Domain Maximus

It was one of those dinners that happen way too infrequently nowadays.

Fungus was there. The author and the missus. Pastrami completed the four-umvirate even though he was only half the man he is normally. Bags under his eyes. Shoulders slumped in exhaustion. Mouth pursed in that weird way of those who have worked 36 or so straight hours on an investment banking deal that will yield rich dividend in time.

(While I sympathized with him, inside I leapt for joy. The more he worked, the more he made bonus and the more he paid for Long Island Iced Teas at the Hard Rock Café. He rounds his credit card bills to the thousands you see.)

Alas money is not everything. Nothing can buy back sleep once lost. Not even a lucrative buy back option. (Got it? Got it?)

But also it was Pastrami’s birthday celebration redux.

Earlier this week he had spent the night of his actual birthday hunched over his laptop at the office doing the things he does on tough deals. Making term sheets, creating spreadsheets, downloading porn, playing Poker on Facebook, hitting on the ladies in HR. They call it ‘the grind’. A party had been out of the question till the deal had been closed and both parties signed on the dotted lines.

Thankfully a couple of days later he emerged from his professional tapasya an exhausted but satisfied man. A quick round of phone calls later we were all at Tamnak Thai. Heinekens were being sipped. Pastrami was awake but looked grim.

Normally, regulars at this blog will know, Pastrami has a tendency to slip into precarious predicaments. There was the infamous time when his family realized he was gay. Also I did poke him in his eye once with my stylus.

But this time we assumed him grimness came from just having worked like a dog all through his birthday.

“Pastrami the usual?”

“Hmm…”

Thai green curry and steamed rice. The missus, another veggie but one bored of Thai green curry all the time, demanded a change. She ordered a refreshingly different Thai red curry.

These veggies I tell you…

Fungus wasted no time in ordering a herd-killing spread of lamb, pork and chicken. All cooked in the Thai fashion with generous helpings of lemon grass. Also much chilli.

We dug into our food with feverish gusto. (Note: The food would reciprocate fiercely the next morning. We are talking Krakatoa here. Lava. Pompeii. It still hurts. Freaking magma.)

Pastrami continued to be silent. He chewed in slow motion. He was completely quiet except for a brief moment, which gave us hope, when he asked for a diet coke. But he went back into his shell again.

“Dude. Something wrong?”

“Hmm…”

“Bad day at work…?”

“Hmm…”

I reached for the Thai Red Curry. The missus dissuaded me with the pointy end of a fork between the third and fourth knuckle.

“Arrey yaar. What is this reticence? Why don’t you talk to us? We are your friends no?” I said fighting back tears bravely.

“No I don’t want to. It’s embarrassing.”

Whoa! Embarrassment and Pastrami? A blog post loomed. If only he would open up. And I could type.

Fungus chirped up: “But tell no? Sometimes it’s good to share things with friends.”

Pastrami took a deep breathe. And then narrated his short but lively tale while we sipped our Heinekens and tried not to think of permanent tendon damage.

Pastrami had been called to attend a meeting with his boss late the previous night. The meeting was at a client’s office and it had something to do with Corporate Finance or Slump Selling or some such topic I remember flunking with aplomb.

The whole team, some seven or eight people, stuffed into a small conference room. Once everyone was settled Pastrami’s boss flipped open the laptop and began the presentation. Pastrami was expected to note down the client’s reactions and questions.

A few moments into the presentation Pastrami notices that the client CEO’s laptop screen has quickly moved into screensaver mode. The way they sat in the room, only Pastrami could see it.

The screensaver was a version of a recent Swimsuit Calendar. The CEO had one of those VAIOs with 19-inch screens and vivid life like images on the LCD screen.

Pastrami is only human. He was distracted. In the beginning he pulled his eyes away to the excel sheets and models and Powerpoint on the large projector screen. But in time he began to anticipate each model on the screensaver. The way her hair blew in the wind. The way the sand stuck to her bum. The way her voluptuous…

“Pastrami! What do you think of the slideshow? You’ve been quite interested in it! Which parts did you like?”

The client CEO boomed with a smile on his face.

“What?” Pastrami frantically clutched at conversational straws.

“What do you think of the slideshow? Anything you liked in particular?”

