Nothing by Chance

Richard Bach is known to have flown biplanes. Striking rarity for a perspective on life’s ways on the ground. “Nothing by Chance” was a book Richard wrote from those experiences. That was a pilot’s barn hopping narration that explained coincidences in life. This book was a reading referred to me by Ajay Pathak, when we studied together for our Bachelor of Arts degree at the Fergusson College, Pune. To quote Bach "Nothing happens by chance, my friend... No such thing as luck. A meaning behind every little thing, and such a meaning behind this. Part for you, part for me, may not see it all real clear right now, but we will, before long.

- from "Nothing By Chance" . It strikes me again in the city of Pune, where the rains have showered more vigorously than the powder drizzle that irritates the Punekar more often. In most cities, a heavy rain dampens a civic strike too. Not this time.

Two of my classmates from school stopped on their tracks on the wet Friday evening discussing how corruption may be a gene in Indians. They were taking up the context of the unlikely crusader Anna Hazare. I was then being accompanied by yet another classmate Gautam. We joined them after work hours. I recalled for them how I went against the grain of the rat race to take up Humanities as a stream in academics. Our Sociology Professor Mrs. Khopkar arranged a study tour in 1987. This was to Ralegan Siddhi. The check dams and the engineering that used the lie of the land cleverly addressed the water table and the needs of farmers there.

The source was the might of the villagers. They had created cooperatives to ensure micro-economics that catered to their needs, and not to feed the greed of the city. They got fellow villagers to close down liquor shops and adopt a non-smoking zone around them for miles together. No external reward would make this possible. Mastery over their own destiny and autonomy over their wills apart – it was their Purpose that mattered to their unity. The experience mattered to us students, as the man who inspired them was not there. He was taking up their causes elsewhere. Anna Hazare had that impact then. That it became 2011 in a jiffy is a testimony to the extraordinary will of the uncommon man. Anna Hazare has a wider influence now. Revered as a God like figure, he is an uncommon determination..

On September 9, 2001, Gautam and I were with another classmate in Mumbai, when we saw the live television coverage of the New York twin tower collapse. Today all of NY is readying to face Hurricane Irene. On Sep 9, this year 2011, 20 years after the killing of Rajiv Gandhi, his killer would be hanged. September mornings are not far away. Yet the following strikes me.

1.       A government confined a man to a prison where more notorious elements have begun to be housed. As George Vettikunnel, Special officer in Maharashtra’s Police department once mentioned in 1998 or so to me, “There are more dangerous minds outside prison walls than within them”.

2.       The same government befriended the media. They did not muzzle it as Team Anna was.

3.       The same government huddled now and again to get it right. They bowed to a moral pressure, unparalleled in independent India.

4.       The same government held a reasonable debate on the state of polity for 12 hours or more to accede to the will of a steadfast man.

5.       The same government did not wish to be seen to choke its own functionaries, who spoke variously on the way they thought they were being treated by the media, or by the citizens of the country.

6.       The same government embraced a vulnerability that stronger governments would have glossed or dismissed, as the fleeting criticisms seemed to indicate. They may not get the credit for that courage, given its early misdemeanors, if not errors or mistakes.

7.       I did not see a single luminary or a common citizen who said, “This is all very new. It will take me some time to understand what is going on”. Everyone wished to sound opinionated and sure of what is happening.

I caught up with a Bangalorean on the plane back to Bangalore from Pune. He felt that the entire political class ganged up to tease its citizens because beyond moral corruption, they were united in the share of the spoils. “Caesar may be in power, but his wife’s accounts may be more powerful” seemed his take. The system is a rotten one in his opinion.  It takes one to challenge it. Silent awe is what I observed on that note of his assertion. Nothing by Chance indeed.

In a human process intervention, whose Goal is it anyway?

One day, my boss posed me a great question. "Whose goal should we be seen to endorse when asked for an intervention?" I realised then that he asked me that question to know what the fate of a relationship with a peer would be post intervention. That boss in the line organisation is a different one, motivated differently than a developmental professional. Fundamentally, he was asking me - what should be the goal of facilitation itself? Should the goal be biased towards the goals of the developmental professional or towards the line organisation boss, who seems to be on top of the power balance? Typically a classical dilemma for the 'internal' consultant.

