Work-life balance / Shirk-life balance

In the corporate world, work-life balance is a raging debate these days, because as we know, work and life are two completely distinct and mutually exclusive things. One requires concentration and intense application of mind, while the other wants you to drift in and out with most of your faculties shut down. Perhaps not completely shut down, because work does require you to swipe your ID.

Various ‘stakeholders’ – in the corporate world, anything that has a name is called a stakeholder; such as your customers, your underworld contacts, your step-mom and your snot – have different ways of dealing with the issue. A boss, for instance prefers a clean, one-step approach:

Boss: You! Yes, you. I hear YOU have some work-life balance issues

You: Err..umm.. I mean, let me… uh, I did feel the balance could be umm.. marginally better

Boss: No worries, let’s sort this out quickly. Why don’t you make these five other presentations? That’ll set your balance right. And then I can go home early, which will set my balance right. Good night and spend the next 12 hours doing this. I’ll see you in the morning. And hey, don’t kill yourself over this – you know, work-‘life’ balance. Ha ha!

You: Ha ha! I’ll get right down to it.

HR, on the other hand, is more likely to come up with innovative solutions:

HR: In order to improve work-life balance, we have organized an off-site.

You: Yay! Where to?

HR: Because of cost issues, it’ll be in the basement of this building.

You: You mean NOT in my cubicle? Yay!

HR: Yes. Of course, you will pay for it since we do not have the funds.

You: Of course, anything for a break from work.

HR: Err, about that; since we cannot let work suffer, the off-site will be on the weekend.

You: (In a drastically softer voice) yay.

HR: Oh, and we can’t let this opportunity go waste. Since the firm is doing so much for you, you will have to make a 100-slide strategy presentation to the team.

You: I can already feel my work-life balance changing.

After all, whoever said the right balance is the same as equal weight to both?

The problem is that every ‘stakeholder’ has a different perspective. What you need is someone who has a broader vision, an understanding of the big picture, somebody who can abstract a generality from several specific situations. So next time there is a company meeting, perhaps you should ask questions of the CEO.

CEO: So what I’m saying is, this year our strategy is to put customer first and focus on service delivery.

Right-hand man: As you can see, it is quite different from last year’s strategy: Treat customers as priority and make service delivery your mission.

CEO: Any questions? I guess not, so let me…

You: Wait! Question. How can we improve our work-life balance?

CEO: Good question. We’ve debated this issue a lot, we’ve done early morning calls and late-night meetings. I think the right approach, if I may say so, is to put customer first and focus on service delivery.

You: But what does that mean in everyday, practical terms? Should I leave early?

CEO: That’s a great way of putting things. In essence, how it translates to every day situations is that you make a list of priorities, make sure customer is top of that list, and then you focus on doing those things, and make sure service delivery is your focus.

You: May be I’m just too stupid to understand senior-talk

CEO: Yes, but if you put customer…

You: I’m leaving. Screw work-life balance, I’ll just spend all my time in office and stop worrying about this.

Right-hand man: See? This is how we solve problems.

CEO: True, but we must still focus on service delivery.

Diary of an Investment Banker

Dear Diary,

I am depressed; yesterday, travesty of all travesties, I slept. In the sixty years that I have spent in investment banking – the calendar, which I do not trust in these matters, says it has been just four months – I do not remember having been fully horizontal, ever. But the strange day that was yesterday ended with me drifting into unconsciousness; I feel terrible about it, but that wasn’t the only bizarre thing that happened yesterday.

To begin with, despite being a Sunday, which as we know is the busiest day of the week, yesterday had only 5 or 6 hours of work. When I came home, I spent a full ten minutes staring at my blackberry, waiting for the little red light to blink, and horror of horrors, no work arrived. I panicked for the next hour and was about to kill self, when a strange but familiar looking woman stepped into my room. Strangely enough, her face had a calming effect on me. I racked my brain trying to remember where I know her from when she said, ‘Son, good to see you. Do you want to eat something?’ After that, I remember having a meal that was equally strange – it was not pizza or the oil-with-stuff-floating-in-it that I usually have in office, but some stuff that tasted good and didn’t burn my insides and make me puke.

Later, I sat in the living room with my mom – that’s who she was – and another stranger, a familiar looking man, and watched TV. This TV too was strange; there was no ticker, there were no ugly men on it talking meaningless drivel and doing fake analysis of random financial phenomena, but it had various other programmes that did not create a sense of stress or urgency.

I also noticed how the people I was with talked to each other: they spoke softly (why?), did not punctuate their sentences with abuses, and did not use the word ‘strategic’ even once in every sentence. They were not aggressive at all, the sissies, and did not ask each other to do things for them. And when they did ask each other favours, like ask for a glass of water – water, mind you, not diet coke – they did not give unreasonable deadlines (such as “hey, can you read this 1,000 page report and summarize it in one slide? Do not miss any details; take your time with this, but give it to me in the next half an hour and make sure you are standing on your head while you do it”).

Like I said, yesterday was quite bizarre. Before I dash of to work today and forget yesterday’s traumatic memories, I really wanted to share this bizarre experience with my close friends, but I realized I don’t have any. I am therefore confiding in you, dear diary; a real strategic move on my part, don’t you think?

How to Become a Sports Fan and Feed Your Terrier

Do you feel left out during intense arguments on serious issues – political, social, economic, religious and the like? Do you have a little angry terrier hidden inside you desperate to leap at somebody and rip their clothes and portions of flesh out? Do you feel frustrated for lack of any strong beliefs to defend? Become a sports fan. You can fiercely defend yours beliefs without having to attend to administrative details such as having beliefs.

