Not Being Useful

 When you are in a job, you can be useful to friends in your network, either due to your expertise, or your position, or contacts. Maybe you can get things done. Fix a summer internship for your friend's son/daughter, or call someone to do someone a favour.

When you stop working, most of these "powers" go away almost instantly. People who knew you 'forget' you, and you are pretty useless to anyone. It's a different feeling, and can affect you negatively.

But there's also a positive. It's liberating, the feeling that you are no longer going to be approached by anybody to do things for them. You can play God no longer, you are just a human on your own. 

Freedom, at last?

Campus Blues

 Actually, that should be Leaving-campus Blues. Most freshly minted grads, including MBAs, go through this phase where they have just left their 'home away from home' and just got out into the big bad world. Could be for a job, in the case of some. Alien place, new colleagues, fewer friends.. you get the picture. And a boss!

No wonder, many get into a mini-depression- if not clinically- and wonder what happened. Songs like Koi lauta de mere beete hue din, start sounding loudly in their brains. Or if a Jagjit Singh fan, his ghazal -Woh kaagaz ki kashti wo baarish ka pani.

These are the Blues - true-blue blues. They don't match with the Reds, or Greens. They persist well into the first few months after the exit. So now you know how the U.K. feels after Brexit. Kyunki, har friend zaroori hota hai.

Why this piece? Because our MBA students are poised for their exit in a month or two, having placed in jobs that they had applied for from the Bangalore campus. Just empathizing. It happened to me in 1984, a long time ago.

Staying Loyal

This is not about relationships-go look for an agony aunt-but about loyalty to organisations/jobs.

What makes people want to continue to work for an organisation, say after 2-3 years?

Learning
Inertia
Good pay/perks-golden handcuffs, as they are known sometimes
Challenge
New responsibilities/promise of promotion
Emotional attachment to people in the organisation
A bond signed in return for something like training given, study leave granted,..

In my case, there were any or many of these whenever I stayed back for more than two years. I have stayed more than two years at Kirloskar Institute (18 hole Golf course), IMT Nagpur (great people), and at IIM Indore (Poha, kachori and jalebi being the Sev-ing grace)-close to my fifth birthday here now. At Vignana Jyoti, too, which was a startup B-school in Hyderabad, and the biryani was irresistible. Yes, Biryani can be a reason too.

Stupid People-Strategies for Dealing with Them

These are simple strategies to deal with stupid people. I think we all can try them out, as they should work, unless you do something stupid..

1. Get them a job..if they are colleagues, get them a job elsewhere-preferably at your competitor's company.

2. Don't give them work, if they are your subordinates..this is because the stupid things they do will take days to remedy, and you would have to do that..and that would be..YES.

3. Ignore them..this is difficult, because like cranky kids, the stupid guys keep drawing your attention..well, you draw it back.

4. Promote them. This may seem stupid at first, but eventually, this works, because soon, they'll become the CEO. And since no CEO talks to underlings regularly, you are safe..

5. Write poetry or prose about them (like I am doing)..this will do nothing to them, but at least you would have done something useful, instead of something stupid.

Khaas Indori Conversation

An Indori guy just walked past, so I thought I would find out what he was up to.

"Where are you going, my friend," I asked.

"To have a poha, come along," he said. We ended up having a kachori alongside the poha..but that's another matter. I wanted to know where he planned to go next.

"Angrezi (English) Classes hain yaar, he said. Aajkal angrezi seekhna bahut zaroori hai."
I agreed wholeheartedly, in English.

I asked him what his ambition in life was. He was pretty clear - "a government job," he said.

"What kind of a job? What do you want to do there?"I wanted to know more.

He looked surprised. "I'll do what others do in a government job."

I started having nightmares. I saw Soorma Bhopali of Sholay fame saying something like "Do rupaye mein license banwaane aaya hai? Kahaan kahaan se chale aate hain..?" to a visitor in a government office, chewing paan while he said it..luckily, I woke up before the nightmare became more graphic. This conversation actually never happened.

Prioritise

You have 24 hours in a day, like every one else. What you do with them, is mostly your own choice.

I try and do things that I like. I am also fortunate that I have the liberty to choose most of my working hours, which can be any time of day or night. Reading and writing can be done anywhere, and that's a blessing. Physical teaching is still classroom-bound, but that could change too, at some future point.

The point I am trying to make is simply that prioritisation is a key to achieving your goals. What those goals are, is likely to be partly driven by organisational necessity (I am assuming you work for one). So about 8-10 hours of the day may be spent in ways that maximise the organisation's output in terms of whatever they consider as "output"- it may be sales, processing of data, coding or civil construction.

But there are ways to do things smartly and use short cuts in most jobs, while maintaining quality. Some ways I have increased my output or learning, are by asking friends to help with things that I find tough to learn-new software, for example. My daughters taught me most of what I know about using social media, and a smartphone, which now help me both professionally and personally. Peers at work can teach you a lot too.

I am able to find time by keeping the phone at bay when I work. It's a great distraction, and keeps you looking at it in anticipation, if you have a net connection. So I don't. I can easily switch back and forth between mails, research and other things on my computer, when the phone is taken out of the equation.

So, prioritise and find your own short-cuts, and be more productive. You will both enjoy your work and get more leisure that way.