….with due respect to Alistair Maclean and
Iron Maiden for stealing their title.
Imagine living as a Jew in Germany 75 years ago.
You’d sleep every night thanking God for not getting ambushed and landing in a
Concentration camp.
Imagine living in present day Syria. You’d not know
when someone would barge into your house and do unmentionable things.
Or perhaps waking up in the Guatanamo Bay.
Scary? Are your fears justified?
Cut to the present day corporate world. Swanky
offices, flashy gadgets, polished language, impeccable attire, elaborate
reports, sense of pride... very easy to miss out the underlying fear behind
every action undertaken. Or rather fear is camouflaged well behind curtains of
either arrogance, authority or obedience.
The ultimate goal in the corporate world is to keep
the shareholders assured that their money is not sitting idle. When you go to
the micro-level, it boils down to showing growth – year on year, quarter to
quarter, month over month the graph should keep pointing north. Any other
direction and the alarm starts ringing. The game is in convincing the
stakeholders that the company is doing everything possible to multiply their
wealth. Lest they face the same fate as Yahoo, whose value eroded from an
all-time high of $125 bn to a tad short of $5 bn when it got gobbled by Verizon.
And the only ways the shareholders decide on a company’s fate is through favourable
news flashed in the media or the quarterly reports emphasizing growing numbers
or rising graphs. If Microsoft had not gifted the Excel to the world – perhaps it
would have been a much peaceful place…
So here they are: clear, more or less monotonous
& clichéd, directives trickling from the top to the grass-root level:
inflate the order books, increase the revenues, maximize profitability. Period.
Shareholders are not bothered about other aspects of business like market
share, employee satisfaction, healthy work environment, transparent operations…
unless it is proudly announced and published by companies for whom people die
to work for – Google for instance.
The grass-root level is in closest contact with
reality – What’s happening in the
market? Who are the new players? How’s their killer instinct? Why they
are sounding attractive? What customers want? What’s the ground reality? Where
is the money lying? Perhaps such vital information was well received by the top
bosses in Amazon and they transformed from an online book store to a
full-fledged retailer on both web & mobile platform along with last mile
connectivity. Full marks to them for listening.
What if the market place is changing and the
feelers from the bottom of the hierarchy are ignored by the top – or maybe the
top is too obsessed with the “We are indisputable?”, “We don’t change our
rules?”, “How can the customer ignore us?”. Well, Nokia did just that before
going down the bottomless pit.
Here’s the catch: The ground staff and sometimes
middle management are in a dilemma. “Do we voice out our opinion on the
changing rules of the game?” “Will management take it negatively?” “Will we be
targeted?” “Will being honest cost me my job in the long run?”
Enter Fear. And Fear can change a person in
multiple ways. It shuts up criticism – constructive or otherwise. It quashes
new ideas – silly or earth-shattering. It compels a person to hide vital
information – good or bad. It forces manipulated projections and market share
figures. It over- shadows creativity. All of these and more because the
top-management has extensively used tools of fear as motivators: “Perform or
perish.” “Your bonus is at stake.” “Your presence is not making a difference,
perhaps your absence won’t too.”
Rolf Dobelli in “The art of thinking clearly” gives
ample examples on how our decision making gets distorted by the circumstances
under which it is made. In a non-conducive environment, every action tends to influenced
by fear. Voicing out opinions gets shadowed by speaking what others want to
hear. Healthy communication gets affected. People tend to hide facts. Slowly
fear makes way for sycophancy. If none
of these are identified on time, gradually the entire organization will be
filled with pretentious relationship and superficial respect. More so in
countries like India where respect is demanded by the title more often
than earned by their attitude.
Deepak Chopra says, “Fear does many things to a
person, but fundamentally it makes us feel insecure. Feeling secure is a most
basic necessity, because without a sense of safety, the mind is preoccupied
with threats instead of possibilities. If you go to work worrying that your job
is on the line, it's nearly impossible to look for ways to be better at your
job and approach the future creatively.”
Does that mean once you are in the corporate world,
you are stuck in the spider’s web till eternity?
Need not be. Think about it: Fear is YOUR response
to the stimulus. Whether you want it to come up or not has to be totally under
YOUR control. All it takes is to honestly tell yourself, “I’m doing my job to
the best of my capability. Me succumbing to fear is not going to increase my
efficiency by any means. What is at stake? They can, at the extreme, take away
my job. Not my confidence.” APJ Abdul Kalam said, “Love your job; not your
company, because you may not know when your company stops
loving you.”
Picture this: You are toiling in the corporate
world for the well-being of your family. On a certain day you get a threat from
both from your spouse and your boss. Choose the one you would prefer to ignore.
Paradox!
Get real…
