Little Things

Here's a poem I wrote back in the Fall of 2000. I somehow happened to dig it up in the tons of mail that has accumulated since then. Mom keeps asking me to write more. Whaddya think?

"Little Things"
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

If Life should be a joyous song
with moments that you'd want to sing,
I'd pick not wealth, not joy nor woe,
what'd matter most are those "little things"

Little joys of a 4 year old
snuggling up to his parent's side,
that little blush on the young girl's face
as the groom first meets the bride

Those little wrinkles round the old man's eyes
(They've been there since my life began)
that concealed pride in a mother's heart
watch her son be a man

that little wonder of a new born bird,
on "Why do I have these tiny wings?"
Such are the wonders I live for,
a life of wonderful little things.

Those little fallen Autumn leaves,
That dusty crooked village road
as Sunset makes the the world blush red
as birds fly by a day grown old

That little tear on a young girl's cheek
knowing not to stay or fall
That summer tree where lovers met
unkept vows on old brick walls

That unseen smile on the teachers's lips
watch her class learn to think
Those little flirts in the college hall
those unheard laughs, those unseen winks

Those silent words that old friends say
that old playground, that broken swing,
This is the life I live for,
A life of just.... well, little things!

-Milind

(Image Courtesy: Ankita Sawani. Costa Rica, 2010)

What is your 30 seconds?

In my first class on Management Communications, Professor Vancamp highlighted the importance of good communication through an interesting experiment. She showed us a video of a guy, probably a computer scientist, describe his startup and idea and persuade people to join his team.It was a 10 minutes video. At the end of it, she asked us whether we would join the person's company. None of us raised our hands. Then she asked how long through the video did it take us to arrive at our decision. Interestingly, almost all of us took less than 30 seconds to arrive at that decision. The most impulsive amongst us in fact made a decision within the first 5 seconds of the guy talking! We all agreed that the guy was clearly not very convincing and went on this whole diatribe about what he should have done right.

But then, after hearing us tear him apart, Professor Vancamp asked an interesting question. "If it took you less than 30 seconds to decide that you did not want to join this recruiter's company, how long do you think it takes a recruiter to decide whether he wants you to join his company?".

The only sound we heard was of the lump in our throats....

(Image courtesy: Movie: Jerry McGuire. from AMCTV.com)

Peer Feedback

After the end of last quarter, I had asked my fellow class-mates for my 'Peer Feedback'. This is a fairly new system at Kellogg where students are encouraged to constructively critique each other on how they could improve on their leadership qualities. Unfortunately, it has not been taken as widely as it should. And I can see why. All our life we work on building our reputation. Now asking the world to find out what we lack goes against what we have been hardwired to do.

And I wish I could say that after getting the feedback, you feel much better. Far from it. You feel cheated! You wish your classmates had told you earlier that this is what bothered them. You feel you were misunderstood.... you feel humbled.

And yet, I feel this exercise is absolutely necessary. Better to know how you are perceived now rather than when you get out of school and in the workforce. If you are already in the workforce, better to know yourself now rather than after many years when you miss out on promotions because no one told you that you could have improved way back when you were up for promotions.

Another argument against getting feedback is that you are fine with getting feedback from only certain people. Getting feedback from just about everyone you work/study with will not be fair because these people don't really know the real you. If you ask me, it is the people who don't know you whose feedback you should be really getting. Even if you feel you are surrounded by morons, the fact is that these 'morons' are the ones you will be interacting with on a daily basis. Knowing how they perceive you is just as important as knowing that that perception is wrong.

So suck it up. Ask for that feedback. And once you get it, work on it. For if not now, then when?

The MBA

As an MBA student with 2/3rd of it done, I should be good at well, managing. Managing people, managing product launches, managing corporate finances, managing pricing issues... yup, they teach all that and more at B-School.

But what about managing yourself? That's one part that seems to get more and more difficult to manage. This is no surprise. Our lives get increasingly complex. The responsibilities we take up, the knowledge we acquire, the personalities we encounter... even the number of friends we have on Facebook keeps increasing as we grow.

Is this self-imposed complexity in our lives out-pacing our ability to manage it? Gandhi had once said, "Be the change you want to see in the world". I would add that that we manage ourselves the way we aspire to manage the world.

