Cellphone corollaries - Evolution through formless circumstances in India

On an early morning sky, an elderly adult of 65 was pacing his available place on a cool morning near his ancestral home. He was holidaying among known relatives, taking a break from the Big Apple where his permanent residence is. Looking toward the two steady lights of the sky between clouds of rain and mist, he exclaimed that the two stars had been his companion of the mornings he was on tour. When I mentioned the redness of a planet that looked silvery through the atmosphere, he was all ears. Recognising that they were the planets Venus and Mars or Jupiter, he seemed dwarfed in time and space to acknowledge the need for a telescopic confirmation. In about the early 1980s, when he migrated, it was not an easy decision to meet with an alien culture, where his daughter now teaches math for a living, and his son is on the brink of a doctoral publication in neuroscience. Saged through experiences, he had the discernment to appreciate that it was a tad late to buy his first smartphone, as he expanded his source of information and was more knowledgeable on matters since his first purchase.

It was in 1989 or so, that I had read in a French publication – (le nouvel observatuer or the L’Express Internationale – I do not remember which) of a caption that featured India’s crossroads in time. It was a colour picture of a bovine on an Indian road. “une vache sacrée a la rue” tried to capture India’s contradictions at a time, when the liberalisation of the automobile sector was on the anvil. Today, two and a half decades later, the smartphone indeed has ruled and the automobile has displaced the bullock cart in most places. Why go far? The home care-taker of the resort I was at in Allepey, whose business is younger than the liberalisation of the Indian economy, says that none row their boats with effort now along the Manimala or the Pamba rivers, leave alone the Vembanad lake. All prefer the Japanese motor-powered boat. His attendant adds quickly, none know hunger here anymore.

This week, the Newsweek’s issue carries the burden of the Indian zeitgeist in similar language as the French press. “The French” our attendant proffered, “prefer blander food preparations, even if it is meat; than the British and the American tourists”. The experience of being on the ground was shining forth in just a decade and a half of such flourishing house-boat and holiday home business in Kerala. The holiday-home owner was more forthright in his assessment though. He wondered why the fuss when even the lower castes with whom local politicians were playing coy; would return to sanity after their tempting differentiation in identity. He was certain that they would be side-lined by the higher castes in communal politics. At the crossroads at which India is today, caste is still a potent killer within India, than cow slaughter is. Social psychology still knows no better wisdom of in-group and out-group phenomena, in that the French observed of India in 1989, as clearly and as early as did the Newsweek did of India’s social contradictions in 2015.

Evolutionary biology, history and even philosophy are enriched in interdisciplinary contributions than are religion and politics of everyday living in the age of the hand-held mobile smartphone. Learning at a societal scale is not only mediated through technology and access to information, it is also restricted by inept social learning; like, falling on naked eyes to ‘know’ the planet from the star; when more contemporary lens are available. Bias and overlearning part, activity – and almost any variety - is considered a strategy for life. So popularity is weighed against social media rankings, and political achievements through material manifestations – even at the cost of the earth and the air on its surface. Activity inhibition is considered as sloth, and not as a possibility for inner reflection and contemplative meaningfulness. So hours are lost as minutes are kept; and the fear of not doing anything has the whirr of the modern boat scare away fish and tear away livelihoods impacted by nature’s plunderers. Seldom has the radical nature of groups been so incendiary in grabbing our attention. 

In populous India, the smartphone presents both opportunity and challenge. Rabble-rousers speeden the reach of their dogma faster than the citizens’ capacity to develop their innate intelligence and express themselves in independent critique based on emerging truths that science methodically uncovers for us. Else, may the farce be with you, and the mercy of a timeless zone rescue us from ourselves. Until then, am hoping to embrace the effervescence of formless circumstances!

Very happy to see this involved sharing from an immersive research experience on change practitioners

Dr. Earon Kavanagh - Keynote Presentation on Change https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSacdE_htpg

As we think, so do we become?

In the last few weeks I have seen many busy hours of toil. They were followed by many hours of restful activity – as in soulful conversations with people from ages 84, old school and college mates  to teen-age children. Witnessed meditative sculptors, handicraft hands, painters, and interacted with writers 

of Indian diaspora of different genres. The tales they hold in their expressions have lessons for me in the way frenzied corporate denizens get about their days at work. Let me share a few reflections.

