and perhaps unrealistic in valuation. I pause to reflect the innocent questions I had about what entrepreneurs do to make their firms successful. Two decades removed, there’s much in the original question to sustain interest, but the context has shifted on several counts. So apart from whole systems that have institutional perimeters or boundaries, there’s also the question of environmental impact and sustainability of livelihoods per se . I offer four questions as spin-off in an entrepreneur’s context.

1. Is the proposition local or global in vision?
2. Is the cause powerful enough and potent to endear commitment of employees?
3. Is the business proposition reasoned enough to summon risks of economic and psychological nature?
4. Is the model of the human being at work and the human being as customer congruent in the entrepreneur’s own estimation?

What has been your experience in these respects? If not a Milk Day, would it be Energy Day or Bio-Diversity day you will be remembered for?

Inspite of, and not because of Competence

At Changhi airport earlier this year, I arrived early to travel into India. I browsed through stores and chanced a premium luxury watch section. My wife Ann Joseph knows a great deal about wrist-wear, and a natural familiar curiosity took me there. When interacting with the salesman from Singapore, he was honest enough to admit that he had not heard of LG and Samsung as Google Watch contenders. For a man who sells Bulgari and Rado, I wondered if he ever struck ‘edge’ conversations even with willing clients. But to my surprise, and to Titan’s credit; he acknowledged one brand from India!

Google Wear has now admirably entered the User Interface (UI) by glance design! That puts Titan in the age of the dinosaur. I had earlier tweeted at the length of a possibility, that perhaps Cyrus Mistry could announce a Nano version for Titan, by marshalling TCS and Titan to come up with an earth shattering paradigm given its intellectual assets and manifest brand value.

Alas, even Wipro despite its closer to skin successes in ASEAN, could not orchestrate its human capital to build on its once renowned capabilities in telecom engineering. People in the industry claim that it could have easily changed the game in India with device to operator knowledge embedded in its people. Leadership of risk and innovation are not the routine affair in India, even in growth phases.

Hence, firms mature too early and die with its product or services portfolios.  The long-serving Ambassador car is one such. Perhaps it is the paradox, India truly needs to balance better. In its abundance, human resources are treated as commodity in a capitalist frame. Retail formats in sunrise mode make no real investment in low-cost, client-facing personnel to relate to its clients. Governments and political ideology in India treat human assets as dole-potential of entrapment, no matter how differentiated the reach and custodianship of the electorate.

Perhaps, a case can be made that Indian firms succeed in spite of their competencies, and not because of them!

What will it take for authentic leadership to lay claim on India’s latent potential?

What's an Entrepreneurial Orientation? Nuggets from Research and Experience

Since the GFC (Global Financial Crisis) of 2008, around the world, optimism in business has not swayed to sparks of excitement or any exuberance of self-deception.  The danger in this situation is the default neglect of patterns that may merit risk-taking. The joke as it were is on us again. We now defend passive behaviors in the guise of safety. There are a wide variety of start-ups that merit our attention. I have had the fortune to mingle with a variety of small and medium sized enterprise who have in them the distant drum frequencies of a distinctly vibrant future, on the edge of sustainable enterprise design considerations and employees wiser from the delight of authentic service.

I am naming just a few to buttress readers' sense of reality. Consider Rajeev Pathak, for example, ex-Wipro. He rushes from village road to city squares between schools of a myriad kind. Consider Vipul Redey, my junior from school  – same space, different approach, after kicking his job at CISCO. Or consider Vinay Joshi in Pune, who is pure play computing and analytics. All in all, am reminded of days, when I wished to formally research the transition phase when entrepreneurs in the quest for growth managed the ‘professionalization’ of their ventures.   While that became a difficult dream then, I am now fortunate to observe the process from up close. Here are some glimpses from the journey for leaders, entrepreneurs, and professionals who may wish to reflect on the dynamics of that transition.

