“Various factors like loss of sleep, disturbed biological clock, etc., make both men and women more prone to cardiovascular diseases” — Dr Nirmal Kumar, Senior Interventional Cardiologist, Care Hospital, HyderabadBy Meera SethJAFFER NENZEE HELD HISAudience of seven with his interpretation of health management. It was 3 a.m. and the Indian R&D team was chatting online. John Kramer’s sudden demise had made life surreal for them all. John was one of them even if their senior. People like them did not just crumble and die. Now they were all very ‘suspicious’ of his death. ‘...carelessness, neglect, competitive aggression, greed’ — they ascribed these suspects to the Luxetta management.The story of John had been unfolding a bit every day as those in the US who attended his funeral and then the prayer services each came back with a bit of John.Although John had announced his move to Asia as head of Asian R&D as early as a month ago, it now transpired that his move had been in discussion since as much as a year ago. But there had been so much internal politicking, as Graham (from the European team) called it.It had all begun with the previous head of Asian R&D, Ken William, resigning and John getting deputed to Asia Pacific to take charge as Asia had a number of products in research and diagnostics. This was a deputation to begin with. But Graham detailed the political mess: “It was the first of a series of experiments by Luxetta Europe, (the R&D HQ) in leadership development and training for potential high-performance directors in the group. So, Europe decided John should ‘train’ in Asia overseen by Europe. However, John had his own responsibilities in the US, where he worked under David Fraser, Global Brand Management Team, work that he did not want to give up. And, of course, his young family too.“And so, he got Europe to agree to allow him to position a chap based in Singapore as the leader of the Asian group. That would give him time to tie up loose ends in the US to help David.”It was rumoured that David was on his way out — having nice-guy John with him would help him leave without losing his superannuation.Luxetta, at first, decided that Ken will not be directly replaced. Europe wanted to retain control on APac and tried bringing APac under Europe, “This I have from Harry (global R&D head) directly after two pegs,” said Graham. “But that did not work too well as no one from Europe wished to go to Asia.”Then, Herman Frescher (heading Europe R&D) decided he would appoint an APac team and jointly they would manage Asia — that also failed. Then they added APac to John Kramer’s portfolio and told him to manage it. But John was unable to give up his US portfolio because his CEO had not been able to replace him.... So, John placed a subordinate (Martin Slavski) in Singapore to mind the APac team while he could straddle US more comfortably.So, John was also a victim of the competition and ambition and the pressure to stay on top, a condition that organisations unleash on people. This was Graham’s verdict.“This whole experiment, however, ended up with a team that was dispirited and extremely critical of both Frescher and John,” said Graham.Between John the de jure boss and Martin Slavski the de facto boss who tried very hard to be a friend, the team was very frustrated. India cribbed occasionally when Martin put them on hold to check with John. But for the most part India was ok as John was also in e-mail touch with many of the product teams.Subeer Bhattacharya (R&D India) could now see how John had been moved around and around and around. How John had been finally sent to Singapore, with direct full-time responsibility for the region. As a strong member of the leadership team at the corporate office, and with several key relationships, John was influential and high on innovation, thanks to his product experience.As for John, he was greatly relieved when his appointment was finally announced, for he would no more need to rush between regions and bosses and teams. The last three months of the experiment had taken him very far away from his children and made his life very difficult, to say the least. He was sitting in the US, managing Asia with a strategic responsibility for Europe.Most of the time John did not know whether he was coming or going.After the usual initial few months of conflict, John had settled in, but he was having to run back to Dallas to wrap up and clean up.... add to which he also had to go pay homage to Frescher (Europe) to update him on how well he was salvaging APac...In this midst, he fell sick repeatedly, apparently some regional flu. He delayed his move to Singapore, citing work that still needed to be completed from his previous role.Finally, his move was announced and John started running around chasing school admissions mid term which was tough in Asia that looked down upon such things.Every few weeks, John would find he was back in the US for meetings, etc. India meanwhile was going through the planning cycle and needed John. But he was unable to give them continuous attention. Twice, his visit was cancelled.And now Nalpat said, “With John gone, there is no one who understands the complexity of the markets in