Anu Kumar, Author

1.       Employees get unrelated development, and employers may not know it. This is an amazing occurrence, when the employee gets to participate in learning events and feels satiated by what is on offer. The employer feels that the arrangement was apt and both go about their businesses without critically reflecting on how they co-designed their experiences. Employers fail to recognise that employees do not challenge their own conditions enough to challenge the relevance of the employer’s offerings in learning and development. At one such organisation, the conundrum was this – the employer felt they did better than they ever did in caring for employee development, whereas the employees felt that the employer’s efforts lacked alignment with business focus areas!

Diaspora in LA

2.       Employers rarely reflect within of what they may be missing in their situation. A consultant’s vantage point is to hear from a myriad voices. While one employee voice was to do with unchecked deceit and overt manipulation of innocent employees, another was to do with short-sightedness of top management in the nature of decisions they made regarding business growth. The folly of assuming omnipotence in turning employee and organisational capability 'on' or 'off'. Authenticity at the workplace is most signaled by those who have control over resources. Yet the vulnerability to face unknowns seems a mirage. In the bargain, unknowns like global warming, mass inequities in wealth sharing and unmindful citizenship rear their ugly forms.

3.       The need to defend status quo needs a healthy challenge from those who want to challenge the status quo. The paradox of defending the indefensible lurks round the corner. The Abilene paradox is a great reminder of human perceptual processes in a group setting. Teams end up committing to outcomes that they do not want. At one organisation, the HR fraternity recognised the signs of their times, but furiously wished to defend what their management wanted to listen to. When the top management listened to consultants they seemed more taken by what they could contribute to larger society than in marshalling the potential of their own employees. Now, why would the consultant be more committed to their clients’ employees than their own management?

Mandakini Mathur of the Devrai Farm, Panchgani 

4.       Whole system is not in the room. The bane of high power-distance cultures is the untended potential of the minions. I have been often met the optimism of an entrepreneur, on whose convictions a possibility in engagement is born. Midwife like facilitation begins almost thereafter, because the entrepreneur’s real difficulty is in getting his team to express themselves more fully to the moments that they see their firm in. Most such organisations have a painful realization that organisational capabilities are group or team orchestrations than about messianic release from constraints.

5.       Rationality makes for superficial defense, reality descends in tears of wisdom. Finally a word about the individual in our times. Schools of influence like Cialdini’s and Hogan’s all remind us that emotionality trumps rationality. Yet, in armors that are put forth as façade, individuals within and outside corporations hold out rationalisations that do not connect with people they try to relate to. In defense of their ‘intellect’ they overstretch generalisations to the extent of mis-reading their situations. When I get proximate enough in calibrating their stances, they recognise their folly, but alas, it may take a lifetime to bring their being to their moments. In avoiding tears, we deny a part of our under-nourished selves. People chase mirages of achievement with such predictability that it may put the solar system’s regularity to shame.

In the noble traditions of Organisation Development (OD), the model of the human being is not just a philosophical alignment with humanism, truth and justice. It is a rapport of congruence and a statement of capability. Like what the Naked Liberal George Menezes shared with me about the origins of Integrity : it is from the word ‘integer’ – the whole. Do we accept the whole person in ourselves? For what greater purpose would people want to avoid becoming who they can fully become? 

CEOs state a problem too many

Often coachees meet their coach with reference to a ‘problem’ they have. When coachees are CEOs, the ‘problems’ tend to have a trend alright, only to be differentiated by their experiences, personalities and visions of who they think they are. The coach on the other hand looks for the invitation from the coachee, not in terms of the beliefs and values; but in terms of their clients’ inner discovery of themselves. Now, this invitation commences with a trigger akin to friendship. 

The seasoned coach however will qualify such an invitation, for her process is not about ‘friendship’ but about respect for her capability to engage in deep developmental experiences.

In coaching, the bottomline is not personal, but about the levels of thinking that the relationship between coach and coachee can unfold in positive ways. Coaching is about systems, the personal, the group and the organisation, where the transforming person links it all in integrative ways.

In my recent months, CEOs I’ve engaged with have come in various hues.  The coachee immaturely seals opportunities by misconceiving choices. The common challenge they represent for themselves is the distillation of self in the present from the self of past successes. They find it difficult to clarify the emergence they will need to embrace from the set learning patterns they are comfortable with. It is a slow unlearning for leaders who do not go within themselves.


What can stop them from doing so? Here are some reasons I can think of even as I am aware that some of these could grip the most unsuspecting amongst us, including yours' truly. 