1.       Paradoxes Galore : Entrepreneurial journeys are full of surprising paradoxes. Laymen may find these difficult expectations of themselves. Let us look at some of them.

a.       Weak-Tie Strong-Network : Entrepreneurs network relentlessly. In-person interactions with people who have complementary capabilities and interests are a general interaction pattern  for entrepreneurs. The paradox is that they ‘use’ relationships for an ‘end’ in mind, so their focus is not on the depth of the relationship, but of the ‘value’ in the interaction. Whether they embellish the relationship with affection, authenticity or warmth is secondary to what they wish to accomplish in the near to immediate term. You may find it surprising how they land up to a second interaction long after the first as if there were no break in time!

b.      Autonomy : Interdependence Polarity : Sociologically speaking, entrepreneurs, especially first-generation ones are social misfits, who seek to stamp out of expectations of conformance through a journey of individuation. They take a psychological risk of alienation, and the more successful ones, come to depend on the society they rebel in only to seek the support of those they first distanced themselves before.  

c.       Self-Help : Formalization Paradox  : Entrepreneurs are known to tie-up informally to enable each other. However, as expansion becomes inevitable, the remnants of bureaucracy or formalization could undermine self-help in entrepreneurial networks too. Hence CEO forum retreats, and even recent attempts in India to formalize expansionist modes of American style business networks over breakfast or lunches hinge on norms and rules of membership.

2.       Entrepreneurial Orientation : I first came across this term in the 1990s when Lumpkin and Dess made it to the Strategic Management Journal with their pentagon like constructs. They have a process view rather than a content view to the concept of entrepreneurship, and as such if any among the five below are diminished, entrepreneurial orientation would suffer. I now offer a distillation of the same given hairs lost on my head in coming to terms with the phenomena that holds these terms up.

a.       Competitive Aggressiveness : This is the entrepreneur’s parallel to the day job employee’s need for achievement or the drive to acquire. It is about venturing all parts of the chain in entirety  ahead of competition – opportunity, organisation set-up and the commercial exchange between customer and the firm.

b.      Pro-activeness : This is a judgement formed in anticipatory readiness distinct from mere initiative taking in the everyday life of an organisation man. If it were Kasturbhai Lalbhai who revolutionised textile manufacturing in Gujarat, today, perhaps Chiddanand’s characters in his book The Horse that flew stand out in context.

c.       Autonomy : An entrepreneur’s autonomy is deep grit of will rising far above mere freedom to pursue an approach to implementing formal processes at the work-place.

d.      Innovation : Essentially of Schumpeterian origin, any disruptive introduction into the value stream of the marketplace was considered innovation. Today, we know that intangible process innovations deflect economic value far in excess of algorithmic proportion than discrete manufacturing or high-sea trading of the past.

e.      Risk-Taking : As alluded to before, entrepreneurial risk is about going against the grain of societal trends and is marked by the willingness to be ostracised for such deviance. Entrepreneurs run twin risks of financial and psychological kind. Intrapreneurs count on being shielded of financial risks. Entrepreneurs also develop the fine art of distinguishing between impulsive hyper-activity and measured stretch of unprecedented nature.  This is also distinct from much touted risk-taking that is spoken of in professional circles as mark of exemplary business acumen.

3.       Glimpse of a Human Dynamic : There is a distinct relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and learning styles of professionals. In my own research it was known to us that engineers in middle-management cadres saw their firms as entrepreneurially oriented or not depending on their learning styles. 

 To put it crisply, the phenomenon we observed was this : If managers adapted in formal organisations such that they gave in to context, by examining inter-personally rich learning, they saw their firms as more organic and flexibly postured to interpret signals from their business environment. As against this, those who retained the concept intensive, rule, norm and logic laden learning styles laced in symbols of organisational policy, procedure and formality, saw their firms as rigid, conservatively postured and thus of low entrepreneurial orientation.

Well that in itself is quite a lot for a blog, I think. Am sure, you may like to respond if you need to dwell deeper.  Would you not be curious to know, for example, what with the advent of mature angel investors, what kind of moral imagination and deeply held beliefs are waiting to fruition in the embryonic ecosystem of Indian entrepreneurship today? Let me give you a clue – there’s hardly any formal academics I know of on the psycho-dynamics of such processes in India. Economists still dominate the discourse in linear extension of a vocabulary they gave us on ‘market’ and ‘value’.

Am looking forward to conducting research on some related themes of ambidexterity, innovation climate and leadership in Indian firms this year. Would you know of institutions or individuals willing to fund this effort? Do write in.

Between Neutral Anxiety and Positive Anxiety? How do you Innovate for Awesomeness?

When it comes to Innovation, would you be cautiously optimistic for fear of slipping into academic fundamentalism? Did you not pay homage to the fundamentals during your education years?

I was on this cusp of reflecting the Monday 8 July, 2013 meeting of the CII Innovation forum. That is when a lucid, evocative and utilitarian perspective came in from Intuit’s Vijay Anand. Embedding emotional appeal within Lean process improvements has largely eluded the Indian IT services businesses, despite the rich opportunity potential to fill that experience economy market. Is it because Intuit is a product company that it has been relentlessly innovative for almost 30 years?

