Iyya

  What does M. S. Subbulakshmi have to do with trendspotting?Or G. N. Balasubramaniam with paneer pizza? Or Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer with Narayanamurthy? What, possibly, could Carnatic music maestros who started blazing trails in the first half of the 20th century have to do with modern-day business practices?

Or better still, how could they help us with stimulus to brainstorm in our office cubicles to solve market problems that we are faced with every day?

Surprisingly, quite a bit. And that’s what business innovation coach R Sridhar of IdeasRS discovered when he first picked up Voices Within, the coffee table book on Carnatic music maestros that was released a few months ago.

Reading it at one stretch, he realised within hours that here was a treasure house of entrepreneurial behaviour, way beyond music.

A couple of weeks ago, that discovery took the shape of the Voices Within Business Creativity Workshop at the Grand Hyatt in Mumbai, which was attended by over 150 senior business professionals across industries.

“The essence of what the maestros practised is a combination of certain attitudes and principles,” says Sridhar.

“They never articulated them clearly or explicitly. They were implicit in whatever they did – in their beliefs, attitude and action.”

Like Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar who sensed the time was right to bring concerts out from the temples and durbars to the sabhas that still exist today – realising the mood was shifting from reverence to entertainment he changed the concert format, taking it from very few pieces sung over six hours to many short pieces over three hours, packed with variety to satisfy the shorter attention spans.

Sighting many such principles, articulating them imaginatively in music lingo, and compiling them into a Business Creativity Workbook, Sridhar pointed out that there was enough inspiration in Voices Within to apply to any business p roblem that one chose to think about.

In a unique lecture-demonstration, TM Krishna and Bombay Jayashri, the musician-authors behind Voices Within brought alive the principles with great depth of sincerity and passion.

Setting the stage first is sadhana - contemplation and willingness to change the self. Intense Sadhana is a penance that seeks to change the self. It is the yearning for a different state beyond mediocrity.

What are you willing to change about yourself to achieve your objective is the first question one needs to ask, when faced with a challenge.

The principles span sa-re-ga-ma-pa-dha-ni.

Sruthi: Connectedness with the psychology of the audience and an understanding of value as in MS Subbulakshmi’s spirituality. Which business today can hope to survive without a basic level of connection with its target audien ce?

Based on its own attribute and ability, every business needs to find a specific life need that it can fulfil.

Ritu: Defining and defying seasons/trends and an intuitive ability to sense change as in the talkies that the musicians acted/sang in. Talking about the talkies, perhaps there is no better example of this than Bollywood itself, which s eems to have found the ability to catch social trends just as it begins to happen and reflect it, even better than marketers.

Think the return of patriotism in Rang De Basanti, think changing marriage rules in Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna, think living-in in Salaam Namaste, and so many more.

In business, think of all those who got into the right industry at the right time … be it manufacturing polyester, building residential complexes or something as simple as providing lunch boxes.

Guru: A desire to be a complete master and raise the bar to a totally unexpected and dramatic level as in T. R. Mahalingam who redesigned the flute itself or T. N. Rajarathnam Pillai who redesigned the nadaswaram. No better example here, than the film of the same name, Guru, which illustrated the story of Dhirubhai Ambani.

Misram: Combining apparently irreconcilable opposites as many of them did with their music, especially G. N. Balasubramaniam.

Examples abound of products, services and ideas in this space today … from mobile phones that are also video cameras to spirituality that can be combined with exercising; from Cindrella pavadais to sarees with pockets!

Prasna: Asking audacious, uncomfortable questions, some of these musicians made unimaginable demands of themselves, their voices, and their instruments – a unique example being Palghat Mani Iyer who could make a mridangam sing.

Surely every great business success started with an audacious question: Why can’t we put a computer in every home?

Druva: Standing apart from the crowd and achieving iconic status like Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer who went beyond just singing to innumerable other activities surrounding music to increase his circle of relevance and influence.

Many of our business leaders today are going beyond just growing their businesses to playing evangelists for their industry, and aiming to contribute to social transformation.

And Nava-Akanksha: Wishful thinking, daydreaming, sheer positivism and relentless determination that drove each and every one of the seven maestros.

Something Indians in different fields are doing today … from why can’t I create India’s largest corporation to why can’t I create the world’s largest corporation?

What is amazing is that these maestros, all those years ago, had intuitively applied such strong and enduring business principles.

Responding to the fact that many of the participants felt the music was divine, but felt there was not enough time to think through the business problems and really come up with solutions within the space and time of the workshop, Sridhar says, “We will be re-desigining the workshop to include more business examples, and lengthening the duration so as to enable more problem solving.” A by-product of the workshop was that many went away surprised Carnatic music was after all not as inaccessible as they thought it might be and charmed by the two musicians who opened their eyes to a whole new world of thinking! Adding to the delight was the fact that everyone got a copy of the book, as well as a matching Business Creativity Workbook. The take away flute, and the South Indian lunch rounded it off with flair. Voices Within was an unusual venture to start with, in that it had musicians collaborating with an advertising professional.