1.       Purpose Clarity : A lack of enthusiasm in inspiring themselves and others to the future with endearing focus

2.       Hesitant Initiative : A fear of staying the distance to implement aspects of stated focus

3.       Social Savvy : Not dealing with different people with forthright diplomacy 

4.       Touchiness : Paradoxically, the CEO-self embattles images of personal glory with fragility.


Each of the above could command levels of specific detail. Expecting me to be more candid here will  border on casualness. Here, suffice it to say that CEOs demand compliance more often than they unleash contribution. Habitual acts lock the emotional brain so tight as to produce unproductive routines. The coach uses powerful questions that inspire novel thinking patterns. New productive habits then get anchored in the personal system of the coachee.

Leadership is a choice, as is personal development. So is survival. If growth is not an option, the choices are in terms of how to proceed.

Imagine framing lack of operational efficiency in terms of non-compliant team-members for instance.   That could be a different problem than the one the CEO is stuck with.

Poetry in the life of Social Media - Maiden Attempt

I thought I should slowly distinguish personal writing from professional scripts in blogosphere. I was particularly impressed when I read Deepa Bhalerao's poetry that she proficiently pens on Facebook. While that is not flattery, I am putting up a piece I wrote over the weekend to give a different complexion to my blogposts. Will also like to write blogs of professional nature on our upcoming company website - more when that comes up..

In the meanwhile let me know how this reads...

The narcissist pervades the media

In search of an adoration sublime

The realist scrambles in wanton hysteria

Both creatures numbed in their climes

This world has its chasers of fantastic dreams

Market-worship, shaman-rituals all yearning for eternity

Then the unexpected surrender in delirious screams

Like refugees - to love they turn, awash in hope of serenity

The mist of cold and the gasps of dust twitch the skin in between

Seasons of moods, and tears and laughter intervene

Remote from the awakening unseen

The insight that emerges in awareness within

Prayers sung for a patch of wieldy sanity

Are drowned out by acts of untamed futility

The poet’s eye scans for the pen of verity

That will ink upon the pad of reality

Frivolous nerves renting its moments

Snatching away at shards of Eternity

Meaning it seems will make its advent

And simply emerge in resilient profundity

  

FMEA and perception of dysfunctional routines

The Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) has been around in Preventive Maintenance and Total Predictive Maintenance for decades. It gives a Factory Manager the assurance of keeping machines used for production up as much as capacity so promises. The accent is on a kind of alertness that is habitually in anticipation of potential errors so that losses in production are minimized ahead of their likely occurrence.  While that is a model approach, it is a feature of ‘systems’ thinking, that if comprehensively appreciated, could alter the design of systems intended for service or production.

In political science, democratic systems are guarded by the procedural manual of a ‘Constitution’. Democracy has the parallel of a system of ‘checks and balances' - the FMEA kind of equivalent. The Executive, Judiciary and Legislature being the original three Estates, has been checked very strongly in the recent past by the Fourth Estate namely the media – print and electronic. The rise of this estate has been drastic with the spread of the Internet. The ‘rule of law’ is a presumptive assumption that human beings have learnt from evolution to believe in principles of justice, equality and freedom.  

Rumblings of social systems in Myanmar, China, Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Morocco, Greece, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and Taiwan all indicate that there are tensions between social order, governance and individual lives.

In market mechanisms like corporate America – Enron, WorldCom, Lehman Brothers, Accenture, ethical violations dominated. Adaptive concerns dominated the fall of Netscape, Nortel, Motorola, the American automotive sector, and similar tensions prevailed in the music recording industry. The norms for checks and balances in corporate India have been tested during stock market crises before. The Satyam debacle (http://www.livemint.com/2009/01/15002832/Will-the-Satyam-debacle-really.html) and the 2-G scam in India have been in the public domain due to the media.

Recently when Karl Albrecht announced a posting on his website, https://www.karlalbrecht.com/articles/17syndromes.shtml ; 

I was reminded of Dr. Jagdish Sheth’s book, “The self-Destructive Habits of Successful Companies”. (http://bit.ly/lPcdbu). 

Organisation Development has been a discipline of applied behavioral sciences that rose from the ashes of WW-II. In repatriating life in communities, the effectiveness of the individual in groups was known to be supported by values enhancing the expression of Truth, Justiciability and Actionability. Such a climate ironically requires more courage today than is required to wage war. I was beginning to think that fostering such institutional ethic was more about creativity. The insight is now about courage, creativity and a trusting in one's deeper self.