Well, this is not an advertorial for Intuit, but a stimulus from which I hold out a premise that may appear as symptoms of competitive myopia in service businesses. The Tofflerian Third Wave was to be about service economy proliferation or penetration with knowledge flows and momentous delights. What could be the deterrents that prevent providing customers with positive emotional experiences throughout the customer relationship journey?

Intuit’s example provides simple check-points, like the following:

1.       Do you deliver customer benefit?

2.       Do customers use your product / service for the benefit you claim to provide?

3.       Do customers recommend your brand proactively?

Delightful service or awesome client experiences could materialise if

1.       The customer experiences benefits that he or she ‘cares’ about

2.       The customer accomplishes his organisational or personal need with ease or reduced effort. Your offering will work with other stuff your client lives with.

3.       The customer demonstrates positivity through prompt use, showing or telling others of your offering or actually buying more of your capacity.

4.       The customer is able to justify his or her delight in your offering in advocating your capability, not just his or her intelligent investment in you

Sounds simple, and even reads ordinarily possible. However, the capacity to identify the benefit your customer cares about begins with your own emotional bandwidth. What latent need of the customer would you have discovered during the prospecting phase? How do you nudge your client to value your offering without breaking rapport?

Tough one, admittedly for engineers from India to design to a vision that provide you the Love Marks of the Net Promoter Score (NPS). Visualising the Customer’s benefit is also about addressing the riskiest assumption of your capability to serve your client. Innovation is the process where your leap of faith on this assumption will be the one on which you are willing to stretch your known capability. That is where you get leads into what the client is also willing to risk on in terms of behavior to meet your value in discovery mode.

A critical fallacy in this paradigm could be equating customer ‘advocacy’ with a commodity that has a shelf-life in terms of inventory and scale.  

Advocacy that arises from authentic customer delight is a value realization episode. The value is however impermanent.

In itself, the sentiment of advocacy has potential of perennial nature. Suspending the accretion of value could however, cast shadow over perceptions of your service capability. We all know how emotionally draining a service recovery could become. We also know, how desirous feelings of delight are.

In closing, as adult learner, I tie my observations with a knot to an idiom the illustrious Shombit Sengutpta led his firm with - Emotionality trumps Functionality, perhaps even Rationality! So, how would we render Authenticity? If you do not experience authenticity in the bonds between your own team workers, what chance does your customer stand of experiencing awesome service? Let me know. 

An evening of Insights from Innovators

I recently attended talks by two leading innovators. They were Ramji Raghavan of the Agastya Foundation and Dr. Lalitesh K of Google. I share what I learnt from their own sharing.
1.       Innovation has a new arena. It is out of the closet of enterprises. It is in the needs of consumers, and not in those of enterprises, that innovation will thrive.
2.       Poverty in material terms can be framed in terms of information access problems. An information abyss co-exists with poverty. What was once known as information asymmetry is now reframed as the valley of despair. For those who do not pay their ‘knowledge tax’ create an avoidable void. Social inequity is a symptom of the information abyss.
3.       In computing, cognitive divides are subtler and perhaps more damaging than digital divides themselves.
a.       Emotional responses to text are diminishing with the rise of broadband access. With more information being read online, the thresholds for emotional arousal on visual media are contested with the sense of hearing. This is why video content with audio sounds richer in emotive content. 
b.      Information search is targeted at new results. Text based search is giving way to video search. Tactile and visual information may be demanded even more. So You Tube is the default search engine for new generations on the net.
4.       Crowd-sourcing, crowd-mediation and crowd dissemination make web 2.0 based platforms participatory and yet challenging because of unintended consequences that the medium holds.
5.       In our times, Facebook, Google, Amazon and the like, compute stochastic models of trust without much obtrusion using search affinity and interaction networks and operationalise 'trust' in their own way.
6.       Google made 'safe' calls on building Google Maps with Map Maker software in much like the prosumer society of the Tofflerian Third-Wave. While parts of Northern Europe, and most of US and Australia had Google Maps, the tipping points were in the rest of the world, where users were given the power to create maps online. Most people would want to do the right thing, most of the time. Hence, even in late starter locations like Pakistan800000 people affected by floods could be reached out to by the UN recently.
7.       Firms bets are large and can cause revolutions merely because they seek to boil the ocean than fill up a bucket with water. They do not also know what to expect in the sense that they allow emergence of phenomena through universality of access to information.
8.       Paradigms that are fiercely defended will find it difficult to move as fast as the radical shifts these firms engender on our finger tips. Mobile internet will allow resume editing on handheld devices with handwriting skills in the next 5 years itself. Broadband access will be tested by a demography of users who are emotionally blind on text, and text-repellent on video and images.  Yet, any such change has to originate in at least one person. That change will find support if the person stays the distance with the compelling idea that is put out there in easy language that masses will relate to.
9.     The boundaries of trust - along with its inherent drivers and manifest behaviors would be so fluid that our traditional frames of analysis will get redefined very, very often.
10.   For societal shifts to occur, the absorptive capacity of its people needs renewal. If at least two thinking skills are addressed the social system could tip over. These are a) Cause-effect thinking and b) Creative Thinking

