My Year 2021 in a Flash

There have been those who follow me on LinkedIn, (over 3,300 when I last checked) and there are a few on Twitter (over 1300 ) and  on Facebook( about a 1000). Thanks to each one of you for participating either directly or indirectly in web-based exchanges. Here’s a little listing sheet for those who’d like a glimpse of what 2021 was like. The pandemic of course topped our attention spans. Seems a miracle, we’re here today.

Books I read this year and would recommend

1.       Emotional Agility by Susan David

2.       The Silent Coup by Josy Joseph

3.       The Gift by Edith Eger

4.       The Indian Boss at Work by Steve Correa

5.       Think Again by Adam Grant

6.       Who killed Osho by Abhay Vaidya

7.       The Courage to be Disliked by Kashimi and Koga

8.       Poona Company by Farrukh Dhondy

9.       Blueprint for a New America by Karl Albrecht

10.    Beyond Entrepreneurship by James Collins and Bill Lazier

The movies I saw in the year and would recommend. I am surprised at the variety myself!

1.       All the Bright Places

2.       Jai Bhim (Tamil)

3.       Grudge (Turkish)

4.       Miracle in Cell No 7 (Turkish)

5.       Malik (Malayalam)

6.       Minari (Korean)

7.       Love Me Instead (Turkish)

8.       Joji (Malayalam)

9.       5 Flights Up

10.    Sherni (Hindi)

 

TV Serials I would recommend you view to get a longitudinal take on phenomena and history

1.       The Good Doctor

2.       Marco Polo

3.       Fauda

4.       Medici the Magnificent

5.       The Family Man

Courses I facilitated this year

1.       Introduction to OD and Change Leadership – Master’s Program at TISS

2.       Introduction to OD and Change Leadership – Executive PG Diploma at TISS

3.       Mindset, Learning and Paradigms – CUSAT, Kochi University MBA Induction

4.       Tuning Behavioral Choices for the HR Profession – CMS Jain University, MBA in HR

5.       Use of Self in OD – TAPMI, MBA in HR

I share with you some resources I found this year that I thought you may like to dip into too.  

 

6.       https://sahilbloom.substack.com/archive  - a compilation business professionals can refer to overcome cognitive biases, has a great 'in the room' feel to it. (like Alexander Hamilton!)

 

7.       https://www.susandavid.com/ - for almost anyone who would like to navigate emotional states with flexibility in honest ways

 

8.       https://seenunseen.in/ - for mind-bending conversations of topical interest on matters related to India

 

To the many whom I’ve interacted with, especially my students – kudos. You’ve braved the virtual connect, and are holding on. Some of you actually suffered and recovered from COVID. Some of you have shared your bereavements with me. I’ve lost classmates across school and college myself. Many an episodes here gave me useful perspectives and insight.

 

9.       https://www.npr.org/series/423302056/hidden-brain Where Shankar Vedantam provides a part conversational, part academic angle to social psychology and neurological basis of human behaviors.  You can access the podcasts on Google podcasts too.

 

10.    https://brenebrown.com/podcast-show/unlocking-us/ Brene Brown has been on my list since 2010. Now with her atlas on emotional landscapes, you can tune in to nuanced descriptions of vulnerable human tendencies. Listen to her conversation with Edith Eger. How fascinating that it was Phil Zimbardo that inspired Edith's expressions in academics. 

 

 I was also invited to be a guest Speaker for Worldview Academy's 'OD Talks' earlier this year in September - Watch that session here.   

Another session that I was particularly pleased to host is with Steve Correa and V Kartikeyan, my batchmates from the NTL cohort we were part of. The session was for TISS students, but it is good for all who are interested in Organization dynamics in Indian context. Catch that here.

Hope you liked what I shared here. Drop in a word. Let's keep in touch.  