Here're my views to such a dynamic.
1. Qualify your contract : Get the sponsor to understand, that the process that both enter into is mutual and requires authenticity from both sides. Any covert act of malafide intent will defeat the purpose in the course of time. Set expectations as to what the facilitator and the sponsor as leader would do to build and secure the commitment to the process.
2. Set Protocols : When in doubt, keep place for an arbitrator.  Both facilitator and sponsor agree that this arbitrator commands respect for independence in opinion. Legalize the arbitrator role and identity within the contract, if the sponsor is a symbol of risk. A healthy contract is more psychological and built on trust anyway.
3. Respect Dynamism in Groups : When done effectively, facilitation encourages disclosure which begets confrontation. Facilitate constructive confrontation of reality. Encourage courage in expression, and that will beget health in the group. Prospects that the group will face will sharply diverge in flashes that catch both sponsor and participant unawares. Respect that dynamism, go with the flow there and watch the thinking that is set in motion. Your goal is to surface the repressed unconscious of the group.

4. Value Closure : Movement towards credible lines of action is a great source of strength. Anchoring the closure of the facilitation with responsibilities that emerged from the process is great as a finshing act. Voluntary ownership is great, but watch out for impulsive acts of bravado in the euphoria of process. Distinguish the mature accountability of voluntarism from the juvenile breaking through from constraints.  Help with facilitative questions that encourage participants to deal with their unfinished business. Closure should inspire confidence, not merely to be remembered for the shock value or surprise from process. That is not where it ends in any case.
5. Wrap-Up with Sponsor : Get the sponsor(s) to verbalize what he or she or they experienced. Their reflections have a generative capacity beyond their presence in the group's process. It is a closure beyond the group that furthers the magic in the process. Choose in context, whether such is better done in private. This is super-ordinate process that ratifies your goal in the process. If both you and the sponsor meet your places of inner knowing in new ways, a deeper transformation will have taken place for both. Of course, it matters most for the artist in you that the client experiences and acknowledges transformation if you have led the facilitation effectively.

Irrespective of us deciding therefore, the line organisation client has a goal anyway. Facilitation is value added when the climate for spontaneous expression is made available through conversations. These cut through the messiness of face-saving tendencies, learnt helplessness and untested doubts. Happy to hear from facilitators of process work. Interventions have such a myriad hue. Love to learn from you.

Of Leaders and Writing - in memory of Ranjan, the Acharya

I dreamed of being a writer once. A passionate journalist, at that. My former boss, the departed Ranjan Acharya compared my motivations to write to that of Fabian socialists. Ranjan himself acknowledged the influence of two great people in his life as far as his own writing was concerned. And he used their tips as cannon for the writing fodder. One of them was the Principal Fr. Mascarenhas of the St. Joseph's Boys' High School in Khadki, Pune, where Ranjan schooled. "Break your essay down into simple points" was Ranjan's  fondest recall of Fr. Mascarenhas.  The other was Mulk_Raj_Anand, a socialist himself. Ranjan would take the local train to Lonavla to soak lessons from him in the art of short story writing.  Ranjan would attempt writing in house journals of the Rotract Club, Pune and get reviews on such writing. Mulk Raj Anand was a tough critic. He still got my boss's respect.

Ranjan's other influences in writing were not so live in the flesh for him; literary giants they surely were. One was PG Wodehouse. And, as it struck me last evening, on a walk with my son, that JK Rowling's travails were not lost on Ranjan's soul. His identification with that writer's struggle and the portrayal of the dark side of life, a premonition of sorts of his moods. When I met Ranjan I was less of a writer than a seeker of understanding of human behavior at work. For what I knew then, an entertainer as Ranjan, could easily camouflage his sorrows. Harry Potter the magician released that spirit of thrill with life, and Ranjan admired Rowling for that ability. He had a magic with words himself, whether spoken or written.

Ranjan got the essence of brevity and humor from Wodehouse and the rivets of a plot from Agatha Christie's characterization of Hercules Poirot. From Rowling, Somerset Maugham, Viktor Frankl and Joseph Heller, Ranjan got the engulfment of mood. If you've wondered, numbers, sounds and even odors could trigger a visual sensation of color for some of us. Hear a drum beat in a march, and you may visualize the color blue. Think of time, and it may be ordered as a deck of domino cards placed infinitely in multi-dimensional space. Such are imaginations that are described as synesthesia. Most creative people experience such sensations. People who experience such cross-sensory perceptions are called synesthetes.

As synesthetes do, Ranjan evoked emotionality from music too. From the Hindustani raga, the eccentric RD Burman to the melodrama of ghazals there was a range he related to that I could not comprehend. Yet these sensations gave Ranjan metaphoric symbolism to lead and guide People Capability Measurement assessments. His access to those nuances, the clarity of those sub-modalities, were clearly his strength. I write today, two years after his untimely demise.

