My 20 Kg Weight Reduction

In 2020, I lost about 20 kgs of weight over about 6 months period. I procrastinated writing about the journey for this long, in spite of some of my friends telling me it was an extraordinary achievement, and that I must talk (and brag) about it, mostly to show off, and to some extent inspire others. But the fact is, although I do realize that the achievement is great because of its near impossibility for most people, including me in the past, and because it helped me feel a lot better about myself, my health and my fitness, I have still never felt it was an incredibly difficult thing to achieve. Which might sound weird coz like most people, in the past I always wanted to lose weight but was only adding more and more on a resultant basis. Couple of times, I did manage to lose 2-3 kilos either from consistent running or a disease like dengue, but I gained back a lot more a little later. But on this one occasion, I understood the fundamentals of it all - mostly by chance. And once I started seeing the reducing trend, there was no stopping me until I was exactly where I needed to be.

A lot of my friends ask me for tips. And I tell them it's simple, at least in theory. But walking that path with consistent self-control is what makes all the difference. There's all kinds of propaganda the world and market aggressively throws at you in various ways to prevent you from doing it right. And you often don't know who to trust. Most people ultimately seek, are rather pushed to seek, short-term pleasure, as long term seems too invisible to matter at any moment. We are encouraged to live in the moment, and within the limitations of life, that pretty much means seeking the most basic among Maslow's hierarchical needs - food, intoxication, physical pleasure. The frequent need, abundance and easy accessibility of food makes it the most basic. And if we can afford it, we'd always seek pleasure from it rather than consume what's required to survive. So the first thing to do is - open your eyes to reality.

From my experience and what I've learnt in the process and since, here are 10 things I think one must do, to get on that path that will change your body, your mind and your life.

1. Eat healthy

Watch closely what you eat, right from your main meals to the little things you pop without thinking much as they seem too small and insignificant to cause any adverse impact. The food industry constantly surrounds us with all kinds of junk, and makes a tempting and compelling case for us to indulge, often by obfuscating facts and plain lying. And these junk foods chemically impact our minds to make them want more and more. Sugar, for example. It's well known that carbonated soft drinks are full of sugar, and should be avoided at all cost. But even stuff like bottled fruit juices sold as healthy drinks are still lots of sugar and less of any real fruit. Biscuits sold as containing nutritious dry fruits or oats are still mostly maida and sugar. Brown bread, whole wheat bread are all more than 50% maida still. Read the ingredients of any packaged food stuff before you buy, and if it has sugar or maida, move on unless it's that rare occasion when the junk still seems worth it for once, coz, you know, cravings are real.

Same is the case with cheese. The western countries may be crazy about it, but that doesn't justify eating loads of it. Combine maida and cheese, and you get the monster food - pizza. I was once a huge fan of Dominos Cheese burst pizza - with loads of molten cheese oozing out of a hand-tossed pizza. I ate it almost once every alternate day for a year when I was in b-school. Thankfully I got bored of it later.

Often, we just get carried away by apparent, yet bogus, common sense. I recently ate lots of banana chips on a few occasions thinking am eating a healthy substitute to regular potato chips which I thought were just carbs and fat. But a simple comparison of nutrition values of both will tell you that banana chips are junk of a higher degree. All the nutrition of a banana is meaningless when you fry it deep in oil.

It's a good idea, therefore, to check nutrition details of food items. Over time, you will have a good judgement of what's good and what's junk. When you are not sure, check.

2. Watch your calories

Human body has a certain burn rate for calories even in state of rest. Throw in some physical activity, and you burn a few more calories. And we have to supply that energy with food. Sure bodies are different and their needs vary within a certain range. But overall, we do have a fair understanding theoretically of how many calories we require - precise enough to manage our energy levels and avoid excess. So our calorie consumption should match the calorie requirement, broadly. Excess calories get stored in the body as fat - adding to our weight. And calorie deficit would lead to burning of stored energy (body fat), leading to reduction in weight.

So the fundamental formula for weight loss is to maintain the below condition day after day without exception for a considerably long time:

Calories burnt > Calories Consumed

How do you really keep track of these calories? Well, there's no accurate way of doing it, but there are many ways of getting a rough picture.

To track calories burnt, you now have fitness apps - that constantly track your movement, physical activity, etc., and based on your body characteristics like height and weight, they can give you a rough estimate of how much calories you are burning on any day. Good thing about these apps is that you just need to carry them along and they are automatic, and some of them are intelligent enough to guess the kind of activity you are performing. But generally, you have to at least tell the app what kind of activity it is - whether you are running, walking, swimming, playing tennis or just sleeping. And when you aren't doing anything, the app will consider a basic burn rate. Again, it's only approximate.

