My Thoughts

I learnt in a course I took that the traditional manner of managing an organization through a rigid “command and control” structure is something companies cannot afford to do now. Now companies need to allow their “knowledge workers” or employees who have knowledge to come forward and create value for the company, in fact to encourage them to come forward. To do this you need to create an environment through which they can do this. I just heard a video lecture on MIT World by Thomas L. Friedman who wrote the book “The world is flat” and the point he makes is that the world is now so flat that individuals across the globe are empowered. People in a certain country are importing machines from South Korea, hiring others from their local Arabic school and exporting their merchandise labeled in Arabic to Kuwait. Another very common example of empowerment at the individual level is when anybody with access to the internet and programming skills can go online bid for making a software and ge...

There are only two ways you can reason: 1) Through deduction 2) Through induction Anybody who reasons or who learns from his environment does so by reasoning in the above two ways. Now the more you reason the more you’ll know, so if you give yourself a lot of work to do example by putting yourself in a tough company or in a good university you’ll have a lot to think about and to learn from. Somebody who does this ‘grows’ very fast. The above method is one of the ways people grow, i.e. exposing themselves to work and learning from it. To grow however one does not need to confine himself to his work. He can meet experienced people and talk to them, read Ghalib and try to make some sense of it, listen carefully at the lyrics of music that he listens to, and pick something up from a movie that he watches. If he gets an opportunity to read an article from a magazine he adds that to whatever else he knows. In other words he uses everything around him as an input to the induction and deducti...

Some time ago I asked the question: “Is initiative the key to growth?” I think that if you put a stick in the river it will get to the end of the river. If you put yourself in any situation such as a job, you will grow because you will be carried forward or made to grow by your environment. At the same time if you take control of the process, i.e. take “initiative” you will grow faster, better, stronger than you would otherwise. If you are interested in a particular domain lets say football you will take the initiative time and again to learn about it while enjoying your hobby of following football. So one’s interest and a much stronger word: one’s passion helps one take initiative. What drives one’s passion? According to a behavioral model by Freud the mind is divided into a horizontal cross-section and vertical cross-section. The horizontal cross section is as follows: 1) Subconscious mind: those things you cannot make sense of, but you do. For example one’s preference for the color ...