this region, all the new direction is extremely US- centric or focused on the developed countries in Europe.”Graham: Why did Ken resign? Anyone knows?Nalpat: Ken left very, very suddenly. No, there is no known story. There was no succession for Ken in place; apparently, John was the fastest solution. But now he too is not available… this is depressing. I heard today that priority areas for APac highlighted by John have been shut down, mostly because the new team of leaders refuse to continue initiatives that John had started.John was clearly under a lot of stress they all saw. The Indian team pontificated opening up the law of karma… tied themselves into knots as fear took over… then rationality prevailed and that is the point when they began to ask, “Didn’t John see it coming? Didn’t Harry see it coming?”The Indian team went into a silent introspection. Had they added to John’s stress? Subeer was very devastated by the very idea that he may have pushed a bit more… The discussion now moved to the lunch room of Luxetta India.Nalpat: Being in three different regions must be so disorienting! Working out of Europe, working out of the US, was supposed to move to Asia, everyone has been in touch with him constantly… didn’t something show up? Some kind of breakdown? Didn’t HR do his medicals?Subeer: What about us? How regular are we about our medical check-ups…?Then they went down that path. HR had annual medical check-ups tied up with five-star hospitals and it was up to the employees to avail of them. Some did; some did not. The latter said they were travelling so much that keeping appointments was the biggest challenge. They talked about how despite knowing everything we do not take our health seriously.Arundhati: Late night working is a daily habit, not an exception. That means going out for a drink, smoking, eating trash from convenient places… We say let’s have a mild snack, and then eat fried kachoris, samosas, pav bhaji. You forget your system cannot deal well with all this. You are leading a bad lifestyle anyway working 20 hours, no exercises, the least you can do is eat healthy!This kind of talk gathered girth.Bhamini Vaidya: Health discipline. That is the key. This body is not a dustbin! There is a lot more to be done by the individual. Even I am a victim of this corporate lethargy. I used to be regular. The entire stress of a project you are working on grips you…. when a project is on you think of nothing else… Subeer: I enrolled for yoga, paid my fees, but I barely go for class once a week. But I fool myself thinking that I am into a fitness discipline. Even the gym, you go once and after that you have a late evening at work, or the IPL and boom. It’s over. If someone asks do you gym? You say, ‘Yeah, I gym…!’ looking so holier than thou, even if you are going only once a month. Food too, you will buy all that is needed like an air fryer, sprouts… but you are not eating anything right. You think you have started eating healthy but you are never home to eat it. So, what is discipline?HR Head Jaggan Mittha came down on them heavily.Jaggan: Laziness is also an addiction. Is there a cure for laziness? So then it is an attitude and if you are attitudinally indisciplined, you will readily blame anyone for your failures.A large part of this is health discipline at school level. Schools that serve chana bhatura for lunch are criminals killing the health attitudes. Those who got their health disciplines at schools are most likely those who continue it at 40. For them there is no battle with the mind. Their body is already in cooperation.Nalpat: You need to have a fitness regime. How healthy are the choices you make? People feel gym is for body building, for developing biceps and six packs. Gym is meant to oil your system into a fitness that everyday life does not bring about.Arundhati: True. One of the things I tell my mom is that given the manner in which we Indians overcook and kill our food, and that osteoporosis is high among Asian-Indian women, she must lift light weights. She says I don’t want muscles, and I tell her no, here you are actually activating the osteosynthesis of your bones which in general will not be activated unless you put some mechanical pressure. There is scientific reason but mom is unbelieving. So, I think it goes beyond discipline — to understanding your body.And so on, each employee gave release to his and her anxiety over John’s absurd demise, talking about his and her correct approach to fitness and health.But back with John Kramer, they asked, given he swam regularly, played squash every morning… his heart should have been strong, so what went wrong?So they said, much to Jaggan’s chagrin, ‘Is HR paying enough attention to health?’