To track calories consumed, you have apps where you have to keep on feeding what you eat or drink all day, along with quantities of the items, and they give you an estimate of the calories you took in. Both the input and output are fairly approximate here. But then, you get a picture. I used an app called HealthifyMe, just the free version. It gives a pretty good idea of how much each food item is worth in calorie terms. Also you can set a target weight loss and the period over which you want to achieve it, and the app would tell you how many calories you can consume each day. Choose an app which has a good range of cuisines built in, especially the ones you eat. HealthifyMe is very well suited for all that you eat in India, for example.

Please note - don't be too aggressive with your targets. You do have to push yourself, and suffer a little bit in the process, but don't make your life too difficult.

You have to work with both these apps for some time, along with monitoring how your body parameters are behaving, to get some sort of calibration in your mind on how to interpret these numbers and get a sense of their relative scales, so that you can compare them appropriately. Also, it's always safe to err on the conservative side, when the goal is to lose weight, rather than try to be just below the borderline; i.e., it's better for you if your calorie consumed reading is overestimated and your calorie burnt reading is underestimated.

I know it's a lot of work to keep entering your diet into apps, and consistently do it for a long time. But my experience has been that you don't need to do that beyond 1-2 months. After that, you get a pretty good idea of where you stand in terms of your calories based on what you eat. You also get some sense of what the common items you consume are worth in calories. Beyond that, if you are popping something new, or you are in doubt, check in the app for that item alone and assess for yourself.

Also, please understand that eating fewer calories does not mean eating less. It just means you change the mix of items in your diet such that you are eating fewer calories while eating the same quantity. For example, you can cut on the staples like rice or wheat and eat more of vegetables, dal, curd, chutneys, sambar, etc. etc.

3. Binge on raw and natural

We have to agree that weights are high for a reason. For most of us, it's coz we love to eat and we eat what we love. Growing up, we didn't care about factors like content, nutrition, calories, etc., coz it really didn't matter. But after a certain age, the body started responding differently to food without our realization. For one, it didn't need so much of food. But our mind was yet to adjust its expectations and continued to crave for what it's used to. And as we continued on the path, slowly the excess went on accumulating on our bodies and we got bigger and bigger.

I think eating is fun. And we don't need to be so hard on ourselves to almost stop eating. We only need some effort to condition ourselves to choose healthier alternatives. And thankfully, nature has given us so much variety and such wonderful menu to choose from, if only we could open our minds a little bit, and then divert the focus. My observation is that the body has a way of processing natural, uncooked stuff such that it can take what's needed and ignore the rest. Nobody gets fat by eating lots of fruits or raw veggies. Pick the ones you enjoy the most, try out new, find your favorites. I eat lot of fresh fruits and nuts - apples, grapes, mangos, oranges, watermelons, pomegranates, bananas, pistachios, peanuts, raisins, litchis, etc. etc., and whenever I feel like, without caring about the quantity or calories. It somehow works, doesn't harm you.

4. Hitting the gym is not the way

There is a very strong lobby trying to sell gyms, exercise products and sports paraphernalia in the name of losing weight and getting fit. If you observe the calories burnt vs calories consumed relationship more closely, and watch the stats for some time, you'll quickly realize that what we burn by working out is a miniscule number in comparison to the impact food has in contributing calories.

For example, a 330 ML can of Coke has about 139 calories. That's about the amount of energy you'd burn by walking half an hour. 100 gm of banana chips give you 500 calories. You have to walk or cycle 2 hours to burn that. You can look up more of that, but the bottom line is that what you eat largely determines your weight.

Besides, working out too much with a lot of weight can injure your body, and sometimes do permanent damage to your joints. I, for example, used to run a lot while my weight was in the 80's (kgs). And in the long term, that caused damage to my knees - which was in fact the trigger for me to relook at my approach to managing weight.

In fact, for the first couple of months during my weight loss journey, I didn't do any exercise, but rather focused on my diet alone. My knees had terrible pain due to inflammation caused by reasons mentioned above. And the COVID lockdown initially left me no choice anyway.

5. Get rid of stress

In addition to triggering the tendency to over-eat when we are under pressure, stress screws with our internal mechanisms somehow leading to distorted metabolism, hormonal imbalance and weight gain. I can't tell you how to get rid of stress... find what works for you. But having a stress free life is extremely essential for losing weight in a sustainable and healthy way.

I had quit a very stressful job just before I started on the weight loss journey. And I was able to achieve what I had never been able to achieve before while working. Of course, I am not recommending you leave your job to get back in shape, but you definitely need to find a low-stress way of life - not only for losing weight and be healthy, but to live happier in general.