Done methodically, becoming a sports fan is a piece of cake. But first, you need to choose a sport. Here, you have to strike a balance between popularity and differentiation. Go for Cricket, and your little terrier will die a premature death, mauled by experienced Great Danes, Chihuahuas and stray dogs alike. Go for Underwater Hockey, on the other hand, and you will feel as ignored as a managing director during lunch hour. A wise strategy is to hold on to Cricket as your bread and butter, and diversify into another niche. An important rule of diversification, though, is that the sport cannot possibly be relevant to your circs in life. You should never have played that sport, your country should never have played that sport, you should stand lesser chance of doing well at it than a duck at a shooting range and you must recently have even heard of the sport in the first place. Any American sport will do.

Regardless of which sport you choose, you must choose a team or player to root for. And when you do start rooting for someone, root like you’ve never rooted before. Root like they’re the one person carrying the antidote to a terminal disease infecting the whole planet. Root like they’re the underdog of underdogs – say a handicapped female foetus from the backward classes in Ethiopia in a wrestling match against Hulk Hogan. However, your rooting is not complete until you express, on various forums, utter disgust for everyone who is not your team or player. A typical conversation, on facebook or otherwise, should go like this:

Friend: Go Raccoons!

You: Dude! Your sports team I-can’t-even-utter-the-name-of sucks so bad I can vacuum my carpet with it and they should be rounded up and attacked with weapons of mass destruction. The Sulphur-Cats will kick their sorry asses BIG TIME. Go Schubert!

Friend: Buddy, Raccoons and Sulphur-Cats don’t even play the same game.

You: SCREW YOU!!! By the way, Schubert should replace Bach after that amazing touch-down. He is the pride of us Californians!

Friend: Sure. Are you taking an auto home or should I drop you till Dahisar?

With such periodic outbursts, tirades, celebrations etc., you will slowly begin to gain prominence as a fan. However, to really move into the senior league, you have to move on to the next level – worship. Wear your team jersey to random sports events or dinners or wedding receptions. Spend lakhs of rupees on air tickets to go to a foreign country for 5 days and spend 2 days visiting stadia (although this is useless until you post pictures of them on facebook. An alternative cost-effective strategy is to pull images off the web).  Link your emotions and psychological diseases to the fortunes of your team.

An important fact you should ignore and dedicate your life to suppressing from detection is that your team, in fact, is just a name. It comprises completely different sets of players at different points in time; these players can be from any domicile; and most importantly, given that you have no connection whatsoever to the place represented by the team, you have no reason to feel emotional about it. Forget about all that nonsense; put on your jersey, paint your face, shout war cries, wake up at 3 am and write long rants about matches or team selection on facebook. Your little terrier will get its share of the action, and you will come out of social oblivion.

Don’t thank me yet. If you have any further questions on how to develop your sports-fan profile, ask here and I will throw you a bone. Unless, of course, you say something against the Raccoons; then, I will kill you.

A More Sustainable and Loser-Friendly Vigilante Model

Every now and then, fate sends us visionary men who bring gifts – such as Steve Jobs with his iThings – that we don’t really need. Rarely, however, does fate send us gifts through men who – and I can’t emphasize this enough –  we can’t quite make sense of. Take Cheteshwar Pujara and his double ton, for instance. If I were Cheteshwar Pujara and were to score a double ton, I would first take care to: a) Change my name from something that sounds like a cross between a scooter and a hill-station to something more earthly and b) Not talkabout my brand new wife’s anxiety regarding my performance in public, especially if her name is – wait for it – Puja Pujara.

However, sustainability is key. That sentence doesn’t quite fit here, but after five years of making corporate presentations, I am aware that you need to use the word sustainability at least five times in whatever you say or write, and you have to assure readers that it (?) is sustainable. So I got that out of the way.

The protagonist of this piece however, is Batman. He’s not the real  Batman, but he’s for real; not Batman of Gotham City, but Batman of Bradford, UK. Not the hero the city deserves or needs, but one it… you get the point. A few days ago in Bradford, a man dressed as Batman delivered a burglary suspect to the local police station, and predictably, disappeared into the night. This Batman, however, created new paradigms (yes! corporate win) in sustainability (score) of the conventional vigilante model (who's your corporate daddy?). In what way, you ask. I say in a way that had little to do with the real Batman.

The CCTV camera shot the whole scene. To begin with, our sustainable Batman wore the old grey-and-black costume, of the KPOW-BAM-POOF fame. He’s also made a few minor but revolutionary modifications to the Batman image. Notice, for instance, his differentiated six-pack abs. They are packed so close together and flexed to such an extent, that a pot belly can easily impersonate it. See what I mean by revolutionary? I mean sustainable, of course.

Further, instead of bashing the bad guy’s skull in and dropping him gagged at the door, Batman drove him to the station, waited for the cop on duty, and even stood chatting with bad guy till the police took over. This novel approach to crime-fighting, with love and goodwill, is what will shape the vigilantes of tomorrow. Why use violence when you can mete out justice with love, goodwill, and (this part is unconfirmed) alcohol?

Let’s face it. Not all our idealist youngsters are underwear model-playboy-billionaire-scientist-kung fu champions. Why idolize an unattainable ideal when we have a model that is easily replicable and is – mysteriously – working? We need a role model that people are not threatened by. The cop on duty, for instance, looked at the Bradford Batman and just laughed. That’s the kind of acceptability I’m talking about.

What we need today is to pick a random man, with minimum education, IQ and fitness level; with no experience or credentials whatsoever; with a face that’s so uninspiring that it’s best covered with a mask with drooping ears, and put him in charge of law and order. That, my friends, will inspire the youth to serve the country. Congressmen have already picked such a candidate to become PM. Have you?

By the way, sustainability is key.