Early Laments of 2019

Tofler and McLuhan brought us to the Future in our heads, before we could embody its experience. Naisbitt evaluated Megatrends, some of which came astoundingly true. One could well claim those views were biased in a US perspective. In India, terms like MN Srinivas' Sanskritization were more confined to intellectually charged academic environs. In the early 1990s when YD Phadke spoke of the criminalization of politics and politicization of criminals of Indian contexts, there was a more subterranean nexus in mass media of the day. That was what Sainath then identified in international media as the militarization of civil terms and the civilization of military words. The 'smart' bomb; the Daisy Cutter, and the semantic reduction of non-humanistic intent to a point of normalization. As would Chomsky term of imperfect democracies -manufacturing consent - in such nexus between war, commerce and the economy.

Today the blurring between news, content, entertainment and views makes for a cognitive challenge that even critical thinking training may find a challenge to help us with. Then an oversimplification of groups and identities leads to destructive stereotypes and loss of empathy with the human condition. There is a simultaneous opacity between civil liberties, ballots, and governments in power. Media hold up a pretense of forces of control when collision occurs between profiteering or greedy media and the covert government. Yet, those hungry for office will need to port images of chaos to lay claim to the office they adulate. So designer crimes, famine and economic warfare will have a share of time on news we pay for. Yes, we even pay for the decay of our state of affairs.

Beyond mediated images, the few who find solace in the human conditions are those who embrace the severity of the slide, and like a persistent desert shrub show up to offer life, as like the arteries in our bodies purifying blood. They, I would assume clamor no prime time, nor brook contempt, and walk their paths with footwear at most, while others claim to carpet the earth.

Even if more die on parched land that was once arable, than in flying coffins with wings, sorrow is also socialized in proportion to the financial estimate or loss of investment. The human race (if that were the term) has to come to terms with more existential questions. Is there an answer to Death? What is that phenomenon? What's Ethics got to do with the living? What's Courage got to do with Greatness? What's Reality got to do with Visioning?

If Good Customs are habits of the heart, why do we expend energy on law?

When sociologist Andre Beteille mentioned about the distinction he made between laws and customs, I reminisced another evening where HR professionals were gathered to discuss implications of diversity in the workplace. I mentioned with regard to sexual harassment, that law would be a remote approach, even in the near term, as it hinged on rule by fear. As I can now reflect, laws that evoke fear, may give rise to bad customs. Good customs endure due to its integrated essence with nature.

For man to know woman and woman to know man, the mind and body needs to live through the emotions of either gender. The liability in society is the abject neglect of parenting in this respect. Adolescents confuse literary (and these days digital) knowledge with awareness, whereas knowing the other gender is an awareness of embodied integration.   The movement in awareness from deep masculine to deep feminine cannot rush with neglect of our shallow masculine or feminine aspects.

Our recent press brings about the explosion of information that reveals the penury of our hearts and of course the burden of bad customs. Good customs after all, as Andre put it, are habits of the heart. I wonder then what frank conversations occur when a training administrator assembles employees in a room for an ‘expert’ on such matters to educate or ‘train’ them in gender sensitivity. In the meanwhile, we live through the fallacy of ruling the heart by law and the rituals of society in this respect - in an illusory notion of civil reins on male libido.  

Male has female in it, and female has male within. Good conversations can begin one at a time, one person at a time. Broadcasts are control instruments. They train our fears. Conversations are rapport instruments. They endear our hearts. Pick your choice and realize the energy within yourself – in mind, body and emotion.

The Sociologist Andre Beteille on Democracy in India

When I studied Sociology at the University of Poona in the 1980s, I heard of Broom and Selznick, Margaret Mead, August Comte, Emile Durkheim, Talcott Parsons, Karl Marx, and of course Andre Beteille. Today thanks to the Azim Premji University, I saw Andre Beteille in the flesh and heard him speak like the ‘sutradhar’ of our lifetimes in India. The venue was the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, on Race course road, Bangalore. I was impressed by the articulate views of a range of generations in the audience gathered there on 29^th November, 2013. 