6. Sleep well, sleep smart

Enough is said about sleeping 7-8 hours a day, sleeping early and sleeping 3-4 hours after your dinner. Won't repeat that, although I do get the feeling that to some extent it is all a bit overrated. From my experience, I think it's important to be consistent in your sleep schedules. Throughout the period of my weight loss journey, I used to sleep at 4 AM and get up at 9 AM. I slept again in the afternoon for a couple of hours. This worked best for me with the baby and everybody else at home during the pandemic. And I had no office to attend during the day.

Also, I do agree that sleeping a few hours after you've eaten is beneficial. Your stomach feels empty, and you can fill it up with a lot of water before you go to sleep. The urine that builds up as a result will act as a natural alarm to wake you up!

7. Shut the pamper

Stop pampering yourself until your goal is reached. I don't believe in cheat days and cheat meals while trying to lose weight. You can have a lot of all the stuff once you are at the new weight level where you intend to be, coz then you just have to maintain your weight at that. While maintenance also means you've to continue to be in control, but that's when you can cheat at times.

8. Exercise for health, fitness, weight management

I said before that exercise is not the tool for weight loss, as it hardly makes a dent. But it definitely is a tool for weight management once you are at the level you want to be. Any slight ups in 2-3% range can be easily reverted by working out. Determine how much exercise you need by looking at how much more you need to burn vis-a-vis how much you eat for how much you weigh.

This is where gyms come in handy. Or pick up a sport. Or just go outdoors and walk. Or run. Or cycle. Or do anything for an hour a day. Pick up something that you enjoy. See what else would make it fun - music? outfit? partner?

Even if your weight is stable, it is important to exercise regularly. Indulge in any moderate to high intensity physical activity for an hour every day. Not only will it help you stay at that weight which you hit with so much hard work, but it will also help you be healthy, energetic and active both physically and mentally.

9. Make fitness a priority

Can't stress this enough - fitness is a never ending pursuit. It is synonymous to a good life. And you don't want to put that in the backburner because of work, stress or lack of time for whatever reason. You have to be 100% consistent. And to achieve that, find ways that suit you. Don't worry too much about what is conventional. For example, I walk or cycle for an hour every day. But I have difficulty being consistent if I try to do it early in the morning. I just can't wake up that early every day. I've tried but I can't be consistent for long. So I decided I'd do it in the night. It might be as late as mid-night, but I have no difficulty being consistent with that schedule.

I also keep a regular watch on my weight now, which has been near stable for 2 years. Whenever I see small ups or downs, I do minor tweaks in my diet or exercise or both until I am back to the right level.

10. Stay committed

Last, but not the least, make this your way of life rather than your goal. Don't make weight loss a tale of suffering. Rather choose the path which is sustainable, gradual and fun, although it does take a bit of pain initially as the body adjusts to the new routine, diet and regimen. If you have any medical conditions, do make sure you are taking care of them and not compromising on any of it. And then, it's all a simple formula to get to a healthier body. And believe me, once you are at your goal, it'll all seem worth it and you will not have any difficulty continuing to commit yourself to being fit and healthy.

Many people need a trigger to push them toward a goal, even though the goal itself may be best for their well being. For me the trigger was a knee condition which was sure to improve if I shed some kilos, and it did. But for most people, such strong triggers are unlikely to occur. They continue to go through gradual deterioration of bodies, until they run into health issues which can't be reversed easily as they grow older. So it's wiser to act early, when you are still young, and move to older age with a healthier body. You don't have to give up anything in the true sense. You just need to make the right choices, while giving utmost importance to your pleasure and happiness.

Don't wait for a trigger. START NOW.

Back

Making this quick post to register my come back to the blog after a gap of 2 years. The last I was posting was during the peak of COVID era. The lockdowns, taking care of our little daughter, my experiments with creative pursuits which didn't go too far, and the lure (and push) of getting back to a job, which I eventually succumbed to... memorable times.

In the meanwhile, some time last year one of my credit cards expired, and the domain I had been using for my blog - SochVichaar.com - was left unpaid for. Someone who does just that - claim domains which are somehow freed up - took mine. He/she isn't using it, but it's not available to me either. Anyhow, I registered another one - SochVichaar.in and moved my blog here. Luckily it isn't very different, and in fact, looks better in some way.

I didn't make any post in 2021, and this is the first in 2022. I'll make up for the lost 2 years of sharing, by sharing more, and more often - as most bloggers say after coming back from a break. These 2 years involved lots of activity, lots of leisure and lots of learning. Less eventful than gradually transformational. And I am sure it'll all come here in more processed and mature form now.

Keep reading, commenting, sharing and exchanging.