Permeability of dysfunctional routines was studied by Argyris ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Argyris ) before. Defensive reasoning and cover-ups continue to dog the decadence of groups. What is it then as Argyris first thought that prevents the upholding of truth in our social systems? I thought there was at least once such appeal in the public domain on the nouveau mode channel of TED events. Watch Brene Brown here on why we’re afraid of being vulnerable.

In the meanwhile I will continue to explore, where does the slip occur - the individual, the group or the larger collective? What should we be open to, and allow to occur that will not result in dysfunctionality of social systems? Would that be a worthy pursuit?


Do let me know.

Book Review - COVERT Processes at Work (Robert Marshak)

Covert Processes at Work – Managing the Five Hidden Dimensions of Organisational Change by Robert J Marshak (2006) Berrett-Koehler Publishers, CA.

‘Covert’ is an English word that signifies secrecy. Somehow, in common parlance, it has acquired the monstrosity of being negative, almost sinister. Hence, the motivations to read a book like “Covert Processes at Work” could be investigative intent, confrontative mission or plain exploration. The author of the book Robert J Marshak (Bob) is however a scholar from Washington at the American University and a practitioner of Organisation Development (OD), considered by many experts in the field to be a worthy successor to the legacy of the grey-beards in the profession. Ed Schein, the originator of process consultation, and a legend in OD himself, wrote the foreword to this book.

So what could then be the motives of the author? After all, this is the first book of its nature, and as co-creator of the Dealing with Covert Processes Workshop, Bob’s incisive thinking has acquired a pulpit like pedestal for those affected by and interested in organisational dynamics. Judith Katz along with Bob provide an interpretive model in their workshops that span the classical units of analyses frames – individual, group, organisational and societal. The focal system could be viewed through a prism of Lessons Learnt in Childhood, Beliefs, Assumptions and Values, Formal Theories or Explicit Systems of Thought, Paradigms and Cultures. The end of the prism that is delightfully insightful is the spectrum it addresses from the subconscious to the superconscious –

1.       Questionable, Illegitimate and unacceptable;

2.       Legitimate, proper and Acceptable; and

3.       Too good to be True

Bob unfolds a closely woven integration in a singular scheme of all hidden organisational dynamics. He asks the question “What do all types of covert processes have in common and what can you do about them?” The book reveals answers to this principal inquiry in a manner that resembles Bob’s synthetic prowess during diagnosis of complex organisational issues. These are teased through for us into repressed processes, denied processes, overt processes, unexpressed processes and untapped processes. At a certain level such elegance and simplicity may seem inconspicuous in its relatedness to a diagnostic scheme; unless the initiated mind cuts through to the inherent profundity it entails. So how is the book itself organized?

Chapters 1 and 2 lay the foundation to the scheme. The author goes on to highlight how and why paying attention to the overt alone does not yield sufficiency in outcomes. He introduces six covert dimensions in Chapter 1, namely – ‘out-of-everyday-awareness’ issues such as – Reasons, Politics, Inspirations, Emotions, Mindsets and Psychodynamics. He then presents the integration of these in a framework he calls the Covert Processes Model in Chapter 2. With this the reader could get to ‘how to go about seeing what is not there’ in the next chapter.

Chapter 3 presents and explains a formula for diagnosing covert processes. It offers a method – if you will - on developing hunches. It is principally about diagnoses of covert issues. There’s magic of cognition in that theorization that is best read than reviewed here. Chapter 4 is an extension of the diagnostic theme, although the primary treatment here is on communication, intentionally symbolic or unintentional. Here is where the reader delights in the paradox that implies that we should explore symbolic messages literally and literal messages symbolically. We’ve known from conventional change theory about private and public withdrawal of participants in organisational change. Symbolic communications serve as early indicators of these symptoms (symbols). Some may refer to such uncovering as consumptive knowledge.

Practice or action based themes commence in Chapter 5. The significance of such nuanced practice considerations stand starkly in the potential that fears, untested assumptions, unconscious reactions and under-the-table dealings of members have during organisational change. Practice is about reaching change effectiveness by using the basic 5 keys in this chapter to unleash hidden creativity, removing unspoken blocks, altering mindsets, and giving voice to ‘unspeakable’ visions of greatness as Bob terms them. Scholars may classify this section to be the mark of procedural knowledge.

Chapter 6 is an extension of Chapter 5 with special focus on engagement strategies to manage covert dynamics. Bob calls it ‘putting things on the table’ – by establishing legitimacy, creating enabling conditions, being strategic and using subtlety through astute judgment.

