RamGanapathy.com

Category: Musings

  • Watching a job well done

    Helen, the sales assistant at the local grocery shop in our suburb made our day. Sensing that we were new, she started a nice conversation with us, enquiring about our background, providing an overview of the suburb, offering any support that may be needed. This was two years ago. My wife and daughter were shy and anxious as we were still settling down in a new country. Helen did her bit to ensure they felt less as strangers.

    Soon, we discovered the bigger malls, and spoilt for choice, we rarely stepped into the local shop.  Every time I did however, Helen would ask excitedly, “Is the family well?…Good!”.

    Watching her interact with the shoppers, I was intrigued by her enthusiasm and zeal, and wondered if “customer service” as a responsibility in her job profile sufficiently described what she demonstrated. Her greetings are genuine and sincere.

    I look at her doing her job and it feels so good. Why? Now, one does not perform a job for others to observe, unless it is not really a job. Performing arts and sports are typically the domains that involve an audience. We learn a lot from those professionals and derive meanings for our lives from their actions, attitude and outcomes, sometimes unintended by them.

    But we grossly underestimate the influences of many other jobs on our lives. I mean when we pay attention to the way those are performed. For instance, I get my haircut from the same shop that I have been frequenting for two years. There are six barbers employed but I distinctly remember (and prefer) one guy. Harry is more of an artist. He doesn’t follow a routine, he doesn’t talk much. When he is finally done with cutting, styling and grooming, I sense I didn’t just get a haircut – but an experience!

    This is explained by the science behind why we watch sports.

    Mirror Neurons

    When we watch a game (or for that matter any action), mirror neurons in our brain become active. The famous neuroscientist, VS Ramachandran illustrates how the discovery of mirror neurons have been a game changer in neuroscience during the last decade. Watch this fascinating TED Talk The neurons that shaped civilization where he explains its role in refining the concepts of empathy, imitation and our social behaviour.

    Max Branson argues in this article that “our brains aren’t just watching sports — they’re trying to play”. Perhaps this explains why I feel the ecstasy when Federer steps out to hit a cross-court backhand shot! From a research cited by Gartland, “about one-fifth of the neurons that fire in the premotor cortex when we perform an action also fire at the sight of somebody else performing that action.”

    Helen and Harry have given me something that I wasn’t even aware that I received: The pleasure of doing something very well.

    As Yogi Berra, the famous American baseball coach would say, “You can observe a lot by just watching”.

  • Sound situations at work

    The soundscape at my work is made up of talking and music. I have to communicate a lot – talking in particular. My job as a bridge person between sales and delivery, only accentuates that. Apart from meetings and discussions in the office, I dial into many conference calls with people I may not have met, holding animated and robust conversations.

    I also like listening to music, as I (used to) write code and (now) crunch numbers. In fact, I’m listening to Zen meditation music as I write this blog. Music (and random noise?) has also played a part in me getting in and out of certain tricky situations at work.

    My team member once forgot to switch his personal phone into silent mode before a conference call with our stakeholder from another country. He was already stressed out, being in the spotlight with most number of defects found in his code. Exactly at the moment he was asked, “Can you please present the root cause analysis?”, his phone rattled with an unusual ring tone – of a film song prefixed with a dialogue: “Start music!”. This became a case of lost-in-translation since the guy at the other end had no clue about the interrupting phone call and had assumed he was being yelled at!

    I’m sure you have had to request – during conference calls – someone to go on mute when they inadvertently add an echo or an irritating background noise. I sometimes wonder if people dial into calls while binge-watching Netflix :). I too was a culprit on an occasion. No, I wasn’t enjoying a movie. Working from home that day, I forgot to mute myself as I got into an important call hosted by our vice president. I was standing on my balcony facing my neighbour’s house being renovated. The clattering noise of metal agonized the leader on the other end. At one point, he gave up and said, “Someone please mute. I hope this is not the sound of our customers hammering us”.

    It’s not just my phone that I want to mute. Mostly, I struggle to listen during conversations, often interrupting with my own ideas and arguments. While I don’t want to offer any excuses, my role does require me to act as a catalyst and perform a certain level of moderation. I could do better for sure.

    I recently learnt about the communication tactic of using pauses in a business discussion, from this BBC article  the subtle power of uncomfortable silences. In a negotiation, such “a pause between someone speaking and your response can be a surprisingly power tool”. It talks about how silences are valued differently based on cultural contexts, for instance, how the “Chinese negotiators are very, very aware that Americans like to fill silences” with something and “possibly make concessions without the Chinese having to do anything”. And how it can help us “get beyond the emotional response and to start thinking cognitively”.

    I also liked a Business Insider article describing how Steve Jobs used an 8 second pause while he responded to an insulting question about his strategy, with a deep and empathetic response.

    I figured, calming music is all fine but it is still a distraction. Silence and stillness is what I yearn. I remember being introduced to meditation as a child but I failed to attain any level of focus or calmness. I should try again, more sincerely.