People vs Process

Companies base themselves on various philosophies that drive the way business is run. Companies that promote entrepreneurial work cultures are driven by empowered individuals getting creative and playing freely in even the core areas of their businesses. They are highly people driven. Such companies not only believe in their people, who are allowed to take risks on their company's behalf, but are also willing to pay for the mistakes these people might end up making, which may be pretty often. The freedom such work environment offers makes it a highly satisfying experience for a lot of employees to work for such companies. But is it good for the company? It's complicated.

The other extreme are companies that are highly process driven. And when I say 'process', I include all that comes with it viz. protocol, discipline, rules, review, chain of command, oversight, pre-defined way of working, pre-defined nature of outcome, etc. People in these companies are slaves of processes. These companies are modeled not to place any bets on people, at least in principle. But since it's people who are eventually driving processes, the system becomes a playground for power games. Inevitably, people emerge, who have the ability to influence those who have more influence. The process still ensures there is pretty good oversight on what's going on. So being powerful in such environments is a big deal, coz that means you've mastered the art of running your shady business from prison while also keeping the guards happy(... à la Red in Orange is the new Black. I love her character).

Process driven companies have a method even to playing politics. On the other hand, people driven companies have none, and so it's a sea of randomness where every individual can play his/her own games and pursue his/her own motives - be it organizational interest, personal interest or plain politics for pleasure. The randomness and chaos this presents can be detrimental to large organizations. And hence, as companies become large, the leaders tend to impose more processes to rein in the madness.

The type and nature of business is an important factor in determining what culture would be most effective for successful growth of a company. Companies which come up with great products conceptualized by people dabbling in their free time or dabbling freely in their time have impacted our lives immensely. It's hard to imagine such companies working any other way and being as successful. On the other hand there are organizations like the Army which can't be anything but process driven, with 'process' as we defined above. Imagine an army where soldiers are allowed to be 'creative', or empowered to fight their own way! I therefore believe that for certain types of organizations, there is a natural style of working that would make them the most efficient in delivering their objectives. But for many other types, the style is a choice leaders make.

I do realize that picking Army as an example, while talking about companies in general, may not sound totally appropriate. For one, an army does not have any commercial interests. But that's just one perspective, and not a very limiting one, in my view. In transactional terms, an army offers its services to the nation and gets paid for the same. In business, an equivalent company would be one offering services to clients for a price. One difference, of course, is that the army doesn't have to compete with anyone to claim the scope of work, which in fact places additional burden on it to ensure that its standards are never compromised, no matter what, since there are no competitive benchmarks to talk about within the same territory. But then an army is a fighting force by design, and it has to compete with other armies, albeit external. So, in a sense, they do have standards to meet, or they would make the whole country weak. It's more driven by competition in that sense than a commercial monopoly is.

Business leaders often get inspired by the methods of the army in how they go about their business. The Art of War by Sun Tzu was covered as part of a course during my MBA. Although the more talked about connection is on how companies draw inspiration from the army in dealing with the market and competition, I think the inspiration in designing the internal structure and workings of organizations is pretty strong. And millennia of human civilization dominated by monarchical models of governance until recently has had strong influence on leadership thinking in designing organizational DNA. Command and Control is like another name for process driven model. And it's designed to keep the lower ranks, who constitute the majority, on a tight leash. The leadership plays by different rules in sharing, exercising and competing for power.

People driven work cultures are a relatively recent phenomenon. The spirit of entrepreneurship and organizations trying to harness the creative potential of their people at scale was largely an experiment of the last century that gave us unprecedented growth in our standard of living. A lot of start-ups thrive on such environments and achieve exponential growth through lots of innovative ideas. But as companies scale, their operations become complex and excess randomness becomes risky. And they realize that they don't need creativity and innovation in everything they do. Rather, it's good enough for them to have some roles filled with entrepreneurial individuals who can wave their magic wands where they can. The rest needs to run like a well-oiled machine. Different companies do this to different degrees and in different styles based on the kind of risks they want to take, and that makes all the difference in their work cultures. Having strictly enforced well-defined processes for most of the work ensures that the organization is taking the least amount of risk in how it conducts its business. Although it kills innovation, it ensures the company delivers what it takes up with efficiency - which is especially important if the scale is big and the work is repetitive. Such culture is not satisfying for most employees as it makes them feel like slaves to the system. However it works very well for the company as it is able to offer reliable standards to customers.