In fact, by the time I reached this part of the book several alternate or related theories whizzed through my mind. Prominent among them are that of Gestalt – the figure and ground aspects of sensory perception, and Neuro-Linguistic Programming  – the symbolic representations that language throws up to be opposed skillfully for their violations – whether they be universal generalizations, simple deletions, modal operators of necessity, presuppositions or lack of referential index. I would be delighted to integrate such ‘use of self’ into the diagnostic scheme that the Covert Process model holds out.

In quite organic connect Chapter 7 follows with how to recognize or rethink interventions. The significance of figure and ground come alive in the prominence Bob accords to the focal system that blocks it from seeing or sensing important issues. Hence the inferential consequence of rethinking and reframing interventions follows. In such a schema, the unity of awareness in purpose of intervention as shared between change facilitator and client system helps lay relevant ground rules that foster legitimacy and safety for change participants.

Chapter 8 is an extension of Chapter 7, in that it is about Reframing. The difference here is not so much about change in focal system beliefs, as much as it is about change in the way something would be interpreted in the system’s context. Bob quotes a giant’s intervention in such a scheme, when Edie Seashore says ‘Up until now”…i.e. if someone on behalf of the organisation says, “That is not possible here; there’s no way that can be done” Edie would say “Up until now”. This example suggests the spirit of reframing in that the dignity of the speaker is preserved, and the challenge is about the thinking process. 6 ways of addressing reframing are discussed in this chapter – primarily from a change facilitator’s point of view.

Chapter 9 is about Rethinking Organisational Politics. The seasoned reader may in fact consider this as a special case of reframing! However what is revealed is Bob’s own take from his own ‘prism’. Dealing with both political and management frames, Bob reveals another aspect of his synthetic mind. They hover around decision arenas, degree of participation, decision rounds (how many iterations), required degree of agreement, access to information, reciprocity, expected styles and types of sanctions. The dimensions he frames are as under.

1. Who decides
2. Decision Process
3. Time-frame
4. Nature of Change
5. Purpose of Change
6. How others are seen

Chapters 7, 8 and 9, are in my opinion, the author’s special contribution to the discipline of Organisation Development. It is here that his insights emerge like the nectar in the air that the nose never sniffed without being trained to do so. The savant and the processual components of behavioral sciences weaves into the book here like a stitch through an ailing body part, and quite like the integrative spirit of Eastern ‘wholeness’ in remedy despite the origin of analytical and almost partitive western diagnostic temperament. Like the good architect working to a plan, he elevates the foundation in Chapters 1 to 3, and raises the edifice deftly thereafter with structural material that houses the diagnostic and the interventionist aspects of classical Organisation Development.

Chapter 10 on Managing Covert processes is like the canopy or the rotunda to the book’s architecture. Written partly like an epilogue, or a good teacher’s summary (the OD practitioner’s Humanistic orientation); it is especially useful for the reader who takes the trouble of going through this book’s organisation. The telling punch is that premise from which the book begins – ‘remember that organisations are both rational and political systems’. The mitigation is however a phased collapsing of both these anchors through humane challenge, conscious judgment, multiple levels of diagnoses, clarity of purpose and  requisite thinking to suit the political thinking of the system when one frames reality.

Perhaps Bob’s pronouncement of psychological safety issues is a shade deeper than the consideration of ethics in such art of change management. If there were one more dimension he could have addressed deeply in the scheme – that would be it – ‘ethics’ as frames of reference in covert processes. Else, this book is compactly done, integrating complexity of theme with lucidity in explanation; elevating abstractions that are grounded in real case examples and theorizing to the extent that it holds out a qualitative promise from tireless and methodical application. It aids concrete grasp for the phenomenologically inclined reader; especially for the one in search of a product of evolved thinking in organisational dynamics. Ed Schein puts it well in the foreword when he says, that ‘in this book finally we have a coherent approach’ to all of what we hurriedly label as hidden agendas, unconscious desires, elephants-under-the-table, latent functions and shared tacit assumptions that seldom get to the table. No more as ‘covert’ as the title first suggested?

Ferrari and Rolls Royce, We've got Choice?

If you have lived through the time of the Wall mania of the Pink Floyd, then you’ve probably heard Roger Waters go solo later in life. He made that choice. In the concept album Amused to Death, Roger penned this amazing lyric for the tile “It’s a miracle” –
 

“By the grace of God Almighty
And pressures of marketplace
The human race has civilized itself
It's a miracle
We've got warehouses of butter
We've got oceans of wine
We've got famine when we need it
We’ve Got designer crime
We've got Mercedes, We've got Porsche
Ferrari and Rolls Royce,
We've got choice..”