Ranjan Acharya

My inspirations came from those who read news on BBC World Service Radio in the 1980s. I had a copy of BBC London Calling as a prelude to what I could tune into. Their diction and flawless flow clearly for me was the virtue of command over language. When in school, Edgar Rice Burroughs (remember Tarzan) had as much effect on me as Gerald Durrel (remember squirrels and mongoose?)  I would see classmates quarrel fiercely over their favorite inspirations of nature, that I vowed never to be victim of such ruthless identification.

I took to reading of the real world. In newspapers of heyday, there was not much to choose from. So I chose writers who had more solemn influence. These included S Nihal Singh and Kiran Thakur. Some writers like Khushwant Singh and Sumant Moolgaonkar would mature like wine. I also fondly remember Abel David of the Poona Herald to have had similar effect. Behram Contractor, the busy-bee and the God of moderation Russi Karanjia in Mumbai were worth observing from their own points of view. Wish someone archives these pre-internet works of journalism for us on the net.

Then came along Chidannand Rajghatta whose place Abhay Vaidya took for a while, as the Times of India correspondent in Washington. Abhay was goaded by Prakash Nair, my cousin's tenant and employee of The Indian Post to mentor me. Abhay still remembers me as a student of Sociology who was advised to take admission to the Tata Institute of Social Sciences than give up that well earned seat for the 'cause' of journalism. Or was it Fabian Socialism that I turned away from? John Scherer the once Lutheran priest reminds me these days that it is never too late to become what I may have been. Choices have their way of churning my insides, I should say.

Today, many tweets have passed me by on the shortest of definitions. Leaders lead. Writers write. And do writers lead? Or do leaders write?  Are these not requisite questions?

As Akio Morita once wrote "I see what I know, when I read what I write". Simple, and yet so profound, the typical Japanese sophistry and understatement shine through. Leaders are humble doers too. Journalists as Abhay were taught that early maxim. His blogs and writing are a testimony to such literary modesty. And curiously a mix of the East and the West?

Leaders are seen and willing to be seen, like fish in the fish bowl. 

Leaders, like writers cannot however live to pretend that they can be safe in glass houses. They embrace reality as vulnerably as fish in a fish-bowl.  Leaders live to be themselves, stoked by their inner sense of freedom to be their autonomous selves. They live to be seen, and being seen they endear others to them. Writers too are opinion makers.Their expressions have an inverse projection from their readership. They first connect in fantasy, and in that image, avail their style and identity with their readership through their writing.

As a tribute to Ranjan, and the spirit of writing, here's a link I invite you to read What do you think? Are writers more powerful than we think they are? Are leaders more influential than writers? What could leaders do with writing? What could writers do through leading?

Five Questions you will see life in

I recently wrote a blog http://www.energizeengage.com/profiles/blogs/model-organisation on implications of designing for organizational effectiveness. It was a nascent attempt to know how readers may take to the blog space for such a topic. At least two senior professionals in my field of passion, who’ve spent more years reading organizations than blogs thought it was a decent attempt. One of them, Terrence Seamon wrote that it may also imply if people from the field of Organisation Development ask enough questions. Do we ask enough questions irrespective of field we come from? My thought streams began this way, until I realized that it is after a certain point of quantity that the questions we ask would become questions of pertinence. Questions that are pertinent and persistent are the most powerful ones. I bring you a book review about questions that fall in that sweet spot between pertinence and persistence. The book is “Five Questions That Change Everything – Life Lessons at Work” by John J. Scherer (Bibliocast, 2009).

When evolutionary biologist Elisabet Sahtouris contributes a foreword, Mark Victor Hansen of the Chicken Soup Series writes a recommendation, there’s got to be a higher reason that John unites them in, beyond the biology of the birds and the bees. So as Sahtouris claims “science taught as mechanistic reductionism in which all life is seen blindly evolving mechanism”, this book looks at human beings as part of a co-creative force in a cosmic perspective. Many of us who come to this moment from the unquestioned assumption of science serving the guiding post in human affairs,  have also seen the transformation of science serving ‘practical’ marketplace economics. That ‘practicality’ consumed India with linen for the cardamom pod in one era, and makes China the global factory today for almost anything in living memory.