    Perhaps I should start with depriving myself of any sound. The other day, I was tempted to buy the noise-cancelling headphone offered at a good discount. It was still expensive, so I gave up that thought of buying. Not before trying it out though. And I realized, even the $499 Bose equipment would only come close to – without actually delivering what I was hoping to attain in those few seconds. Absolute silence.

    Maybe sleep would deliver it. As I finish writing this blog, I look forward to some sound sleep.

    Only to be woken by an alarm.

  • Hi, who are you ?

    Embarrassing.  It felt worse than what this word suggests. He was not a friend – merely an acquaintance,  but we used to travel to school together, waiting endlessly for the bus to arrive, jumping into it even before it came to a halt, rushing to grab the best seat. But at that time when he spotted me in the same bus, it had been three years after school and we were going to different colleges and never had a chance to catch up.

    His name ? I just couldn’t get it.

    He caught me blinking even as he excitedly shook my hands and enquired about the new phase of my life. I still managed to have a full thirty minute conversation without having to refer to his name. That was until when my new friend turned up and I had to introduce the strangers to each other. “Meet my school mate, ummmm…”.

    Oops.

    Eventually, I discovered my erstwhile fellow bus traveller as Gopi – the name I struggled to fetch and the one he had to announce it himself. It was awkward. Yeah, that’s the word.

    I have good memory. Anyone who has passed their exams from an Indian University during the 90’s would be never found wanting on that aspect. But I have always struggled to remember names of people. I have tried various techniques – to picture film stars of similar names, or to understand its meaning and co-relate to their personality etc. It all went for a toss, when I began networking at the work place, meeting so many people from different cultures and countries. Add to that, the challenges in pronouncing them correctly.

    Turns out, that are some good reasons why this happens. An article from the Daily Mail explains why the brain struggles to retain a name – a random information with little connection or correlation to the person. One of the reasons it says is that we may not be so interested in the person and hence the brain would hardly make an attempt. I wonder if it is also due to the enormous amount of data feed that goes into us every day.

    I saw an old interview of the veteran Tamil film actor, late Poornam Viswanathan who was once a news reader with All India Radio. He recalled his broadcasting days – he had the great privilege in announcing India’s independence in his Tamil bulletin. At 5:30 am on the morning of August 15, 1947, swelling with pride, he had begun, “All India Radio…seithigal vaasippathu (news read by) ……….”. He forgot his name! After a few excruciating seconds, he recovered from the brain fade and went on to declare his name followed by the most important news that he ever presented.

    These days, I employ this trick which works well in some occasions: I ask for their last name, appearing to store their contact details in my phone book. Most of them go on to say their full name. Even when they don’t, its OK since that’s more than half of the information.

    Recently, when I spotted an ex-colleague at the far-end table of a restaurant, I used linkedin profile search to confirm my guess, before walking up to greet him by his name. It worked.

    But he was still struggling to recognize me at all.

  • Grand lessons from a simple life

    Grand lessons from a simple life

    When the lady from the neighbourhood came to our home to formally invite us for her son’s wedding, my grandmother was very gracious as a host. At her late sixties then, she had been quite popular in the housing unit – of close to five hundred houses – by being a friendly, helpful, wise old being. On that occasion though, she surprised the lady who believed my grandma was her best friend, by declining to attend the event citing a reason that was too difficult for her to digest. “At this age, I have decided to attend only important events. The other issue is, you see, the weekly water supply occurs at the time of the wedding”.  It was embarrassing for me since the lady’s second son was my play mate.

    I never had to read any other book to learn the art of saying No.

    My grandma always chose to speak her mind even at the risk of appearing rude. Once, being tired of listening to a young mother lamenting about the fact that her child wouldn’t eat properly, she quipped “Don’t worry. The child will start eating more as you start preparing tasty food everyday”.

    She did have a peculiar sense of humour. For instance, when I proudly announced to her about my first car, her sarcasm left me stumped.

    But she had a tough life. She was the last child in a rich family of jewellers in Ernakulam and when she married my grandfather – who ran a restaurant – she was just a teenager. She faced one of her first challenges when the restaurant had to be closed down and they had to migrate to Coimbatore, in the adjacent state of Tamil Nadu. Reduced to a lower-middle-class life and faced with new language, culture and people, she dealt with life very well. She raised her four children instilling values of discipline, hard work and mental toughness. My grandfather gave her good company, until he passed away due to heart ailment and she was still in her fifties. And we the thirteen grandchildren filled up the space.

    And, about my car, she had this to say: “I’m happy for you. But even if you tell me you bought an aeroplane, I won’t be excited. I have seen it all”.

    Cricket and Cinema

    My primary school was situated just a few yards from the local cinema. There have been many days when my sister and I would return home to see her getting ready for the evening show. The next thing we knew, we were ushered into the movie hall, left to watch a boring family feud unfold for three hours. She was clever to attract us with a bait of the triangle-shaped vegetable samosa, served before and during the film interval.