CRITICAL THINKING LAYOUT

11.   The value of curiosity reaches its heights when continuous concentrated introspection unravels as passion.
12.   Observers give new meaning to phenomena that pass us by. Else it takes a crisis to get us to think differently. The shift in confidence from learned helplessness to learnt optimism is the challenge of developing economies.
13.   If people who do the work of teaching and facilitation are from within the system, change ensues faster and surer, both. Catalysing the internals may need transformational leadership or external facilitation, and sometimes-  maybe both!
14.   In rural India two significant milestones are worth noting.
a.       Google’s Rural Maps are up due to Kerala’s CNR Nair, a retired government servant who despite cancer made it a passion to map rural Kerala on Google Maps.
b.      Parents of children who learn science through mobile science labs like that of the Agastya Foundation, are keen on learning Astronomy and chemistry, as the visual treats these provide hold prime attention!
15.   Competition can be reframed if we elevate the dimension of its threat. E.g. Ask the question, have we solved a problem, that has not yet been solved? Competition is no longer the red ocean then!


Evidently there are more implications, I will muse on in times to come!

Musing on Risk as action

The accomplished Dr. Verghese Kurien passed away yesterday. Some say he orphaned the little girl who appears in Amul advertisements. Social innovation was a huge risk in Dr. Kurien's times. He influenced millions of farmers to cooperate in milk distribution so that animal husbandry became a well supported activity. On my first visit to Gujarat in the 1990s, I desired to meet him, but am glad that I at least got the opportunity to visit the city of Anand to know from up close what the impact has been.Was shown around by my mother's cousin a resident doctor in the area then. He was traveling when I visited in the context of a conference organised by EDI - the Entrepreneurship Development Institute. That was my first brush with entrepreneurship theory and a first-hand exploration too. That was my first paper presentation outside of my alma mater (TISS).

In the same week as of this legend passing away, Kochuouseph Chittilapally of V-Gurad and Veegaland or Wonder-La fame was being honoured by the National Institute of Personnel Management in Kochi on the occasion of its National Conference. 
Mr. Sreedharan of the Konkan railways and Delhi Metro fame was being consulted for his prowess in the same space of time. The contrasts between the 3 profiles, an illustration of risk and innovation ingredients in accomplishments. It is also fascinating that cousins Ravi J Mathai and Verghese Kurien traveled to Gujarat to make their mark on the nation. That some who take risk also innovate may also be true. 

Last week, we went on a social visit to my dad's cousin. Innovative he still is. But risk is not a feature he would take to the marketplace. He has designed and crafted his own furniture, laid marble on the floor himself, developed a functional coconut scraper with his own hands on the welding machine; but he won't sell his ideas nor take it to an entrepreneur. That robs the joy out of doing it he says.

His late elder brother on the other hand was a maintenance engineer in paper factories. He learnt economic aspects of the production process and in his retired life had husk of grain and related material to make for water proof paper, which in bundles, he exported to other countries, from his own backyard.

Perhaps, he cultivated a business orientation during his career, that inspired the output side of his endeavours. 
The younger brother lacked the desire to engage the people in the commercial world. Am not saying the elder one was more adept at risk, but am sure, the brothers defined meanings in opportunities differently.

A friend recently wrote thus : “It has been my experience when moving deeply out of my comfort zone and watching others that it depends what part of a life is being put at risk and how important that part is in those moments.  There is the magic of the pull of the  moment--the taste of the challenge--the internal terror-the adrenalin"...My few bits of learning on this for now as below.

1.     Risk can easily be confused with impulsivity.

2.     Risk is a personally invested experience in the unknowns.

3.     Anxiety can impel risk, it can also grip in ways that control others. 

4.     Intuition and risk being related can make for innovation at times. Reducing risk to a logical procedure of finite steps is mocking at its essence.