So what would such a perspective of life giving or life-affirming dimension be? It could be your GPS. No, not your geo-positioning system; but your Greater Purpose Statement. That comes about in an intuitive joining of dots from the author’s own life. John has bared much to let his thoughts merge into that of the reader’s from a framework of 5 simple Questions. They are as below, and sequenced as such in the book’s plan:

1.       What confronts me?

2.       What am I bringing?

3.       What runs me?

4.       What calls me?

5.       What will unleash me?

Irrespective of which part of the world we wake up to the sun from, John’s sharing casts light on your shadow too. His premise is surprisingly simple. He considers the workplace as the system that needs to be lived into by inviting us to be our authentic selves in relationship with others there.  With a worldly immersion between Kenya’s Merreushi community of the Masai tribe, Poland’s contemporary industry professionals, the US Navy and deep learning from Masters of human processes in the USA (I can’t stop counting how many well-wishers he has there), and countless moments in various ports of call, John carves out a distinct self-perpetuating inquiry code necessary for life. Riveting text comes with portions of autobiographical narration, which however, every reader may not take to as spontaneously.

For me Chapter One on Facing the Tiger (read What Confronts me?) is an appeal to courage and possibility. To quote John “If you are not facing one of your tigers, it is already eating you”. Now for a moment again, we may dismiss the obvious metaphor saying we’ve led the tiger to near extinction in the physical world. In a racy society of materialistic oomph, consciousness may slip such a metaphor too to its extinction.  Yet, in a curiously symbiotic way, I wish to see the tiger live and face it before the force of the metaphor itself dwindles out. Chapter Five begins dealing with the Question ‘What runs me?’ Living life on automatic is a very kinesthetic symbol, that John reminds us to be wary of. Whose life is one living with all the inner world perspective we shore inside in the tides of change?  John takes us through a conversational trip on how we unwittingly carry themes that we enslave ourselves to – the Positive, Immediate and Concrete (PICs) and the ones we get less often - the Negative Immediate Concrete lessons (NICs). Our default pre-conscious leads us to a selective interpretation in our conscious state, John argues. In that conscious state we act as we choose to, depending on our addictions (PICs) and terrors (NICs). Not a question one will forget or have answered as in ‘forever’.

That is when we begin to be shown to the power of our shadows (our ignored selves).  The book’s magic also comes through with the active use of Polarity Management as a discipline in thinking through issues and teasing problems to be solved from polarities to be managed. For readers not hungry enough to visualize who they seem to be becoming, this part of the book can do no more than tickle their curiosity. The constructive part of the book comes from the dealing of the remaining 2 questions. And this becomes the difficult part for the reader who has been used to a human face to such personal growth questions. That is where John’s triple pulls of Self, Others and Cause is a useful framework to our identity. Overexposing oneself to any one pull in the trio could diminish the other two.  In Chapter 18, comes a set of deep bone questions. Sample these “What deep need does the world have that you would give anything to see met or addressed? What is something you deeply want to see happening in the world three generations from now because you had been alive..?.” That is how John takes us to his construct of the Greater Purpose Statement that integrates your Charism, Your Shadow Stretches and Your Impossible Possibility- The so That.

His last Question “What will unleash me” is about dealing with Pain and Possibility as parents of Transformation. Eventually chaos is the birth canal through which human evolution is presumed, true to Sahtouris’ preface. John has shown a deeply experienced promise in narrating the movement from living life on an ‘automatic’ to living authentically. Given that leadership is now increasingly seen as a process between members who enjoy the choice; this book is a consistent companion in process. For those who want a self-help manual, this is a tough read. For, as John writes of the workplace, “Your faculty is always there – the ones you like and the ones you can’t stand. ….the ones you don’t particularly like are the most important ones for your development”. Ever thought about that one? 311 pages long, it may take some a lifetime to complete reading. But as those questions change everything by brining one back to oneself, our personal ‘home’; it is one I’d like to have in hard copy than browse on an electronic screen. John’s punch in such contribution comes from sharing how his own statements look like and even baring the purpose of his book from the questions he asks. That is not an ordinary feat to pose as premise of a book! The essential question then is “What am I becoming?”

Management Reset – Organizing for Sustainable Effectiveness – by Ed Lawler and Christopher Worley

Management Reset – Organizing for Sustainable Effectiveness – by Ed Lawler and Christopher Worley, (2011) Jossey-Bass, CA

Book Review

In their earlier book, Built to Change, a title that read more like a ‘me too’ product, Lawler and Worley had already challenged conventional thinking around organizational agility and response to change. Designs for organizational excellence in the past meant that a goal for change was constant relative to the time in which change could be accomplished. Efforts in adaptation would be around such goals that fostered relatively newer forms of stability. The root for change effectiveness was identified as the need for stability. That structure, strategy and organizational design had to simultaneously change as the environment changed was called out in Built to Change.