It is not easy to describe the thin line that separates decision making from choice. When you read the lines above, you probably realize how from almost 2 decades ago, the wisdom of the poet singers descended down the ages. Contemporary to that music was National Geographic’s famous 3-D holographic cover of our stressed planet and CK Prahlad’s exhortation to stick to the knitting in terms of corporate strategy. Today, corporations that vend their wares need to reckon with their impact on sustainability and triple bottom-line accounting methods. How did we ever end up making those choices? Who would you expect to break ground on such thinking? Would it be Daniel Kanhemann, the Nobel Laureate with his heuristics that explains bias in decision making? Or would it be the confluence between efficacy and challenge to be in the state of flow?

Well, challenges she overcame indeed, and her efficacy is now endorsed by famed journalists Atul Gawande and Malcolm Gladwell. Sheena Iyengar’s dissertation in 1993 “Choice and its Discontents,” asks the question: are there circumstances in which people are better off when they have their choices limited or entirely removed? She received the prestigious Best Dissertation Award for 1998 from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology. Undeterred by an inherited disease of retinal degeneration, and her visually challenging life, she has brought her learning and insight to our lives in her book “The Art of Choosing” (2010), published by Little Brown UK, and also available as an electronic book in audio form.

In early depiction of her work on choice, she was known to be derided by people from Rush Limbaugh to McKinsey consultants – from airports to social events, for her rather hard-boned grit in offering choices in experimentation at popular marketplaces. Take a mundane question: Do you choose to brush your teeth in the morning? Or do you just do it? Can a habit or custom be a choice? When Iyengar asked Japanese and American college students in Kyoto to record all the choices they made in a day, the Americans included things like brushing their teeth and hitting the snooze button. The Japanese didn’t consider those actions to be choices. The two groups lived similar lives. But they defined them differently.

Sheena’s book is fascinating not only because of her narratives of choice, but also for the way she has it unfold. Autobiographical and personal at one level, it takes a reader right into her world, and then slips smoothly into our skin to explore dimensions of choice in social informal settings, performance on the job, cross-cultural behavior differentiation, stress, judgment and decision-making, perception, intergenerational diversity, cognitive dissonance, happiness, conscious and unconscious intelligence, self-referential predictions, medicine, neural representation of thought, attitude, culture and history.

At another level, such sagacity is balanced with a story telling persuasion that makes it easily a style reminiscent of Carl Sagan who popularized science through his writings of the Cosmos. Here’s a sample from page 72, “One civilization can no longer fully consume another, and it also cannot set up a giant barrier to keep the other out. Tolerance and respect don’t cut the mustard, either, especially not when deeply held beliefs and lives are at stake. So we seem to be at an impasse, thinking we have little to share and no clear way to move forward. But there is common ground, though it may sometimes seem to be no-man’s land. At the broadest level, it’s unquestionable that the basic values of life liberty, and the pursuit of happiness truly are common to people around the globe. Indeed,..we have a biological need for choice and control.. ” …..and then page 73 “I can’t offer a 3-step plan, or even a 30 step plan, for how to reach whatever it is that comes after tolerance. But I know we cannot live solely by our own stories or assume that the stories we live by are the only ones that exist.” I am left wondering therefore, if such perspicacity could have dawned on one more gifted by eyesight and multi-sensory perception.

Sheena admits that one book cannot contain the fullness of the art of choosing. Yet, she leaves us with provocative thoughts about ourselves and others whom we impact through our choices. Her seven chapters and sub-chapters therein are clearly a vantage point that is uncommon in its field of enquiry and its depiction.

Her mark of tolerance leaves the reader to imagine how life itself may unfold. Her choice in such a style is to uphold values that led to her own insights. Such gregariousness is surely a gift of the scientific temperament. It also tells in the variety of methods science uses to uncover truths. Some of her findings come from positivist survey methodology, and some from qualitatively ethnocentric case studies. She cleverly and at times, teasingly engages our attention, as she legitimizes her grip of the knowledge she is passionate about with evidence from her studies across the globe. Her trials and triumphs in engaging with people from her personal and professional worlds are impressive to say the least. Convincing and perceptually wealthy, this book is not a passing fad like some of its apparent predecessors; but a classic that will brew its magic as time passes us by. And if I were to add another dimension to this review, do recommend this book as a role model feat to those who are challenged in life. This monumental labor from Sheena Iyengar could not have culminated without love and grace. Pass it on.