Padma Bhushan of India Andre Beteille

For someone, who studied in Kolkata when Lenin was both alive and had a lead influence on communists of Bengal, his alacrity on what may be fact and what is opinion is sharp. It edges the idealism of youngsters armed with fingertip internet information.

While his scholarship, focus and passion shone through – as if here were a political historian, I was absorbing the philosophical stance from which he treated sociology. His vantage point could shift in malleable form from historian to social relations student to political anthropologist. Yet he was unapologetic of taking on the categories he saw his world view from. For him structure and order were cornerstones of analysis of paradigms in democracy. He used a colloquial term to explain his perceptual position – the conformist. To have held that standpoint to hold out his categories of analysis is a feature of analysis in itself. 

His sociology may be seen as a sociology of regulation, and disorder to be seen as a sign of ‘movement’. For ‘movements’ like that of Anna Hazare, JP  Narayan, and the like would change and evolve into something like ‘parties’. Such legitimacy in Andre’s perceptual position is the necessary condition in which ‘meaning' is restored to regulate relations between institutional entities in society. He says, that the difference between Anna Hazare and JP was simply this – that JP was more self-critical and a thinker. And although Andre did not see it himself from the outside, he gives credence to the possibility that those within the movement, saw it coming before most could. E.g. Arvind Kejriwal created a political party. And this when the democracy we have in India hosts a multitude of parties under the swelling tent of liberty, quite apart from a multi-party democracy of 5 or 6 political parties that European nations have.

In terms of signs of deviance, we should look for patterns in factions, which according to him is an unstable entity in parties. It is difficult to pin down factions to stable properties. In fact, factions happen to find friends among university teaching staff too. In terms of regulation however, the academic function of a university, would be lost if faculty co-opted students within their factional identities.

Otto Scharmer's view of the world in 2013

On rather lighter notes, Andre’s pearls included the following :

1.  Laws and customs are different units of analysis in sociology.
2. Longer lasting democracies survive on good customs, not on good laws alone.
3.  Somnathda, erstwhile Speaker of the Lok Sabha,  in his farewell speech wished none of the parliamentarians get re-elected. In his subsequent withdrawal, he expected a Brahmin’s curse to have a salutary effect in Indian society, as he confessed to Andre the sociologist whom he respected. So much for entrenched communism in India!
4.   Lenin may have called India a zoo, and not a democracy, but more fatally, he may not have known his own country any better.
5. One must not disdain disorder in Indian democracy as to wish it out of existence, but as in The Westminster model, make sure that the opposition is Her Majesty’s Royal Opposition. (His need for order to contain disorder a clear sign of the sociology of regulation, than the dialectic sociology of radical change).

Lastly, his most telling sign of democracy in India having brought about change is the average age of women at marriage. He would not have imagined this of the India of a 100 years ago. His one distillation of institutional resilience was if the institution survived the life of its founders! Indian democracy has survived, and we could be more hopeful than being in the grip of irrational fears of factions like Naxals and Maoists whose inherent structures would not help their endurance as institutions.

I am however left with how Andre's sociology of regulation may survive the age of the internet, and the mindless degradation of our ecology, if man proceeds without conscious attention to destroy givens.

Collectivities - Going Nowhere Furiously?

I have noted of late a few disquieting trends. It reminds me often of the debate between being pessimistic and realistic. Am also reminded of anchors that may make me revel in thoughts other than the optimistic. However, denying a reality is no better than self-adulation and fantasy. Let us say my inspiration for this blog arises from the gritty bureaucrat who appeared on television at an event that sported anti-corruption crusaders. I record a few citations that make for my observations as below.

1.   The Indian bureaucrat working within constraints: He mentioned that in the space of a year, he was witness to an average of 4 transfers per official. He thought that was the limit to his powers, and the porosity of the social system. Stoking the appeal for a Team India, he talked of an SMS (Short Messaging service) based initiative that Indian citizens could use to upload evidence of wrongdoing via GPRS enabled software. Spoken as Vijay, and spelt as VIGEYE, the spirit of the man was not lost on me (http://182.18.181.234/vigeye/).