Evenas they discovered the effects management practices were having on institutions at large, they realized that some of man’s irreversible choices were depleting finite resources. Sustainability of organizations now became inextricably intertwined with leadership as a team sport and shared goals and values were significant part of that journey. Management Reset is about embracing the complexity required to be a sustainable organization. “It is now clear that financial sustainability is a necessary but insufficient organization objective”, write the authors, thus opening up the possibility of reading through some refreshingly fundamental aspects of designing organizations for economic, social and environmental sustainability. Written for consultants who advise organizations on strategy and change, the authors want it to be read by academics who are concerned with organization design, organization development and change. They consider it as the third major management reset since the beginning of the twentieth century.

Command and Control (CCO) organizations responded to volume needs of capitalistic markets with bureaucratic controls. High Involvement organizations (HIO) showed the advantages of tapping into human beings latent potential in the second management reset. CCOs and HIOs are designed to be stable. Few have appreciated thus far, how sharply we will have to deviate from management approaches of the past in order to be sustainable. Fewer have explored its impact for strategy, structure, decision-making practices, human resource management and leadership. A Sustainably Managed Organisation (SMO) requires an integrated approach, far different from the fashion equivalent of putting lipstick on a pig. The mindset for the CCO and the HIO is normally one of compliance, and the tension of interests between shareholders and larger stakeholders like society and natural resources remains. Hence the case in this book is made for the integration between agility of the HIO and responsibility of the SMO. 

Forces of Agility

Technology – Virtual presence technology is proliferating, closing the distance between people and challenging the concept of time. The amount of research and knowledge produced is also increasing, pushing the boundaries of change and innovation.

Globalization –The disappearance of host and parent status in manufacturing and research centers have forced organizations to continuously to modify services and products they offer as also where and how to produce them to enable access for their customers.

Workforce – Gender, national origin, race, age and language have come to acquire more central place for attribution to success. Life-span of employment varies not merely by economic development of the host economy, but also with sector of employment, age discrimination laws and financial wherewithal to retire.

Talent, intellectual property, brand image are more perishable and requires a different mind-set to manage as these feed off each other. Knowledge work is harder to direct, measure and perform. Designing for outcomes that may ensure Organizational agility required to evolve from CCOs and HIOs into SCOs are the basic tenets of this book.

The authors quote potential for being SMOs from among their researched organizations. Patagonia, PepsiCo and Unilever are featured for example. The book points towards

a) the way Value is created which includes strategies for sustainable effectiveness as against sustainable competitive advantages

b) the way work is organized, including Governance at the Board, Structures for Operations and sustainable work systems, as against conventional control through job designs; the focus being on organizational designs that dynamically adapt to business environments

c) the way People are treated which includes new notions on Performance, reward systems and management of Talent for SMOs and

d) the way Behavior is guided which entails orchestrating performance through leadership as teamwork, and the transformation to sustainable management where followership is imperative to leadership as well.

Contrary to popular perception, and much against conventional intuition, research on leadership development is quite clear that experience is the best developer of managers and leaders. The development of ‘crucible’ jobs that could provide learning experiences may seem outright first choices for learning designs, but one may fail to realize that moving people from one job to the next rapidly will rob people of requisite learning to overcome quick-fix mentalities - the kind that gloss over long-term impact of actions. What brought us here in terms of short-term thinking that focused selectively on the customer and shareholder will in this sense prevent us from reaching the SMO prototype.

Change Acceleration towards SMO transformations is facilitated by models, language, frameworks and practices that help people talk about and discuss the relevance of change to their work. Formal processes that facilitate learning from experience will be the key to both crucible experiences and the realization of the emerging identity of the organization. The interconnectedness of different social systems in a global world is brought about clearly in this book. It may take an evolved leadership team to embrace the message in this book though.

For another view try this link http://www.cnbc.com/id/43341328/ 

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.

Nine Days to Knowing by Iain Ewing - Book Review

Why was Alexander the Great not as great as we should consider as great? Where do real heroes of the world toil? 