People driven work culture, on the other hand, can be highly satisfying for employees, as it offers them freedom, respect and space. But as a company grows in size - and companies are meant to grow - it can retain such culture only if it keeps changing its core business to suit such work culture. If the whole work force of a large company is to work like they do in an entrepreneurial start-up, its range of products should each be of a unique nature, and constantly being replaced by new ones. Services should be totally out of scope, according to the conclusion I reached after lot of thought, as no successful service company can afford to be totally people driven. Services companies are bound to require people meeting certain standards and working in certain ways to satisfy customers' needs and expectations. I've observed a few large service companies try to be too entrepreneurial, and they only ended up being complicated mess that is beyond repair.

So, I'd like to conclude by saying that totally People driven companies are great places to work but it's extremely difficult for business leaders to shape the nature of their businesses in such a way that the work culture stays people driven even at larger scale of operations. Process driven companies are difficult places to work as they can get really frustrating for employees as the scale gets too big and business gets complex. But with such size and scale of business, it is the best model for such companies as it minimizes exposure to unnecessary risk and places the company in stronger position to deliver. And this reflects on the kinds of people various companies are able to attract and retain.

It would be interesting to hear from all business leaders and professionals out here what they have experienced and how they look at this topic. Please do share your views in the comments section.

Observation, Imagination and Extrapolation - 3 key faculties for learning & pursuing Science

When I was in high school, I grew extremely passionate about physics. Each new concept I learnt gave me the joy of uncovering a new reality about the earth. I would spend hours imagining all scenarios and perspectives where a concept would manifest itself. My imagination was my biggest strength.

Of late, there has been a lot of talk about handling science education in more effective ways. A very popular notion is to make science fun by designing toys and games that would help children learn scientific principles while they are playing. Another related approach is to emphasize on learning by experiments; and there has been a lot of investment in designing simple experiments and offering to schools, teachers or directly to children as kits. Experiments provide an opportunity to see what they've been taught, and when a principle is visually demonstrated to us, it not only gets recorded more firmly in our brains, it also helps us go beyond and think further.

I don't disagree with effectiveness of the above approaches, and they are indeed better than just reading books. And they do offer stimulus to spark the most powerful tool every human being has - the imagination.

The greatest discoveries of science were made in last 4 centuries, especially before we even had cinema or computing machines. The kind of theories scientists of those times came up with through observation, imagination and extrapolation were simply mind-boggling. There was of course a lot of experimentation as well that was done to test hypotheses, but it was secondary, although inevitable and extremely important, step in my view.

Each one of the 3 primary and core activities - Observation, Imagination, Extrapolation - were performed by these scientists with some level of artistry. For the mind to look deeper into what the eyes see, imagine to look beyond what the eyes have no opportunity to see, letting the mind wander and decide what's that beyond which is worth going after, and then applying all the tools one has, and inventing what one doesn't, to mentally transport oneself to the version of reality that the mind has created for itself, a version carefully fine-tuned to adhere to all earthly laws so as to be real even outside the boundaries of the mind and in the real world - it's art of the finest kind that humans are capable of.

I therefore believe that if the ultimate goal is to encourage scientific pursuit, one must focus on these 3 fundamental faculties in children or adults - Observation, Imagination and Extrapolation. With all the mental clutter that has resulted from heavy doses of social media and heavily messy internet, we have lost the finesse we once had in exactly these abilities. And to bring us back from there or to protect our children from messing up their clean-slates is becoming extremely difficult and complicated. Complicated - because the internet is like one of the fundamental realities of our lives now. It's the source of all good and all bad, and our lives rely heavily on it. But if humanity were to see the kind of scientific endeavor it once did, we have to overcome the clutter and develop a learning system that sharpens and enhances these faculties to a very high degree - Observation, Imagination and Extrapolation.

Valuing employees in the current times

I came across a news item yesterday that Capgemini cancels leaves for all employees in India in the current quarter. So the employees can't take any paid time off till the end of June. If they want to go on leave for whatever reason, they have to get a pay cut. And given the nature of the current times, it is obviously not because the company has loads of work flowing in or that there's severe shortage of people. In simple words, this can only be explained as - the company can't take the fact that people are at home and many perhaps are not as busy with real work because of the slowdown - and because of these two reasons, some employees may end up having a good time outside work while also getting paid by the company. I would say a logical thing to do in this situation is to let employees take more leave, provided workload allows them, so that the company and the employees needn't waste resources. And in the long run, the employee feels more motivated when there's work and the company might also save on leave encashment money when those employees quit. But on the contrary, it wants to tie down those employees and make them do meaningless work - like attending e-learnings they have no interest in, create documents nobody would ever look at, attend calls where all they'd discuss is how bad is corona in their cities, how well they are mopping the floor, what's their grocery and vegetables situation, and so on.