    The reason was that he referred to the Constitution of India as he mentioned the ‘individual’ and ‘collective’ responsibilities of the citizen towards the state. What an amazing sub-conscious to refer I thought to myself. The Article 51 on the Fundamental Duties of the Indian citizen states in section ‘j’ as follows “to strive towards excellence in all spheres of individual and collective activity so that the nation constantly rises to higher levels of endeavor and achievement”. It has been no accident I thought to myself, that the civic society acts as a system too.

2.  Morality and Fate : I know of a group of 8 interested souls working on the contours of a proposal for Economic Development that will be a viable alternative to irresponsible capitalism. One among the 8, namely Shankar Jagannathan (http://www.corporatedisclosures.com/index.htm) shared a provocative and hard-hitting link with me. A telling web-site name http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/05/22-4 was not where the sharing stopped stirring me. Rebecca Solnit has a writing style, that is imperial and majestic in its sweep, and yet, liberating and pulsating in its effect. She assumes that the acts of Dominique Strauss-Kahn are a fait accompli.

      That apart, every argument she weaves is a testimony of our numb sensibilities. She writes “In one of the more remarkable apologies of our era, Bill Clinton -- who had his own sex scandal once upon a time -- told the United Nations on World Food Day in October 2008, as the global economy was melting down: “We need the World Bank, the IMF, all the big foundations, and all the governments to admit that, for 30 years, we all blew it, including me when I was President. We were wrong to believe that food was like some other product in international trade, and we all have to go back to a more responsible and sustainable form of agriculture.”  Clinton’s outpourings here are more intense than his public reputation and sadly it is less heard too.

3.  Going Nowhere - Fast :   The famous Development Dimensions International (DDI), founded by Bill Byham and Douglas Bray, were at it again in their forecast for 2011 (http://bit.ly/jsD55q ).  The opening lines of this year's post is very telling indeed of the signs of our times. “After six iterations of examining the state of leadership worldwide via our Global Leadership Forecast, you’d think nothing would surprise us. You’d be wrong. Here is a look at some of the findings. BUSINESS IS CHANGING… LEADERSHIP IS NOT If there’s one phrase that comes to mind when thinking about this year’s data, it’s “We are going nowhere. Fast.”  It is only recently that we knew of Lawler and Worley through their book Management Reset http://indiatimes.uread.com/book/management-reset-christopher-g-worley/9780470637982 . Within DDI’s report is a work of collaboration with Gary Hamel that reveals group dynamics at the top of the corporate hierarchy - it badly needs a relook.  You may like to add Rajeev Peshawaria's RED framework http://rajeevpeshawaria.com/book to your list of why there are more bosses than leaders today.

4.   Social Cognition is distributed Capacity :   The anchor that most strongly resonated with me was that of a bold theoretical proposition by Gabrielle Lakomski, when I met her at the University of Melbourne in January 2005. (http://bit.ly/mPknsd ). What she mentioned in that book on Managing without Leadership was a culmination of social cognition, tacit knowledge management and indeed general management theory itself. Today, we see more and more after the Great Reset, that the behavioral response of leadership has been one of buckling under pressure than being additive or creative about situations. (http://bit.ly/ioEpLR ). e.g. At CISCO John Chambers regresses away from council based structures, it is reported; even as fundamental questions about the management model of modern day enterprise rage on unanswered in the world. Lakomski was far ahead of our times, it would appear.

Facilitating the leadership space that holds answers to the link between the individual and the collective is but an obvious responsibility. The economy, the society and the realm of the subjective moral self seem to be coming home to roost faster than leadership and their facilitators are ready for. Perhaps, philosophical questions seem remote to the urgency of the situation. The importance of the issue is ignored at our peril in these essentially ‘developmental’ phases of our lives.