“Well…”

“Don’t be scared of your boss. Give me your honest opinion…”

Pastrami figured this guy was a real stud. Not harm in playing along if it meant the deal would go through.

“Well I really liked Deepika’s picture. Sheetal was a little too aggressive if you ask me. That little tigress! Sarah Jane would have rocked. But that’s just my opinion. Ha ha ha!”

The room reverberated in deathly silence.

On the drive back Pastrami’s boss spoke to him: “He was referring to my…”

“I know…”

“You thought?”

“Yes…”

“Oh shit…”

“Yeah…”

“Little Tigress… damn…”

“Hmm…”

Just as he ended the story the Tamnak Thai people brought in the cake we had ordered for him. There was a candle on it that had already been lit.

And around the candle our message:

“Happy Birthday Pastrami! May 2008 be your year with the LADIES!”

He flinched.

We winced.

“Happy Birthday Pastrami!”

“Shut it…”

Sigh.

p.s. Do a good deed today. Sign up at GiveIndia and support one of the certified NGOs there. You don’t have an excuse not to.

Do you have friends who are totally, totally on a different wavelength?

Sure you guys get along just fine. But sometimes conversations tend to get bizarre very soon. I don’t mean different wavelengths in the sense that you work in consumer banking and they work in investment banking. No I am talking about the situation where you work in consumer banking and they work in mixed media impressionist sculpture or something.

Let me explain.

There is this dear friend who is the highly creative advertising-media-design type who does a LOT of work for JAM Magazine. She is quite the brimful of ideas. And I mean ALL the time. Now these advertising types have brains that work at a completely different level, (electron orbit?), compared to the regular moderately imaginative brain that I have.

When you ask them for advice or inputs on things you do so expecting an avalanche of creativity to be let loose. It’s as if they just wake up in the morning, spend an hour thinking up a few hundred creative trains of thought, and then spend the rest of the day just launching them at the least suspecting MBA types who still can’t get over the genius of VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP.

Question in office: “How do we give the magazine a new look?”
Regular Sidin answer: “Let’s get a new font, increase the visuals and jazz up the cover a bit!”
Arty Lady’s answer: “Let’s chop the magazine to a square, punch a hole down the centre, print text down the diagonal and string it up at newsstands.”

At the time you try to hold a straight face while wondering what substance makes the brain works that way. But most of the time you envy the insane coolness of their ideas.

So yesterday evening I am sitting hunched over the laptop wondering what to get the wife on the soon-to-be-here first wedding anniversary.

While I may be tall, dark, handsome, have immaculate chest hair and nearly odourless sweat, gifting has never been a strength of mine. I suck at it. And when it comes to gifting women I take that sucking to plunging depths. So, in a moment of weakness, I asked Arty Lady for a anniversary surprise idea.

The mystery is this. She doesn’t even pause to think. It’s as if her brains has ideas for any possible scenario just cached in somewhere. Without as much as a pause to suck in air she launches into the description of a plan unlike any I have heard before:

“Sidin what you do is this. First I will give you the number of a friend. He is a broker for elephants and other trained animals. You book a nice big elephant for your anniversary day. You then rent a good Indian prince type Sherwani. You dress up, take the elephant, go to her office and wait with the animal till she comes outside after work. Then you pick her up and begin a slow yet extremely regal elephant ride to South Mumbai. On the way you can stop at a cafe or something and share a coffee of some kind. Leave the elephant prominently outside. You must have booked a table at the TAJ for dinner obviously. Then you take the animal right upto the entrance of the TAJ. The valet’s face! The idea is to give the woman an experience she will never ever forget for the rest of her life. Awesome no?”

I paused for a second in order to retract chin and a lion’s share of tongue from the floor.

“Yes. Yes. Awesome. Awesome. Elephant. Awesome. Very good. Give me that bottle of water please…”

“What were you planning Sid?”

“Handbag…”

p.s. Still open to outstandingly creative ideas that do not involve large creatures that can tenderize you for timepass.

Unfortunately time pressures and a laptop less Sunday means I have nothing original to blog about for the time being. However I do have the latest Businessline column to cross-post. Sneaky third-rate manipulation of regular readers no doubt. But better than nothing no?

