Domain Maximus

(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.

Busy busy couple of days. Travelling up and down fuelled only on vada pav, kothimbir vadi and fish and cilantro clear soup. Was in Pune for a bit. (And Arpit before you go ballistic I tried asking around for your number and could not find it on dbabble either.)

Recently I spent a good day checking out wordpress and wondering if I should just migrate the whole thing there. Then I decided I would be creating maha pain for the thousands of blogs that link to the 14 blogs that link here.

So that idea got ditched.

So now I am just trying to get blogger to do unheard of fancy things with CSS, AJAX, HTML, XHTML, IUML, PMK and so on. (Though I think I will go for one of those Wordpress layouts with the tabs on top and all. Want to create multiple channels: blogs, links, news, pictures and videos of myself. Relevant stuff.)

Not ruling out a move to an exclusive domain sometime in the future though.

Book Update: Tons of people have been asking me what happened to my book. Well I had to stash that away during that small distraction of getting married. And then subsequently I got caught up in the vaccuming, laundry, roti making. gobi plucking and things like that. But I am glad to say that things are back on track. And I should be able to rake in the moolah in another six months or so.

But in the meantime I want a few of you fresh, young just-post-MBA recruit type guys to send me some of your stories from the workplace. Not the usual Dilbert type nincompoopery. I want those stories which have a typical Indian angle to them. Things involving Human Resources, Interviews, Annual Apprasials, PSUs, the Underworld etc. are particularly welcome. You will be suitably rewarded. Bhai guarantees it.

Hafta Magazine Update: Thousands of people on a daily basis read articles posted on Hafta Magazine and Rediff.com combined. But we have had our fair share of problems. Upload issues. RSS feeds went bad. Formatting. Etc. etc.

A lot of you came in with feedback. And we are now trying to implement all of them. We are working on the format a bit. Then there’s the text editors and upload system. And the entire value proposition in general. In the hurry to put out articles we sort of lost our way in terms of keeping the audience interested. So give us a little time to do that. A couple of weeks at best.

We are therefore trying to now get onboard a fresh group of writers to support our existing bunch. I know a LOT of you mailed me last year. But this time it would be great if some of you could send across pieces of writing as well. Or links to your best blog posts. Mail them to sidinsv@haftamag.com. (Yes we have upgraded the email system as well. Works on Google Apps now. Lost hajaar emails on the old domain-supported one.)

Pitch in. There is a nice bunch of people on board already. And besides we need the help.

NOW QUESTION OF THE DAY:

Somewhere in Navi Mumbai. Just before a Siemens office. (Maybe in Vashi.) There is a hotel by the name of “Hotel Threestar”. That’s the actual name. And it looks decent too.

What would they do if, god forbid, one day they became an actual four-star hotel?

“Hello Hotel Threestar. How can I help you?”
“Hello is this Threestar?”
“No sir we are now four-star…”
“Oh. Sorry wrong number.”

I was just wondering.