. More arguments flew at him – after all, humans are assets, they have to be maintained as well as you maintain your machines. You have an AMC for all of them, we do have an AMC for human assets, but is HR auditing to see what the feedback is or the test results are? I go for a check-up and come back with xyz on my blood, my pathology is showing a pattern in many ways, but are you looking at the trend to see over my last three reports if there is a deterioration? Shouldn’t you be doing that?Jaggan: HR cannot do this. There is a regulatory aspect to it. In the US patient privacy... HR has no right to ask anyone about his medical reports. HR can provide health care. But it cannot enquire into the test results.Divya: Ah, so, who did John belong to? Asia or US? John had a condition which HR could not know because of this privacy nonsense. Then why pay? If you are not going to use the results to keep employees fit, and goad them to fall into a health pattern then why pay at all? I don’t know why we have to follow everything the Americans do? Eating pasta and pizza is harmless, but to imbibe behaviours like this is very bothersome.Jaggan: I don’t understand. Why can’t you take action on your own health report? Your health is owned by you, not the organisation. Why do you want Luxetta to be responsible?There are fat deposits on your liver, or cholesterol build up, the physician at the clinic is analysing your test results for you, he is telling you what to eat, then that is what you have to eat! Who is to be blamed? HR is an enabler, not mom!Jaffer: I buy your argument Jaggan, but I also see merit in Divya’s argument. What happened to Madhav? Did HR analyse? I do think you need to. What led to Madhav’s brain haemorrhage and subsequent paralysis? Cardiac and stress build up is one thing that organisation must take responsibility for.John was being moved around like a pawn on the chess board, because there were two regions that were wanting to hold on to him. This was adding to his stress. He didn’t want to deal with so much, but he was dealing with so much. He internalised a lot. Is that what happened to Madhav?Jaggan: We do not know John’s personal life. To attribute work stress and work load as being the driver of cardiac health is speculative. Need not always be work related, it could be personal in nature.When you come to work, you have to leave your emotions outside.Divya: Now, we are in the realms of the absurd, Jaggan. Man is not a robot. He pushes personal below and brings work to the surface when he gets off the office lift. Both reside in the same mind. Where do you get this nonsense about leave your emotions outside?Subeer: Isn’t goodness an emotion you carry as an underlying substratum of your work persona as well? The organisation wants success and the individual ends up paying for it. What happened to Madhav? What caused his stroke?Jaggan: The individual too has a need for achievement. He has the option to go to HR and saying to them that things are going beyond control, that people are treating me badly…I am being overworked.…Divya: Don’t be silly. Nobody does that!Jaggan: This is exaggeration and pretty primitive. In reality, the whole logic of work-life balance is misunderstood as all play and no work. And let me clarify Madhav’s health. He was hit by Carotid Artery disease.He had plaque build-up that resulted in a stroke. Madhav’s health check had revealed plaque in his carotid artery and he was asked to cut his weight. Overweight and high blood pressure together needed lifestyle changes in diet and exercising. So, yes, Madhav could have prevented the stroke.Divya: And Madhav’s high BP was not a function of stress? You forget that sometimes your boss can be without focus – groping in the dark for an absent black cat… wasting time.Jaggan: And why is that? I will establish my point. You may have heard that women deliver higher productivity. The reason is that women have a greater sense of purpose to get back home at a certain time for a variety of reasons: obligations at home, kids, but I have seen that more than obligations at home it is to do with the safety on the streets, so get back by 7 p.m. Because these are forced upon women; if not, it is a child, or an ailing in-law… or family will wait for dinner… whatever it be, but because of these social barriers, the available time for work is so valued and so well organised that they actually end up being greatly productive, because they do not want to give a social excuse for failure (that my child is unwell or my mother-in-law will freak out). In contrast, men have the greatest need for a coffee break, smoking break, or chatting breaks, want-to-stretch-my legs break…Durgesh: Nice, but it still holds good that if my boss is stretching his legs I pay for it. My boss likes to work till 11 p.m. I don’t. I like getting home in time to play with my kids. Or pray with them. But my boss is usually at a loss for focus. If he wants to sit late and smoke, I have to sit too... and very often we don’t even know what he is searching for. One of the problems here has been the competition we have been facing from China and it almost seems to us that China is getting ahead of us so we have to get ahead of them, spy versus spy. So any product development we do is incompletely done and when the product is launched some small gaffe shows up.Subeer: Your work lifestyle is responsible often, Jaggan, we cannot pretend it is all about individual efficiency. And work lifestyle is set by the organisation. John travelled 70 per cent of a month. Even 80 per cent. It disrupted his life style, his life cycle and whether he knew that or not, is not critical. But HR has to know that