However expect a blog post about the successful completion of the fabled GM diet last night and the ensuing feeling of hilarity at slightly better fitting jeans and shirts that have more room (not quite flapping around me in the wind yet.)

Over the weekend a few people had the idea that I must select a cross-section of my blogs/columns/whatever and publish them in book form after duly groveling around for a publisher. There was a show of hands in favour of the move. I continue to dilly-dally.

And finally, if the powers wills it and a visa and ticket are forthcoming, a four-day dash and splash to Malaysia (Truly Asia!) is in the offing. KL and Genting to be precise. Do drop hints on how to make maximum use of my time in a way that I can tell all about it to the missus when I return. Is there a desi-blog crowd there by any chance? Will blog from there if all goes well of course. And will keep the Petronas pics to a minimum.

Without further ado on with the column and off I go kicking off work for the next issue of JAM.

—*—

(The version you see in the actual newspaper is different from this for pretty obvious reasons.)

What is common to the words dollar, pound, dirham, rial, peso, gourde, ouguiya and ariary?

If you thought “Hey! These are all funny sounding words that appear right in the beginning of a humour article in a major Indian business daily published out of Chennai!” then, technically, you think right but I sincerely hope you are not involved in a business function other than HR.

In reality these words are all names of currencies of various countries all over the world. And why am I talking about currency today? That is because in today’s column we are going to learn a little bit about the concept of ‘currency’, how it evolved and how currency, in theory, and money supply, in practice, is extremely critical to the functioning of an economy like India’s and even more so in mine.

Let us start with the basics. Currency is as defined as a unit of exchange that facilitates the transfer of goods and services. Or, as us humour columnists put it, “That wonderful thing that all the people with regular jobs seem to have a lot of and which is the primary reason we make friends with people in the banking and investments circles who have expense accounts.”

Currency, or money, in paper and metal form has become such a part of our daily lives that we tend to completely forget about it and take it for granted. Then suddenly, one dark and gloomy night, we are traveling in a cab to our homes and suddenly remember that we haven’t carried our wallet. In fact we don’t even have a wallet. We then tell the cabbie to stop under a tree a few minutes from our home in order to relieve ourselves in peace. We then walk a few steps before breaking into a mad dash for our building. We have managed to escape somehow.

The above was a completely fictional incident made up for the express purpose of this column. But it brings out the huge role that currency plays in our lives.

Now before the advent of the concept of currency man had a terrible time trying to buy and sell stuff. A typical conversation between a shopkeeper and a customer would be as follows:

Customer: “Two apricots please!”

Shopkeeper: “Here you go! That will be four dollars!”

Customer: “But this is before the advent of the concept of currency dude…”

Shopkeeper: “Dammit!”

Of course I am exaggerating here. In reality that period in history saw the widespread adoption of the barter system whereby people just exchanged things with each other. For instance you might get two horses for forty chickens. (Twenty-five chickens if the horses were Chinese.)

But this led to several problems.

First of all you sometimes never found someone who had horses to exchange for your chicken. But you found someone who had pineapples and wanted chickens. So all you needed was a guy who wanted pineapples in return for horses. Alas, then you found someone who loved pineapples but had only, say, primitive table lamps to offer. So a lot of people ended up hanging around for hours at the market. This alone slowed human progress by several thousands of years.

Secondly you could never store your goods for use at a later day. So while the other guy had horses that he could keep for months you had to barter potatoes that, after a week, began developing fungus colonies the size of horses. This led to tremendous amounts of business rivalry and even industrial espionage. Then finally, after years of lost trades and bad produce, tradesmen struck upon the concept that would change business in the world forever, namely credit period.

“Thanks for the bananas man! Your cheque will be here in just three days!” the evil trader would say. “Sure! No problems boss!” his counterpart would reply feeling very confident, “I am sure you are a man of your word!” The trader would then ride away to a safe distance before letting out a loud evil laugh (Muahahaha) because, ironically, banking was still several centuries away.

Thankfully before long the people of ancient Egypt came up with the idea of currency to help in all financial transactions. They used silver ingots to represent an equivalent value of stored grain. This way the value of the silver and the ingot itself was standardized.

