Startups have open offices – mostly. Everyone from the twenty year old founder to the twenty one year old employees are all sitting around in open cubicles. It is a visible symbol of a non-hierarchical work culture. In a country where hierarchy is everywhere, this comes across like a breath of fresh air and becomes a great draw while hiring. But are they really productivity boosters (because the boss can keep an eye on you) or creativity enhancers?
As if to test my resolve someone sent me a screen shot of Ola cabs who purportedly were now offering a boat service to get around the city. Look at the way humor works in the social media world. Venkatesh Krishna who tweets as @VenkatTweetz modified the Ola screen shot and suggested that a boat service would be more effective instead. That screenshot seemed to have gone viral. So there was no reason to suspect that it was someone’s idea of a joke.
Laurie Pickard (Twitter @NoPayMBA ) who now lives in Kigali, Rwanda, completed her MBA-level education using only MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). She is now telling the world how to do it through her website NoPayMBA.com and Fortune, CNN/Money, Financial Times have all talked about her idea. She created to document her studies and to serve as a resource to other learners, has been visited by readers from nearly every country in the world.
RD Burman (27 June 1939 – 4 January 1994) is an influencer in Bollywood even today. Reality shows dedicate episodes to him, channels organize special RD Music shows, his songs are part of recent movies like Aisha, Tamanchey, Race, etc, TV serials are using cover versions of his songs, not to mention the remixes of his songs. Yet the same RD had long spells towards the end when he was without work. Success and failure perhaps have to be measured beyond the life span of an artiste.
It’s not just in the workplace that we judge ourselves generously. When the weighing scale tells us that our weight is more than what it ought to be, we blame the scale. When a psychometric instrument tells us something about ourselves that we are uncomfortable with, a person will question the design of the instrument. Performance Management is hard ... very hard.
His caricatures always made a statement. Indira Gandhi was always shown with her nose in the air. Sanjay Gandhi was the "enfant terrible" in the pram wheeled by his mother. When Rajiv Gandhi came to power, Laxman was worried. After all if politicians did everything right, the satirists and cartoonists would be jobless. He said much to his relief very soon that Rajiv Gandhi did not disappoint the cartoonist. And Laxman remained a part of our lives.