With Sridhar, a business innovation consultant now turning it into a workshop, the books takes on a life way beyond where it started.

(The writer, Senior Vice-President and Executive Planning Director, JWT, is also co-author of Voices Within.)

 Source: The Hindu Business Line

WHAT IS my motivation? It is the clichéd question that a washed-up schlock actor, appearing in a dire U.S. detective show as a, erm, washed-up schlock actor, might ask the soon to be bunked-off character playing the theatre director.

Hackneyed script-writing aside, it is also a question that few of us bother to ask when stuck in front of our computer screens, or on our commutes to and from being stuck at our computer screens.

But even if it’s not a question to reflect on out loud, in public places, we should consider what motivates us at work. What really made you get up this morning and trundle into the office with the sweating masses to knuckle down until five or six in the evening (and probably for the foreseeable future)? In theory, we work to clothe, feed, and shelter ourselves. But we also toil for money, power, recognition, and status.

Cupidity and narcissism are workplace drivers we all recognise — especially, it must be said, in management. Just look at the contestants who genuflect to Alan Sugar and Donald Trump on The Apprentice.

That bunch would have sold their grannies into slavery if they thought they could get away with it. But, do you think they make for happy and dedicated workers? I’d say it’s unlikely — those who over-value material success, status and power are more likely to hate office life, and be less committed at work, than those for whom helping colleagues and developing talents is a must.

Materialistic workers are doomed to misery. They feel exhausted, want to quit, experience more work-family conflict and are more dissatisfied with life in general. So says Maarten Vansteenkiste of the Centrum voor Motivatiepsychologie, University of Leuven, Belgium.

In fact, his study of 885 workers — published in this month’s Journal of Occupational and Organisational Psychology — goes even further, suggesting that seemingly covetable benefits, such as annual bonuses, are act ually counterproductive.

“Although these benefits may appear to be great motivators, paradoxically they are not,” says Mr. Vansteenkiste. “Material rewards divert employees from recognising and attaining other less tangible goals that are important for maintaining good mental health, such as good working relationships, autonomy and job satisfaction.”

These less tangible targets that Mr. Vansteenkiste identifies as important, are known as “intrinsic goals.” And according to Tim Kasser, an American psychologist, these intrinsic goals satisfy inherent psychological needs; examples include helping the wider community and friendship, things that go beyond material gain and personal power.

To become more satisfied workers, we need to focus on fulfilling these often-overlooked human needs. But no one is motivated by intrinsic goals only — those who claim to denounce materialism completely tend to be self-righteous in other ways.

To be a contented worker you need extrinsic goals, such as material gain or status, in combination with your desire to interact and grow as a person: a happy workplace needs both camps. To suggest the office “do-goods” play swap-shop with the office “do-bads” would result in a variant-free environment that would be a hell on earth. We need the money-makers and the community builders. Because, if nothing else, if we got rid of one lot, where would all the gossip come from? —

Guardian Newspapers Limited London 2007

Source: The Hindu

நோயெல்லாம் நோய்செய்தார் மேலவாம் நோய்செய்யார்
நோயின்மை வேண்டு பவர்.

 mathavangallukku theemai nenaicha njoi varum….

THE faithful — of divinity or whatever is its opposite — sometimes have no option but to inhabit artificial extremes of the language they best know. Consider “singularity” for example. In astrophysics and cosmology it means a point in space-time at which gravitational forces cause matter to have infinite density and infinitesimal volume, and space and time to become infinitely distorted. But seriously, does this really mean anything to anyone besides rousing in them the awesome inference that everything can get confined to a point which virtually doesn’t exist? Yet we are told to live with the fact that not only does it do so but in the process also creates existences out of it.
   Such as black holes, for instance. Matter which falls into one gets squeezed and squished till it has no more dimensions left and apparently drops out of being by getting relegated to a singular state. What happens to it thereafter is a physicist’s choice of words, once more. Ditto the Big Bang. Here we have to imagine a condition of some no-thing which was in “existence” at a point of time about 14 billion years ago which became active all of a sudden and produced an abrupt inflation outwards that saw the creation of space, matter and time and everything else around that goes with it. Though for what reason, and why, we are not informed by people who are not informed about it either.
   They say it’s due to something consisting of three more words: “quantum vacuum fluctuation”. This is the belief that things — including even the entire universe — can arise from nothing via natural processes because in the quantum microworld energy can appear and disappear out of nowhere in a spontaneous and unpredictable fashion.
   So where did all the matter come from in the first place? Physicist Paul Davies would have us believe the whole show began as a perfect void and that all the particles of the material world were created from the expansion of that. (One must remember to ask Prof Davies what he means by the word “began” here.) In any case, how is this so much different from the old Sioux American-Indian belief that matter is a part of un-matter which manifests itself and vanishes unto itself again to reappear one more time and fade out and so on and so forth ad infinitum? Speculative philosophy is one thing. But when it consists of man trying to stand outside himself and his experience in order to put it into words and define it, it gets dicey.

Source: The Economic Times