Egyptian paymaster: “Here take this silver ingot you builder!”

Builder: “Wait a minute! Is this some sort of pyramid scheme?!”

The rest, as they say, is monetary policy.

Later on the Chinese began to get a little sick of carrying around coins and decided to substitute it with paper money. Before long wallets became an essential part of Men’s fashions and people were circulating banknotes with little poems on them with words that often rhymed with ‘pluck’ or ‘crass mole’.

Today currency plays a less visible but an all the more important role in our daily lives. Sure we have Debit Cards and Credit Cards that no longer necessitate the carrying of coins or paper money. But without a well managed currency system an economy is in shambles.

For instance if the currency is easy to counterfeit then the market could easily be flooded with copies. Suddenly people use this fake money to buy things and this can actually push up prices due to greater demand. The same thing happens if the people in the government indiscriminately prints notes and mints coins, takes this currency into the market, walked past the junction, behind the post office and into their homes where they spend it at leisure.

Exchange rates are another interesting outcome of national currencies all over the world. Because the value of a currency is stable at least for short periods of times the concept of an exchange rate took shape. This kind of stable currency system is essential for World Trade.

And last of all the currency system led to the development of banking. Banking played a vital role in the development of human society. They helped businessmen, traders, consumers like you and me and, most of all, investment bankers like the guy who has just called me out to lunch at a swanky new Five Star here in Mumbai. He is been behind me for weeks now and waxes his eyebrows. But what the heck.

So I must run now. I hope you enjoyed this little recap of currencies and how they help make our lives better. So the next time you pick up a thousand rupee note and spend it on an insignificant thing like dinner, clothes or life-saving drugs, pause for a moment. Think about the many millennia of evolution that has made that particular note reach your hand. Wonder at the ingenuity of the human mind.

And then send the note to my address.

—*—

(As seen, with minor editing, in yesterday’s Businessline.)

Recently I had the opportunity to sit down with an HR professional over a cup of coffee and get to know her side of the Young Manager dilemma.

The Young Manager Dilemma is what we call the entire superset of problems that HR and the new manager seem to have with each other. Let me explain.

Not enough pay, the manager says. The business can’t afford it, HR replies. Crappy food in the canteen, the manager says. That’s why we secretly have a separate contractor for the HR team, they retaliate. I don’t see my career going anywhere, the young manager cries hoarse. Stop bothering me when I am playing Solitaire, the VP HR responds. I would like to move into Marketing as that is my long term career goal, you email the Manpower team. We have a Marketing Department?!!, they immediately retort.

Indeed over the years many small, medium and large level problems have deeply rooted themselves, in a morale-debilitating minefield of sorts, between the people in HR and the young, new managers.

My friend prefers to call this explosive family of issues ‘The Young Manager Dilemma’.

“They are NEVER satisfied you know” she said slowly shaking her head side to side. “Nothing you do is ever good enough for these new managers. You do this much and they want this much.” She first holds her hand about a foot over the table and then extends it over her head.

She is right of course. Young managers can be a pain in the backoffice. I myself have given many an HR professional sleepless nights with my incessant questioning and clarifying.

“But I still don’t get why I can’t encash one week of leave right away! I haven’t used them and it clearly says in the HR Manual that I can encash leave I don’t use…” I once ranted and raved.

“Yes. But you need to work enough to earn your leaves!” the HR guy retorted in a lame attempt at defense.

“So why don’t you calculate that and tell me sir…” I told him as I walked away pleased with having raised an important issue during my orientation program.

But much of this tension is just due to the unbridled ambition that many of today’s new managers approach their jobs with. They are eager to perform and I know this because many of them keep forwarding me emails with advice on how to easily improve my performance as well.

Alas the blood is hot and the manager is young. That is a volatile combination in addition to being an unnecessarily melodramatic line for a humourous newspaper column.

My friend suddenly looked up at me her eyes screwed up in anger and her eye brows furrowed together severely. She calls this her ‘Retrenchment of several employees in one go’ face. She said: “These fellows should be glad that they are not in China you know. Listen to this true story that happened recently.”

You may check with the Xinhua News Agency for full details of this fascinating story that will lend much mirth at HR conferences all over the world for years to come.