people who travel 25 days a month are high risk. Your job is very, very taxing on two counts: being time demanding and two, being very taxing to the mind, where there is a higher level of intellectual complexity involved in your job. This could be interpersonally taxing, or even intellectually taxing. Madhav had a weight problem, no doubt. But a lot of his lifestyle was motivated by his work.Jaggan: It is not nice to discuss an unwell person, but I do feel Madhav needed to have taken his last health check up seriously and changed his diet. We all need a peg to hang our woes. HR is handy. But isn’t one of the serious drawbacks of man his inability to take responsibility? Why do you need to be told to ‘take care’, ‘be good’, ‘don’t overeat’…?Arundhati: Jaggan, we cannot be in denial. HR often drives people to perform at a manic pace in the name of competitive pressures, but it is the human machine that burns out. Very simply, why was John serving 3 masters —Harry the global R&D, Frescher in Europe and Fraser in the US? Didn’t it strike someone that this is unpleasant? The cost of health care of a company lies in its ability to maintain its human assets emotionally and physically. Organisations have a duty to be alert to this.So, then, we come to assuming responsibility. How do we make this audit a core part of organisation habits?To be continued...casestudymeera@gmail.com(This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 07-09-2015)
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The core purpose of HR should be to safeguard, develop and nurture the most important asset of the company — its employees, writes Prof. Mala SinhaLuxetta’s strategic approach to gain competitive advantage is outward looking, which means adjusting the organisation’s relationship with external environment by changing structure or repositioning products and services. The fallout of this approach is that even when products are unfinished and have technical glitches, they are launched in markets to be in time with, perhaps, a festive season, be first among competitors , or simply to ‘beat the Chinese’. For this reason, in the past, a noiseless juicer that Luxetta had launched failed in three markets and had to be withdrawn. Now, market intelligence had indicated that competition was ready with three new products in refrigeration section: making the marketing department push for early launch of the technologically advanced five-door refrigerator, Liza Extra, even though its ice dispenser unit — also supposed to be the ‘wow ‘ feature of the product — was giving problems. The R&D and production people were resisting, and felt this move to be a recipe for disaster.An outward strategic approach is essentially reactive and stems from inherent insecurity due to uncertainty regarding the external environment — more prevalent in case of European and US-owned multinationals when they are dealing with Asian economies. At Luxetta, the strategy is also blinkered by centralised control mindset, possibly a colonial hang over, with little trust for people from APac. Thus, when Ken Williams, the previous head of Asian R&D resigns, instead of mentoring local talent from Asia, though there is a half-hearted and therefore a failed attempt to do this, the company deputes John Kramer based in US after year-long bickering. This is strategically a bad decision because John will now be even more stretched by responsibilities straddling US, Europe and now APac , while simultaneously reporting to three bosses. In order to make life a little easier, John gets the company to agree to a suboptimal solution like appointing a junior in Singapore, who would report to him, while he himself would be based in US. This move ends up causing several complicated and inefficient lines of communication to develop among the APac countries, Europe and US, leading to delays in decision making which further strained the system. Prof. Mala SinhaOrganisations benefit from an inward looking strategic approach, which focuses on their core purpose, embodied as products and services, meant to serve specific needs of stakeholders in a particular way the organisations know best. In case of Luxetta, the central purpose of the organisation is producing top quality and technologically advanced home appliances, and therefore all systems, processes and people resources should be focused primarily to fulfilling this objective. When strategic intent deviates from organisation’s core purpose and decisions are guided by secondary concerns such as being first in the market, or beating the Chinese, among others, there is misalignment of people, processes and products, which leads to adverse consequences. At Luxetta, the strategy is determined by a desire to retain European control of APac operations, and rather than nurturing Asian talent, which, with their greater depth of understanding of Asian markets and culture would be more capable of serving the central purpose of the organisation, deputes an overworked westerner to APac.An incident from Jaipur Rugs, an Indian SME that has won several prestigious national and international awards for excellence is illustrative. Traditionally, the company gave designs for