Another company was in news recently for wanting all its employees to be logged in all day with their cameras turned on. While that's sad and hurts employee motivation tremendously, and may be their leaders realize that but they still get into the top-down trap of pretending to be productive and valuable to the company. And then some companies would even expect you to report by end of every day what you did that day. The simple truth is - if you ask for shit, you will get lots and lots of it, decorated with corporate color and formatted to perfection. And if leaders take pride in being able to derive this out of their employees, they are clearly fooling themselves.

It's sad that while many leaders are touting work-from-home as the way-to-go for the future, a great many also look at it as some sort of semi-vacation for employees, and often these are not mutually exclusive sets of people. The latter perception is also being promulgated by the media, which projects working from home as an opportunity for family time, reading books, binge watching Netflix, and so on. While in reality, on the one hand companies are pushing employees to show that they are busy and productive, on the other hand employees are also trying their best to prove their worth. In the process, a lot more of corporate waste is getting generated than before. And employees end up working longer hours.

Besides being about working from home, especially in the current scenario of a lockdown, this decision by Capgemini in India is another of numerous examples I have come across over the years where MNC's, even those headquartered in the "happy" western countries with employee friendly corporate cultures, have different policies for employees in India (and may be other under-developed countries).

I personally experienced a similar disparity in one of my previous organizations. I had been wanting to go for a sabbatical to pursue some of my personal interests. And after we had a baby, I badly needed one for a certain period to help manage while my wife was getting back to work after her maternity leave. I was glad to find that a lot of leaders within the company, none based in India, shared their experiences of going on sabbatical for reasons like spending time with family, exploring some passion, starting a business, and so on. I thought this was a great way to help employees feel valued, respected and also for them to respect the company. And for the company, it was a good way to keep some of its older employees stay motivated and excited about what they were doing. Why let go those who had already been groomed into the company's culture. But when I checked, I found that there was no sabbatical policy for employees in India.

Capgemini's current decision also smells of the same lack of respect for Indian employees. And the worst part is that these decisions are taken by Indians themselves. It's as if we ourselves feel we don't deserve to be treated with equal respect and trust. Or perhaps that we don't deserve the same level of flexibility or being valued as the American or European employees.

I've seen similar policies in manufacturing MNC's with operations in India. For example, a lot of them work 6 days a week in India but only 5 days in Europe or US. There is huge disparity in the kind of perks that are offered too. And also, the work-life balance is significantly different.

I don't know if writing about it will change anything, but I believe acknowledging is the first step to bringing change. And further, we should all bring the change in ourselves as leaders, so that we create more productive organizations that value people and don't just push them to prove that they deserve their salaries.

Do share your thoughts in the comments section.

Conference calls

My wife works in a manufacturing and services company. Because of the lockdown, she's working from home now. And very soon, her way of working has become like how mine used to be until recently in an IT services company - staying on conference calls all day. While it's not totally related to working from home in general, the proliferation of conference calls in non-IT organizations to this extent has definitely been caused by the sudden switch to work-from-home mode of working.

The main reasons conference calls started and became inevitable in IT organisations was the presence of teams in multiple locations collaborating on projects or business development activities and onsite-offshore delivery models. It did save costs because people could now communicate real time with everybody, travel was cut down to the bare minimum and calls/internet bandwidth kept getting cheaper.

But then, and gradually, attending calls became the job of many people, especially those in the upper-middle and higher management. And who do they talk to all day? Everybody in a band around their own level in their company. Many of these so called leaders are accountable for a lot of things, but don't do any of it. And a handful few are the doers who have to sit in all these calls, take note of action items, and work whenever they get time-out from these calls.

Why do we have so many calls?