This occurs at an automotive parts manufacturer somewhere in China. Besides making excellent automotive parts that, in US Dollar terms, cost just one-tenth of US manufactured parts if you exclude the product liability and patent infringement law suit costs, the company also espouses a most unique Corporate Policy.

Simply put the policy states a method for handling any dispute between a senior and his subordinate. According to the policy if a subordinate disagrees with something a boss tells him he is immediately fined on the spot. A second offence means an even greater fine. At the third offence the employee is fired.

This actually happened to an employee recently. And she is now taking the company to court.

Now take a moment to let this sink in.

We are not talking about a serious offence here like setting fire to the SAP server or passing something you shouldn’t have through the paper shredder like, say, the VP Finance.

In this company you CANNOT contradict ANYTHING that bosses say. If they say “I think we should brand this product Fluffy Puppy!” you are NOT allowed, as per policy, to correct them and say “But the product is an industrial garbage compactor.” Instead you are supposed to nod along and agree.

Now some of you might say that this is not at all surprising coming from a country like China which is pretty popular for their authoritarian government. I could go and on about various anecdotes from the Chinese style of government but the fact remains that the Chinese press suffers from a dearth of high quality writers in English and I fit the bill perfectly.

Now I would like to see how some of our new managers would deal with a situation like that. Where, when you need to contradict top management, you can’t fill in a form, fire out an email salvo or convene one of those 360 degree feedback meetings. All you can do is mutter to yourself very quietly and go back to your little cubicle.

“Now if only they would expose our young managers to some of these cruel work environments before they started working. Then I’d like to see how many of them turn up and crib at work everyday.”

My friend in HR was working herself up to a frenzy.

But I guess she is right in a way. We all do tend to get a little too caught up in our personal goals and forget what a good thing we have going for ourselves here. And sometimes it is OK for things not to be perfect at work.

For instance let me talk about my very first job. I was recruited to setup a material testing lab which, about fifteen minutes after joined, was scrapped by the top management in Bangkok.

So I sat around with nothing to do. For months. It drove me nuts. And no one there seemed to care.

Today, however, I have learned from my impetuous ways of old. Of course I still get a pay check from that employer even years after I decided to no longer go to office. But they don’t know that.

Most importantly, I am not cribbing.

And my message to you is this: Maybe you shouldn’t too.

With all this frequent referencing to Pastrami here it is easy to think that I have only one friend in all of Mumbai, i.e. Pastrami. But this is not true at all.

I have at least one more: the great Chipolata BSc. LLB.

Chipolata is this wonderful and most lively woman who is party animal by night, top notch lawyer by day and, all too rarely, an inventive email composer as we will soon see.

So earlier tonight we were all chilling out at that Barista behind Lilavathi when Pastrami mentioned an email of Chipolata’s that had become quite the rage in the legal circles some months ago. It was, actually, a harmless invitation to watch a cricket match at her place. But, once Chipolata had wielded here adept lawyerly skills at it, it became this funny as hell masterpiece:

(Whatay warning: Whereas anyone with a prior exposure to legal documentation will enjoy hereunder email and others may not but then I don’t care and you can hiterto kiss my whereas.)

Dear All,

This email (the “Email“) is with reference to the upcoming match between India and Sri Lanka (the “Match“) as a part of the Cricket World Cup 2007 (the “Cup“) being held in the Caribbean.

Those marked on the Email (collectively referred to as the “Parties” and individually referred to as the “Party“) are considered the poor souls who are either (i) don’t really care about the game; and/or (ii) are too poor to go to the Caribbean for some sun and games; and/or (iii) are to lazy to make the effort for the same; and/or (iv) know that India is not going to win the Cup and therefore what’s the point!; and/or (v) have the money but are misers; and/or (vi) are buried under work (Yea right!); (vii) all other reasons not covered in the foregoing paragraph.

NOW THERFORE in consideration of the mutual covenants and agreements set forth herein and for other good and valuable consideration, the receipt and adequacy of which is hereby acknowledged by the Parties, this email witnesseth and the Parties to the Email agree as follows:

1. The Proposal

1.1 It is proposed that Parties meet to watch the Match and generally enjoy the company of each other at a time, date and venue set out herein below.