5.     Mindfulness may help the self to engage in acts considered risky. Rationality may have little explanation for such choices, as presence in authentic form could augur higher outcomes than one plans for. 

What actions will make for your PRESENCE in our world? Will it be 'risky' to act so?

Small and Medium Enterprise Paradoxes - Scale, Scope and Growth apart

Of late, I am beginning to at least experience a love with enquiry I nursed long ago, and had to forego. That was when I first studied linkages between Entrepreneurial Orientation and Learning styles. It is of some lament that in a world gone global, my understanding is largely from one nation - India. It is also my joy, that being here in India, I have seasoned professionals with whom I can bounce such reflections. I write this short piece as a token of my appreciation for those who’ve helped my understanding.

1.     Venture creation is often a leap of individual faith and investor confidence at times. Beyond the proof of concept and business model success, CEOs and their top teams have less influence over their organisations than they believe they do. An institutional effect in the ecology of the business sector is more at play. Small and medium industry may mistake their size for comfort in autonomy, when they may be skating on the thin ice of a disappearing glacier. Such is the role of the business environment as well.

2.     Scale trumps scope in the near-term for some firms. Scale is trumped when volume loses differentiation. Like the current state of the Indian IT services industry, where low cost begat scale, and now differentiated value eludes the customer. The CEO cannot determine such ecological balance of his or her own accord. The paradox of entrepreneurship is about traversing from social misfit to innovator to community champion. It is a paradox of identity shifts across stages in the institution’s life cycle.

3.     CEOs and their teams can orchestrate firm performance, provided they share a mind-set around what results they want from a shared vision. CEOs need to abandon their ‘leader’ image and mould with the wisdom in the group for which collaboration produces value that none in the group could produce alone. Leaders with individual power often dread giving up for the insecurity of processes for leadership in organisational systems. Such tipping points are moments of deep dialogue or shallow disconnects for the entrepreneur and his/her team.

4.     A Renter or Trader mind-set in governance afflicts early design of organisations in risk-averse firms. Structures and communication protocols that serve such designs will not be able to generate passion for intellectual property or pioneering innovation. A change in such mind-set is about leadership courage and vulnerability, both. The Renter can become a Statesman, provided he or she embraces the technocracy of pioneers in the team. The paradox is of staying on a accreting value chain without having to invest incremental time in acquiring the unnatural identity of pioneering innovation.

5.     Markets are not decided by hard figures of funnel size and feasibility studies as much as by buyer or sponsor intent and motivation in the zone most proximate to value creation. Qualifying for purchase intent is market intelligence as opposed to post-facto wisdom in lessons learnt in pitching for business.

Facilitating such moments are a challenge and joy. The challenge comes from lack of precedent in the relationship. The joy comes from the opportunity to raise questions that delightfully make for progress. The progress in small enterprise is not a function of ‘leader’ development alone. It is about fuelling the aspirations of a team in alignment with shared purpose for which the firm is created. Do small firms retain size specific autonomy? Do they rise to overcome issues of size with a maturing team that enables even more people to experience development of markets, customers and the ecosystem?
This is not a matter of policy paralysis in itself. It is the mitigation of risk in an environment where perceptions shift faster than providers can retain customer attention.

Scientific and Creative outputs - Where's the curiosity?

An excerpt from the article on Innovative Nations by Booz, featuring INSEAD's Soumitra Dutta (S&B Interview, April 2012) reads as below. He states both the delineation and the limitations to highlight his insights and the significance is lost on most of us. 


"We measure five kinds of inputs — institutions, human capital and research, infrastructure, market sophistication, and business sophistication — and two kinds of outputs: scientific and creative. We face many limitations in terms of data availability and methodologies, but we have taken great pains to make sure that we normalize variables in a way that is equitable to the conditions of both emerging and developed economies."

Human capital and research in India? I recall mentioning a few of these issues earlier too - SHRM India SME artefact. I enlisted 10 points of attention for Learning and Development in formal organisations then. My first point was to do with scientific temperament.


This sharing by Booz of Dutta's findings stirs up a feeling of concern. Even if it is met with care, the commitment is difficult to dilute. A courage is required in academia, industry, and in the home, to accord method of inquiry its due place. Leadership is therefore a rising to the occasion, and not just an allowance for rising with the tide. We also need to overcome the notions that confuse between values of analytical thinking and creative thinking. If we honor the attitude of curiosity, then neither form of inference - logical or intuitive will hold us back.