• Status checkpoints and sync-ups: A lot of these calls are to get everyone on the same page on any common task or project. In situations like large deals with large team working on the pursuits, these sync-ups may need to be as frequent as twice a day, because of too many moving parts moving too soon.
• Over emphasis on being on the same page: Often half my day went into getting everyone on the same page when I was working on large RFP responses. I have been part of deals where there were morning checkpoint calls and evening checkpoint calls with everybody, and then many checkpoint calls during the day with smaller groups of key people. And when you are one of the 4-5 doers in a deal team of 50 people, you'd almost kill yourself getting everyone in sync with what's going on, besides being in sync yourself with the sales strategy and moods of the leaders.
• Working sessions: With screen sharing becoming more easy during conference calls, like over Teams or Skype for Business, participants are compelled to glue themselves to screens while they talk or listen. Someone presenting stuff, updating a document, preparing notes as things get discussed, and so on have become so common that without a screen being shared it has started to feel a bit awkward being on a conference call, especially those conducted over web through softwares like Teams. The earlier method of dialing a bridge on phone was better in letting participants move around carrying their phones. But now they have to sit and watch their screens for as long as the call goes on. While it makes it more effective visually to be looking at the stuff getting discussed, it still drains the mind if dragged for too long.
• Looking busy: For many leaders in the remote-working world, all they do is to attend calls. Their relevance in the company is from 2 things - their designation and their presence in these calls. The importance any project, assignment, deal/pursuit gets is determined by who is engaged. If something's not getting sufficient seriousness, engage one more leader, preferably a bad-ass one who is known to get the job done, and the guys actually working on it lose more sleep.
• Top-down flow of stupidity: It is a cultural thing as well in many companies, and starts from the top. May be the CEO or founder chairman likes it, and to please or comply each layer below starts following the practice and it becomes the culture of the company.
• Trying to be in control, urge to review: Many senior folks who are privileged enough to get a cabin of their own are isolated to an extreme degree. They just have a connected laptop and a telephone, and all they can do with those is emails, calls and documents. It's easy for stress to build up sitting alone in such small enclosed spaces. The constant fear of losing control gets into the head and they end up asking for calls with everybody. They rarely set them up themselves coz they are too senior to send meeting invites. They'd often 'demand' for calls.
• Reviewing team members one-by-one: This is done to either create fear among the rest when one is reviewed or just to create awareness within team of what each one is doing. Another more common reason is the difficulty of catching each person individually, so it helps setting up a call where attendance of everyone is expected. But going one-by-one is a terrible waste of time for everybody on the call. Nor are the "good" objectives met ever.
• Projecting the right "corporate" personality: In certain industries, being on calls has become synonymous with work. Also, there is a certain image that one projects in these companies and it has to manifest most prominently in the calls one attends, because that's what he/she would be known as in the company. As everyone is remote, how you appear in calls is what matters. And to matter in the ecosystem, it is generally more important to be seen/heard in the calls, especially flaunting that personality, if you think you manage to get an impactful one across. It could spin your head meeting people in person after hearing their voice for long time in calls.
• Fear of appearing incompetent: I have come across many leaders who lost the political race because of not being visible and audible enough. It's like class participation in IIMs, where students get some marks for participating in the class. When it's truly observed by the instructor, the desperation is visibly pathetic.
• Gathering a herd: Now this is especially true for the weak leaders, which is the majority of them. They like to get everyone into calls and go on and on without much of an agenda. In their fear and insecurity they end up wasting times of a lot of people. It severely impedes the efficiency of their teams and hampers the outcome.
• Networking and organizational politics getting redefined: While still a lot of effective leaders prefer traveling and meeting people to build meaningful relationships and strong networks within their organizations, companies are gradually cutting down on such travel budgets. And this makes it more and more difficult to connect with people at personal level. Small talk and gossip are getting constrained by the medium of exchange. So one has to make calls to somehow achieve a degree of bonding. There are internal text messengers too in companies, but they have very limited effectiveness - with buddies you can go hours on them in say a side-window conversation while you are working on something else, but for professional connections you tend to be strictly transactional in these messengers. Smarter conversations can happen only in calls or in person.

My sincere suggestions to those who already are and those who are now getting obsessed with conference calls are:

• Think whether a meeting is necessary and whether there are better alternatives.
• Choose meeting participants very carefully.
• Don't have any meeting longer than 30 mins. Shorter the better.
• Make sure you stick to the meeting duration.
• Define the agenda very clearly and stick to it.
• Clearly articulate the agenda and expected outcome while setting up the meeting.
• Set expectations if the participants are supposed to come prepared for the calls. E.g., everyone is expected to have read the RFP.
• Encourage participants to drop out of calls if they are not required
• Don't do brainstorming on calls. Let people share ideas beforehand offline. Have some email exchanges and then have focused discussions in calls.
• Have 1-1 call if you need to speak to 1 person at a time, like for individual status updates
• Use collaboration tools like shared spreadsheets, etc. more effectively for gathering status updates rather than getting everyone on call.
• Respect everyone's time

Clearly, conference calls are here to stay, at least for the duration of our professional lives. It would be wise, therefore, to inculcate some discipline in how we go about them, as it is now capable of having significant impact on organizational efficiency. Effective use of the medium can reduce stress levels in employees, while also making them more productive.

Do throw in your ideas on how conference calls can be made more effective and meaningful.

World post COVID-19

Today starts the 21 day full lockdown in India to fight the Coronavirus epidemic! Something like this was unimaginable just a few days back. But it's happening now and it's going to be like this for some time - may be weeks, may be months - hard to tell. When we come out of it, the world is definitely going to be very different from the one we know.