1.2 The Match is scheduled to start at 5:00 pm (1700 hours) Indian Standard Time (“IST“) on March 23, 2007. However, Parties agree that since the said date is a business day and all Parties are required to attend their respective offices, the Parties shall gather at a mutually agreed venue (the “Venue“) at a time confirmed by all Parties via return email to this email. The proposed time is 9:00 IST (2100 hrs) subject to confirmation from all Parties.

1.3 Majority of the Parties work in Town (for the purposes of this email Town shall mean the Western length of Mumbai (excluding Navi Mumbai) from Colaba to Parel) and therefore it is proposed that the Venue be in Town. However, if Parties mutually agree that Bandra West, then the Venue shall be shifted to Bandra West.

1.4 This entire Clause 1 is subject to confirmation of the Parties. All confirmations for Clause 1 shall be governed by the procedure set out in Clause 4 of this Email.

2. Bets

All bets, wagers of any kind must be placed before the Match begins, for avoidance of doubt it is clarified that 5:00 pm (1700 hrs) IST shall be taken as the beginning of the Match. It is further clarified that the all bets and wagers may be in the form of cash and/or kind. For the purposes of this Clause bets, wagers of any kind in “kind” shall have the meaning of wagers of goods and not of services.

3. Third Party

3.1 If any Party is desirous of inviting a Third Party, it may do so at its own accord and discretion (the “Inviting Party“).

3.2 The Inviting Party shall be solely responsible for informing the other Parties and the Originator (as defined hereinbelow).

3.3 The Inviting Party warrants that in the event such a Third Party arrives at the Venue and watches the Match with the other Parties, there shall be no blood shed.

3.4 The Inviting Party further warrants and represents that any Third Party so invited shall be bound by this email.

4. Notices

All Notices with respect to the Email shall be marked to all Parties via return email and the same shall be the preferred mode of communication. In the event, a Party is unable to communicate with the other Parties via email, he or she, as the case maybe, shall communicate by means of sms (smart messaging service) or phone calls (telecons). It is clarified that all phone calls shall be routed to the Party’s mobile phone and the use of office phones is strictly prohibited. In the case of an emergency, the use of public phones is allowed.

5. This Email

The Email constitutes and represents the entire email between the Parties on the subject matter hereof and supersedes and cancels all prior emails, agreements, arrangements or understandings, oral or written, between the Parties on the subject matter of the Email.

6. Governing Law

The Email shall be governed by common law principles of good faith, friendship, equity and all such things.

7. Dispute Resolution

If any and all disputes arising out of this mail, they shall be referred to the originator of the email (the “Originator“). The decision of the Originator shall be final and binding on all Parties.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF the Parties have executed this Email the day and year so appearing hereinabove.

Regards,

Chipolata

English Version: Tomorrow when everyone gets off lets meet for dinner, drinks, the match and company at a place agreed amongst all. (GAVAARS if you didn’t understand the above email and had to read this to understand it!)

Bravo! Bravo Chipolata!

(Latest newspaper column. Not bad at all.)

I can’t tell you how excited I am to write this fortnight’s column.

See the thing is normally, one or two days before my column is due, I am sitting at home and pulling my hair out. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this but writing humour is tough. And writing humour from the wonderful world of business is doubly so.

To be honest the world of business isn’t really a frolicsome hotbed of humour article ideas. Business is, in fact, only marginally more interesting than those old taped cricket matches you have at home that were fondly recorded many years ago and watched once, at best, and have now become populated with fungii colonies so large that I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a Big Bazaar and an ICICI BANK ATM in there somewhere.

I have friends in the stock trading, M&A, Corporate banking and allied sectors and what distinguishes them from normal people, apart from monthly salary slips that have an index and several footnotes, is a uniformly underdeveloped sense of humour.

Let me explain by ‘cracking’ a joke representative of the banker type:

Banker A: So dude, why did the chicken cross the road?

Banker B: I don’t know man…

Banker A: Because of an inverted yield curve and a strengthening dollar!!!

Banker B: Oh! HA HA Oh my! Oh! Good god! Too much! Stop that right now! Phew! You are good bro!