The Flexibility of Happyness

Loved hearing Daniel Gilbert's talk on why we are such poor predictors of what makes us happy. However, the good news is that we can change what predicts our happiness. Daniel calls it the Synthetic Happiness... one where we can be happy on things we are not supposed to be happy about! Which leads me to think, don't we all do well in jobs that we are truly passionate about? And don't you need to be happy about the job to be passionate about it? Thus if passion can be synthesized in our minds, then we can come to love any job out there.

To borrow from someone's famous words, Ask not for a job you will be passionate about. Ask what passion can you bring into the job you've got!

Connecting the dots

Come mid-Fall quarter and you see 2 things at Kellogg. There’s the wonderful fall of the leaves as they go from green to red to yellow and eventually glide their way to the ground beneath. And you see another kind of Fall, the one that involves 1st year students! You see them move from the glowing color of triumph and a yearning to learn about every business case out there to one that is more sullen, unshaved, barely awake and just skimming through the headlines of only the most mandatory of cases. Having been there and done that, I often get asked what are the shortcuts to reading these cases. Are those supplementary readings worth it? If I’m going to have a career in Finance, does it make sense to spend my time pouring over books on Social graphs and Personality Types?

I hear you. You see, more often than not, these cases are about some business that perhaps was an interesting problem a few decades ago. And more often than not, its about an industry that is likely obsolete or has been shipped overseas. So at a cursory level, and definitely by only skimming through the summaries of these cases, I always felt that this was a waste of time.

But I think the 2nd year for an MBA is for a reason. Strangely enough, after a year of cases and an internship, one can, to paraphrase Steve Jobs, “see and connect the dots”. You begin to realize that the case on some Gillette razor that added another blade was never really about whether adding another blade made a better business case. Far from it! It really was about the lessons you can draw from it; timeless lessons that can be applied in very different settings. Marketing yourself on just a few lines (Facebook status message), creating a need in consumers for something they were doing without (iPad), the psychology of consumers towards deals (Groupon), etc have something to draw from this age-old case. And therein lies my point. It’s not about the cases. It’s about the dots that you can draw from there to issues that abound today.

This reminds me of Moksh. He’s 22 months now and in that phase where he’s still blabbering baby talk but does use some words every now and then that we understand. What’s surprising is that even he, in his own little way, connects words he picks up from different sources. Whenever Megha is having coffee, she reminds him that its is not for his consumption. In his own toddler-like way, he calls Megha as "Menga" and Coffee as "Koshi". We had some guests the other day and opened some beer. When we told Moksh that it was not for him, he pointed to the beer and exclaimed... "Menga Koshi!" :) . Through the little cases of his life, my little boy was also connecting the dots!

So, yes, my MBA 1st year friends, please read as many cases as you can. But don’t just stop there. Go ahead and connect the dots. For as any child who has done the puzzles on connecting the dots will know, the more dots you can have to draw from, the faster you can converge on the complete picture!

God Speed!

The New Lifestyle

Today was the first of the many Sundays to come when I will be leaving my Megha and Moksh in Waukesha for attending school in Evanston. We plan to meet every Thursday evening to Sunday evening. It will be sort of like a Consultant’s lifestyle – the classic 3 nights, 4 day away from family.

I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I am looking forward to my 2nd year of MBA. The 1st year and a summer internship helps put things in perspective. You realize (or at least you think you do) about what you want to do with your life after MBA, what you lack and what courses and skills you plan to work on to get you to what you think you want to do eventually. In any case, it is definitely something that you look forward to… the kind of excitement that every kid has on their first day in a new grade in school. Those feelings… no matter how old you get, will never change!
But at the same time, there is that lingering concern. How will we, the MMm’s cope with the new long distance relationship? How would Moksh take to this new schedule? These days he cries and refuses to sleep if he does not see me sleeping next to him. In the day care, which we started last week, he apparently cries for his ‘Annu’ the moment he realizes that we are not around. And Megha’s starting a job. Actually two jobs… one involves building a mobile X-Ray system, another a toddler! How will she manage? What if the demands of one outweigh the other?

There are questions that you can get answers to. And then there are those that pertain to human relationships. These are the hardest of all… left best for time to tell!