carpets and rugs (in demand by western markets) to weavers in India, but this time CMD N.K. Choudhary asked 10 weavers to create their own design — essentially make a carpet based on their own creative insights. After completion, when the carpets were exported and put on sale at High Point Market in North Carolina, US (one of the world’s largest centres for home furnishing where over 2,000 suppliers exhibit wares at a time), seven of the 10 carpets were sold within an hour of being unpacked. The inward approach of aligning processes and markets with weavers’ competence, rather than the other way round, resulted in the creation of top-class products that got instant recognition from external stakeholders —the customers. Anchoring the organisation’s strategy to mavericks of market forces and uncertainty brought about by rapid and unpredictable technology change makes the organisation strategically directionless.By the same analogy, the HR strategy at Luxetta is also outward looking. The core purpose of HR should be to safeguard, develop and nurture the most important asset of the company — its employees, in a way that the larger and overall purpose of the organization can be effectively served. HR should have been the first to worry about John’s wellbeing, and the first to question the rationality of making a person travel across the globe for greater part of the month, deal with idiosyncrasies of three bosses and juggle two seemingly bipolar hats — brand management and R&D.The maintenance engineer while taking care of company’s physical assets increases efficiency by mechanical precision and documenting data, but HR, which deals with intangibles of human nature has to be more creative in sense making. The approach of HR towards annual health checks of employees at Luxetta is documenting and informing, wherein it should have been discerning patterns in the state of health of the organisation’s human capital, and counselling. HR should also motivate people to be conscious of their health, and had Madhav been counselled by food and exercise therapists, he may have realised the seriousness of his medical condition and taken remedial steps that could have averted the brain hemorrhage he ended up with. People are paid to work for the organisation, and therefore worrying about themselves often takes a back seat. Good health maintenance can be incentivised as happens with defence personnel, where poor physical fitness impacts promotions as medical category goes down. The services know that soldiers and officers have to be physically fit to be able to do the job for which they are hired. John was a valuable asset, he was handling two critical functions — R&D responsible for producing high quality home appliances — the core of Luxetta; and branding which is essential to survive in a competitive environment.What are the limits of corporate responsibility towards the health of an employee? In the context of heated global competitiveness due to the economic success of emerging economies, consumerism and greater material and stimulation needs of populations, corporate work life has become more stressful. Abetted by principal-agency nexus comprising of faster returns to shareholders compensated by hefty corporate salaries, perks and bonuses, corporate stress levels have increased exponentially, making it difficult for individuals to deal with it on their own. HR must play a greater, nay, a more sense-making role in corporations. Performance criteria should also include good health — we want people who are both productive and healthful and perhaps even the balance sheet can report on these matters. Radical changes in the way companies are trying to reduce performance appraisal linked stress are on the anvil. Accenture CEO Pierre Nanterme recently told The Washington Post that starting in September, the performance of the company’s 330,000 staffers will no longer be judged based on company rankings and annual evaluations, but on a more fluid system. The irrationality of forced ranking along distribution curves will be abandoned and people will be evaluated for their role, and not vis-à-vis someone else who might work in Washington or Bangalore.Finally, the case indirectly questions the limits of western values like individualism, free will and autonomy, which are fast becoming the values of new age aspirational Asians too. John was on fast track of personal growth and treated every added responsibility as an opportunity in this direction. He was individualistic and his wife’s observation at the funeral that ‘he took to heart if he missed soccer game with kids’ was perhaps compensatory concern towards the family; and the fact that ‘he was always smiling’ and never shared with his wife the considerable problems at Luxetta showed John did not relax at home. John Kramer was perpetually on a centrifugal spin and had forgotten to be still and listen to his body. The markers of the stressful life he was leading were present, only he never recognised them. The writer teaches Business Ethics, CSR and Leadership through Asian Values at Faculty of Management Studies, University of Delhimala.sinha@fms.edu(This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 07-09-2015)