Banker A: I KNOW!
I didn’t get it at the time either. But you get the picture yes? Looking for veins of humour in these parts is pretty pitiful.

So I was just about to get into one of my weekend ‘Sid Says’ funks, desperately looking for inspiration, when the missus emailed me about a recent consultant report that had she had heard about.

Compared to Consultants, Bankers are a total hoot.

Consultants have little time for humour. They are in a mad rush from project to project helping companies achieve significant improvements to topline and bottomline through complex methodologies including, and not limited to, ‘making slides with animation of trucks’ and ‘expensing minibar usage’.

If you ever get invited to a party with consultants it may be advisable to, beforehand, do a root canal on yourself with a tea spoon to get in the mood.

So boy was I surprised when I read the report my wife had pointed me to. The report by one of the biggest names in global consulting, which I will only refer to as McChickensey & Co., goes out to highlight a terrible evil that threatens to have dire economic impact on companies:

Hiring of Strategic Management Consultants.

Ha! I jest.

No, what they actually said was that companies had to pay a heavy price if they hired, retained and refused to remove ‘jerks‘.

According to the report ‘jerks’ are people in a company who are ‘nasty and demeaning’ to other employees.
Now I know what you are thinking: “Hey! That’s like everyone in our top management team!”
And for thinking like that I am appalled at you!

You forgot HR and Accounts.

Now this column has a duty to its readers: all the young managers out there. We have pledged to educate them about the truths of the business world and warn them against misinformation and rumours.

Therefore I need to tell all of your right now this simple rhyming message:

“Be one of the jerks, become a CEO, get all the perks, this rhymes ayayyo”

In that one line I have encapsulated a life time of learning, experience and hands-on achievement by people like Jack Welch and Winston Churchill.

Let us look through the annals of world history.

So what are all the sobriquets we often hear? Bismarck the Iron Duke, Ivan the Terrible, Alexander the Great, Peter the Great, Richard the Lionheart, William the Conqueror, Winnie the Pooh and Vadukut the Tremendously Gifted As A Satire Columnist to name but a few.

Have you ever heard of a Jonathon the Polite, Frederick the Excellent Behaver with Subordinates, Paul the Teamworker or Manoj Kumar the Balanced Performance Evaluator?

Exactly my point!

In the real world there is no place for the meek and mild and tender. And so it is in the world of business. Success in the young manager’s world goes to him who is aggressive, focused and ruthless. A tiny teensy bit of ruth is all that it takes to drop you from the giddy heights of success to the just-about-ends-meeting depths of middle management mediocrity.

Now to justify all these points and aspects very clear let me tell you why, briefly, being a jerk is not just a good thing, but a prerequisite for managerial success.

Listen carefully:

Nice bosses empower their subordinates, give them much freedom and let them chart their own workplans.

Nice Boss: Sidin we need to get this report done by tomorrow!

Sidin: But I need to take my family out for a long weekend vacation…

Nice Boss: Oh ok! Let me work on it then…

So while his conscience may be clear the nice boss is just going to walk around vacuuming up on himself other people’s project work like a first year engineering student in a final year hostel.

On the other hand let us look at the go-getting jerk boss:

Jerk Manager: Sidin we need to get this report done by tomorrow!

Sidin: But I need to take my family out for a long weekend vacation…

Jerk Manager: Oh I see! Let me arrange some interviews then…

This way the jerk boss has translated the company objectives into a very clear and powerful personal deliverable for the employee: remaining solvent.

Now that’s what I call motivation.

The next thing is that nice guy managers spend a lot of time in meetings trying to get his point across and making decisions:

Nice Manager: So I was thinking that we could try implementing SAP before the CRM suite…

Sidin: But I don’t completely agree…

Nice Manager: Oh and why is that?

Sidin: See if you look at the long term financial implications of a sequenced rollout program…

As you can sense this meeting is going to go all night and will probably end in ‘road maps’, ‘transition presentations’, ‘gap analyses’, ‘due diligences’, ‘phased rollouts’, a pizza dinner, and a decision to meet again the next day.

Jerk Manager: So I was thinking that we could try implementing SAP before the CRM suite…

Sidin: But I don’t completely agree…

Jerk Manager: Oh I don’t care. And, to reiterate, !@#$% you too!

