Fear is the key

….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…