Are there more bosses than leaders with transformational prowess? Seldom have business fables captured responses to such questions as has Nine Days to Knowing by Iain Ewing. This book is about several layers of distillation and narration. Part autobiographical, part spirited in the giving dimension of a richly experienced life, and part an amalgamation of brain science, social norms and evolution of the human species, this book is not for the weak at heart. It surprisingly will not exclude the meek who comprehend the harsh brutalities of living life on our planet. 

In the land of the Tundra, hunters evolve to become herders, who in turn may see some people getting herded themselves. “People who are herded do not spend time observing the behavior of the herd to which they belong.” Shamans in the cold deserts of the Tundra consciously step back to observe the hunters, the herders and the herded. At one level, such wisdom as Iain Ewing narrates is deeply spiritual. It reminds me of the work done by Rev. Richard Rohr, in his book “The Wild Man’s Journey” that explains the revelations and transitions sensed between the deep and the shallows of the masculine and feminine parts of ourselves. 

The fable is revealed through a 65 years old book-store owner when approached by a modern day set of youngsters from work life. It took about 9 days for him to reveal what he could about the relentless harshness in which the high-latitude desert bears life. What  that difficulty did to about 3 million caribou amidst predatory wolves is a compelling backdrop. In a year, this region could see about 250 cm of snow. Caribou move in herds to keep themselves alive from wolves. Their migratory path involves almost 3,000 km at times, one of the longest for four legged animals on the planet. And the lessons in the book are about the ways of the wolves. 

This book is also about the power of paradigms. Paradigms can govern our thinking as much as it can conceive of possibilities and patterns. The paradigm of this narrative is about the parallels in wolf packs that resemble human conduct in organizations. Social order is controlled not only by Alphas (male or female); it is also routinized by Betas and Omegas.  And while that may be in caribou worlds as in wolf packs, behaviors of escape and hunting differ. A caribou will keep a constant distance from other herd members and turn when neighbors turn; a wolf will not keep constant distance but vary it with the closest wolf; and turn when the prey itself turns. A company of humans is more like a wolf pack, watching what the Alpha does and what the Senior Betas do. And while such sits easily between imaginations, general awareness from popular nature channels on television; what separates that from this book is involved interpretation.

The book-shop owner is a figurative shaman, of the good variety; for in life evil shamans exist too. The interpretation distilled from keen observation tracks human evolution too. While our brains defense systems triggers either a fight or flight response in default mode, it also gives us the competitive advantage through nutrition and advances in medical sciences to discern phases in life-span. The new paradigm is about thriving in 6 phases – childhood, adolescence, odyssey, adulthood, active retirement and old age. The associations between time-based biological evolution and roles in corporate hierarchy are strongly brought out, although contemporary technologies may allow for social roles to flip once in a while between age-groups in counter-intuitive ways. Generally, however, the rules of occupying leadership and followership roles in an organization seem to draw on wisdom from the ages. There seems to be an order of nature there that the narrative seeks to share as a mark of respect for life’s harsh conditions for survival and growth. “I don’t think powerful Alphas can be powerful shamans and that powerful shamans can be powerful Alphas”. But they need each other.

“Being kind is not a sign of weakness; it is a sign of strength”. The relationship between the means and the end is an interesting concept. Iain also provides his version of what paradigms do as contrasted with analogies. The relationship between personal transformation, observation of shamans and one’s shadow self is a struggle in intensity as the fable unfolds. Selective episodes of being a son oneself in regions close to the tundra and being a father rearing one’s own son between China, India, Indonesia and Thailand – all indicate personal transformation worthy of sharing. With tips on how to approach life at each stage, and making allowances for each stage of life to enter our conscious psyches this is an alternate reading written lucidly and convincingly for those in the modern day wolf-pack – the organization. The sharp integration from the I Ching, the Milarepa, Vyasa’s Bhagvad Gita and Lao Tzu’s Art of War are only a faint depiction of a distilled wisdom in this book – of how we can make learning simpler. Do not merely aggregate learning – integrate the lessons in life to convey it in a compellingly simple way. It took 9 days for the book shop owner to entertain the contemporary corporate employee through personalized knowing in this book. 

Else, this book is an easy, quick read of timeless heritage. It is also the mark of a living son's odyssey in wrestling with one’s shadow side trusting in the knowing that Alphas need endearing company. The author's son Tejas makes for a minimalist in the sketches he provides for a figurative symbolism through visuals - also including the notion that Alphas need to know when to retire and how to keep friends for Old Age. One of the benefits of reading this book is surely, watching out for one’s future NOW.