Sidin: But from where I am coming is … OWWW… who threw that stapler at me???!!!!

Jerk Manager: La la la… whistle whistle… la la…

Thus jerk-managed meetings happen quickly and easily and this can only mean better profits and returns for the company.

Similarly jerk managers get better bonuses by:

a. passing on less to the team driving them to achieve ever more, they maintain high attrition levels thereby keeping the company always flush with fresh ideas,

b. keeping their subordinates uncomfortable and insecure thus fighting that great virus of corporate excellence: complacency and,

most importantly, they infuse the company with a sense of good-hearted resilience and verve.

So if you ask me jerkdom is really the way to go.

You may have a differing opinion of course, but then this is all I have to say:

!@#$%% you!

So there I was the other day with the missus, Pastrami and a friend at the Hard Rock Cafe here in Worli. Some of you know Pastrami who makes frequent appearances in this blog in a suave speaking role.

He is this smart, rich investment banking types who makes truck loads of money by doing something in distressed assets and private placement and equity investments and clandestine selling of office equipment when noone else is around on the weekends and so on.

“Cogito Ergo Lump Sum” would be the ideal Latin motto for him.

Our conversation focussed around the fourth member of the group who was an HR professional in a bank. (We normally do not hang out with the type but the person involved had a sense of humour and had agreed to share the bill. And that is as good as any reason for a genuine, sincere one night friendship stand.)

So we were being told how HRPro, as we will call the fourth member, had to recently fire something like 54 or so employees and how it is always a painful and regretful thing to do.

HRPro told us how some of the people had joined with genuine hopes of making careers in the bank but were now being asked to leave due to internal cost-cutting reasons.

“They are often shocked and dumbstruck for a while. And us HR people find it difficult not to feel terrible for ourselves. Some of them have damp eyes and things.”

Most of them leave gracefully but the odd few do demand justifications.

Of course this is out of the question as this means sharing the bank’s deepest darkest HR policy to identify potential lay-offs which include methods like “Throw a dart at the organization chart”, which is quick and rhymes too, and “Random number generating and sorting in Excel” and other such well researched methodologies.

In some situations the lay-off meetings can get overly emotional and the HR team has to use every last trick they learnt in HR school including “pepper spray”.

But in the end its an unpleasant experience for everyone involved.

Now I have an interesting personal trait myself that is just begging to be utilized by the Indian corporate world.

Everywhere I have worked my team head is out of the place within nine months. Often they do not even know I exist and I hardly speak to them after the initial team meetings and team lunches or whatever. But rest assured that by the end of the year the guy is long gone.

Its happened four out of four times. The first guy played his Media Player too loudly in his cabin which shared a wall with the CEO. The second guy made a minor modification in the weekly sales reports where he mistakenly typed “revenue” where it should have said “cheque no.” or some such innocent mistake apparently over several months. The third fellow turned out to have the business acumen of raisins and the fourth and final guy got a better offer somewhere else.

Now clearly with such a strong trend you might wonder if I had anything to do with this puzzling cessation series. “No way that is a coincidence! You must have plotted their downfalls to usurp the position for yourself! You evil scheming MBA you!” is what you might be thinking to yourself.

Well that is just preposterous of you to presume something like that. I had NO ROLE WHATSOEVER to play in their swift downfalls.

Well obviously the departure of a leader does make life difficult for people in companies. This leads to lack of vision and direction.

So as Ravi Shastri once said, “It was time for someone to stand up and be counted and lead the team to a tour of <chuckle> Bangladesh!”. Therefore I did the right thing and made sure my willingness to replace the recently departed was communicated promptly and sometimes even before the said person had been informed of his cessation.

“I just want to tell you that if, god forbid, something were to happen to the excellent and committed Mr. Jhaveri I am always in a position to pitch in…” I’d say to comfort the CEO. “…also you must check out the cool punjabi music he plays next door when your not around. It’s awesome!”

So if you have a difficult boss or a CEO that needs ejecting you know who to call for a quick consulting project. Just make sure I am in the vicinity of the guy’s cubicle and you can confidently post up the vacancy on Monster the day I walk in.

p.s. Yes the notice period can be managed as well for a nominal fee.