    And boy, did she love cricket! She would happily collude with me in bunking school to watch a game of cricket in our black-and-white TV. Whenever the commentary was in Hindi – a language she wouldn’t understand – she would quickly mute the TV, switch on the local radio to match the visuals with the narration in Tamil. Together we have watched Sunil Gavaskar retire, Sachin get his first hundred and Dhoni lift the world cup. And every single India-Pakistan match.

    I always picture her when I reel under uncertainty or the fear of the unknown. When she was close to seventy, she suddenly decided to visit her niece in Bombay – 1200 Kms away and did not wait for my father who offered to apply leave and take her on the two day long train journey. She was happy to join my cousin who happened to travel around the same time. She then made a 2000 km train trip across the country to the east, to meet her cousin in Calcutta – all by herself and with no clue of the lingua franca. When she eventually returned home she had completed a big triangle, but she was unfazed.

    She travelled a lot more. And while I could not join her in those trips, I feel blessed to have been a part of her journey.

    Couple of weeks ago, my grandmother aged 91, passed away peacefully in her bed, having lived a complete life. All through, she kept it simple: spoke her mind, never skipped a meal, washed her clothes by hand, walked to the temple in the mornings, watched a movie/TV for a few hours and befriended tons of people.

    She was born rich, lost it all, got most of it back, maybe more – but never felt poor.

  • None of the above

    None of the above

    The two hours around dinner time during the weekend are easily the most agonizing times for me, as we sit in front of the TV to find a good movie to watch as a family. The labor of sifting through the films across many genres, considering the preferences of the three of us – me, the missus and the pre-teen – is daunting in itself. And then to choose the movie of the week is a responsibility I don’t get excited about.

    Choice. The act of choosing between two or more possibilities. Sold to us as the boon of the civilized world. The word cleverly used to disguise as a gift before one realizes the burden accompanying it. When we exercise a choice, we invariably make a statement about ourselves.

    You think I’m complicating things here. Fair enough. I even dread at the prospect of having to choose a “good” curry off the dinner menu for my colleagues.

    This happened many years ago and I am giggling as I write this: When food was served at our dinner table, a colleague who arrived late spotted a dish with an unusual aroma and wondered out loud, “who the hell ordered this dish!?”. The awkward silence that ensued was broken by our new manager’s reply, “I did. Is there a problem?”. He was obviously worried about the popularity of his choice. Four more awkward seconds. “Great choice! Looks exciting”, was my colleague’s attempt to avoid the embarrassment. He thought he salvaged the situation until when our manager asked, “Cool, shall I order one more?”.

    A similar incident occurred at work but it was not funny. My team toiled for months, working closely with the client team, going through multiple iterations of the visual screen design. The client team was tasked by their project sponsor to replace their legacy system with a state-of-the-art IT system. However during the final presentation, the sponsor was seen grappling with the dilemma: while the prototype looked exactly like what he asked for, he simply did not like it. The whole exercise had to be repeated. The team was disappointed but we took solace in these words from the book Are your lights on ?, “In spite of appearances, people seldom know what they want until you give what they ask for.”

    Is it easier when you have to choose something for yourself ?

    Not necessarily. Since a lot of mental energy and resources are required to make a choice, you have to be very clear about the context, even if it is as straightforward as deciding to donate your organ. This is due to the Default Effect as they refer it in psychology. For instance, “in countries such as Austria, laws make organ donation the default option at the time of death, and so people must explicitly “opt out” of organ donation. In these so-called opt-out countries, more than 90% of people donate their organs. Yet in countries such as U.S. and Germany, people must explicitly “opt in” if they want to donate their organs when they die. In these opt-in countries, fewer than 15% of people donate their organs at death.”, as described in this Stanford University paper.

    This is leveraged in many domains especially in user interface design of apps. You will always find a default choice say, “Save” or a “Pay” button instead of “Cancel”. The other obvious example is the social media. You are constantly fed information tailored to you, to effectively keep you in your bubble.

    Then how can we be really free to make the right choices in our lives ? A couple of mind hacks could help. One of them is based on the Via negativa approach, extended further in his book Anti-fragile, by the maverick thinker Nassim Nicholas Taleb. He advises us to figure out what to subtract from our life. Debt, tobacco, bad company are obvious examples. It gets interesting when he quotes Steve Jobs of being “proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things”. He then illustrates the “less is more” approach for dealing with life’s more important but difficult decisions (diet, investments, career choices etc.).

    The other technique is to stay still and resist exercising any of the options presented to us. I’m not advocating any form of Zen thinking here. What if status-quo is a better option? For instance, during penalty shootouts, soccer goalkeepers usually either jump to their left or the right but never stand still. However, a 2007 study of “286 penalty kicks in top leagues and championships worldwide” indicates “the optimal strategy for goalkeepers is to stay in the goal’s centre”! This is called the Action Bias which explains why people prefer to do something even if it is counter-productive, as opposed to doing nothing. They do not want to be ridiculed for failing to act.

    The movie was awesome. My wife liked the drama, the kid liked the sports bit and I got the necessary inspiration for the upcoming week. Rudy turned out to be a perfect choice in the end!