A lot of small businesses are going to die in this process. As the economy is going through a severe depression and as it would start it's recovery,  new businesses will start picking up. It'll be interesting to think about the potential opportunities in the world post recovery. Whoever gets it right would be generously rewarded, I am sure.

Here's my take on what are likely to be a few of the major changes we'll see in the post COVID-19 world:

1. Global delivery models will be seen with caution. A lot of businesses in the US and Europe are dependent on India and other offshore locations for managing their IT systems including the most business critical ones with severe business implications if they go down. Similarly, a lot of companies manufacture from China and a few other locations in Asia. The supply chains are complex and multi-country. A situation like now where every country is locking its borders and shutting down work places can bring businesses to standstill even if they are not headquartered or selling in an affected country. Also, for any country dependence on external factors for their own basic and essential services can be a huge risk when it is itself under lock down. One would like to have things in own control at times like these, rather than adding uncertainty to an already stressful situation.
2. Working from home will become the norm. A lot of companies have always talked about it, but dragged their feet when it came to implementing work-from-home for all their employees, even if was feasible for many of their roles. IT services companies, for example, could do it for many of their teams, but refrained even when it was doable because of considerations/reasons like complexity of management, network security, client data protection, poor trust on Indian employees, pleasing clients, old-style leadership, poor/slow/non-standard internet accesses at homes until recently, lot of already built infrastructure due to poor foresight, or plain belief that people sitting together are the most efficient and productive. While I do believe that some of these reasons are genuine, and that working from home is not the most efficient way of working, it seems like it will have to be given a higher share in future because of what the world is seeing now. The extent of the virus outbreak took everyone by surprise, businesses were hardly prepared with a proper work-from-home model. Future delivery models will therefore look more closely at companies' capabilities and preparedness in this regard.
3. Switch to robotics and fully automated operations. In spite of heavily leveraging technology in many of the new-age businesses like commutation, e-commerce, banking, etc., I realized now that they all are still heavily labor intensive. Machines and internet have either upgraded parts of their operations or enabled these businesses to start with, but a lot of activities are still done by humans. When there's an epidemic, if customers are able to get their basic needs from home, it makes the lock down meaningful and also keeps them less exposed to risk. But if humans have to run around to deliver these, we'll end up needing a huge army of people exposing themselves for the comfort of the rest. It therefore makes sense that companies immediately ramp up the testing and adoption of technologies like drones for delivery, fully automated warehouses, automated cars/trucks, and so on, which have so far been huge areas of research, yet have not been perfected and adopted because of one prime reason - jobs. But as businesses would crumble in the next few months in spite of huge demand but inability to supply or deliver, it will become imperative for companies to rethink technology investments for the future.
4. Countries have to either invest in massive skill building or have to breakdown under the tremendous pressure due to unemployment. As businesses rethink their supply chains and degree of labor-intensiveness, jobs are going to be lost in billions around the world. Labor arbitrage and large young population are no longer going to be competitive advantages. Especially in India, people need to get out of their comfort zones and get hands-on with basic engineering skills. It's an irony that we perhaps have one of the largest number of engineers in the world, but most of them are only engineers by degree and can hardly do basic stuff even in their areas of specialization. The quality of our tech workforce is pathetic on an average. Our ability to conduct research in an area and generate outcomes to help our masses is severely limited and under-invested. It's a shame we brag all we can, but in times of crisis we need to again look at western countries to come up with solutions. Mr. Modi would never have the confidence that Mr. Trump has in their respective countries' ability to come up with a vaccine for COVID-19, for example. Our world-class educational and research institutes are not even in a position to catch up with the global best. The same is true for many other countries like ours. In the new world, skill-building will not be optional. We won't be able to manage 7-8% GDP growth and brag about being one of the fastest growing economies, with half our population only capable of lifting weights, and most of the other half earning better due to labor arbitrage, though doing mediocre work. We say we have a lot of brain power, but sadly most of it is wasted because of the absence of platforms to nurture them.
5. Healthcare infrastructure and services need massive upgrade. Even in normal times, we are under-invested in healthcare and have far from sufficient medical staff. The current epidemic has exposed the weaknesses of even the developed world in this. We in India may fall into the common trap that if they are not well equipped, we are justified in being where we are with the 1.3bn population - which is the most stupid argument we often make to explain our backwardness to ourselves. Sadly we don't value human life enough, but this has to change if India were to be a leader in the new world order. And in fact, this is true for every country on this planet, as we now understand where we collectively and individually stand. It also exposes a huge business domain as severely under-represented in the economy. There is scope of millions of jobs here, but lack of the right policy framework to make it happen. I am optimistic that all countries will realize this soon, as it's already too late.

What are your thoughts on the how the future would look like?