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While the algorithm to resolve dilemmas may be impossible to crack, some frameworks can be adopted to offer clarity in making wise choices, writes Vineet Kapoor
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Subeer Bhattacharya grabbed his mobile phone and peered at who was calling. It was 4.40 a.m. The name was not clear. He reached for his glasses. It was Arundhati Raina. So early? People have gone mad. Maybe she was still in the lab? “What happened?” he asked worried.Arundhati: Harry has called for a video conference at 5 a.m. our time. Be there!Subeer was confused. Why an unscheduled meeting? He opened his mailbox on his phone and saw an invitation from Harry Sugarman, Luxetta’s global head of Product R&D (research & development). The meeting would start in 20 minutes, and the entire global R&D team was invited. He dialled in and saw that very few of the Indian staff were on the call. After all, there was not much notice given…A few desultory side chats started up, as they waited for Harry to come on and start the meeting. No one knew why this meeting had been called and at such a time. There had been rumours of a management change. There were rumours that a few people would be laid off. A few product developments had gone awry or at least that was the verdict. The entire energy was negative, there was a lot of tension in the air. The annual R&D team meeting had not been held this year. Budget cuts, they said. Vacant positions had not been filled for over a year and everyone was stretched. Often they did work that they were not actually qualified to do….Subeer yawned. He had come home at 3 a.m. after an R&D audit — an accessory on a home appliance had been found to be faulty after the launch and the heat had been turned on by marketing. If it was not rework then it was because ‘technology changed while you were brushing your teeth …’The entire R&D team at Luxetta had been living on the edge for over a year. New technologies were coming at R&D every day. Jamie from the European region was yawning too as he said, “SOS meeting was called last night; someone in the auto industry invented something and suddenly there was this idea that ‘it could be borrowed into one of our products to make it more interesting’. (Others laughed) Seriously! None of us knew what it was about and yet, we were all giving an opinion about it. We were all having these conversations and getting super worked up about it, and reading up on it. But seldom do we pause to ask the question, ‘Is it really necessary to load more features onto a refrigerator or microwave oven, even if it sounds like a grand idea?”Subeer: Crazy times. Our managers are being pushed to squeeze more productivity out of all of us, so working in areas that were not our specialisation. We would be passed off as experts to the 3P vendors to give them specifications for product design. No idea what they were asking about but we would emphasise the learning and then brainstorm with friends in industry, old colleagues, classmates, whoever we could find.Of course, sometimes this resulted in hilarious situations like when Govind got some numbers mixed up and blew up the prototype of C16-8X that was nearly ready for marketing to comment on. We lost weeks of work and, of course, the frustration got to all of us.Nalpat: Oh, yes, there was even this time when someone sabotaged the computer that Andre was working on. We were all very stressed.Graham: And John (Kramer, head of Europe R&D), the star of the organisation in the eyes of the CEO, was turning cartwheels trying to meet the growing and larger than life global expectations. It is absurd. But super hero that he is, he made no mistakes.Bill Denver (Florida, USA): Not a good super hero though. I had heard from his previous team in the US that he passed on most of that stress to them, asking them to perform unrealistic tasks in unrealistic time frames, asking them for answers to questions that they had no idea about, and all that “in the next two hours”. He has been pretty manic.Subeer heard them through his half sleepy state. He did not think John passed the buck. He liked John. On impulse he said, “We like John. He is going to spend three months in a year in India. He has spunk.Arundhati (interrupting): …and the raw end of the US’ convoluted strategy…Bill: How do you mean? I am US …Arundhati: HQ expectations have been rising higher every quarter. We are working odd hours to keep pace with work. We have to work with teams in other parts of the world in order to help them meet those tough deadlines. Come on, what is all this if not convoluted?the announcement had come a week ago. John was moving to Asia. John Kramer, head of Europe region’s R&D, was moving to Asia. (but John was the rope in a tug of war … More on that later). He had chosen Indonesia as headquarter, but was toying with India too. He loved India, really loved India. But the clutter was insane he said. Just too much of everything and the traffic. But he would work summers in India when most people went away on vacation. The load will be less, he had laughed. Jenna in New Delhi was already talking to some real estate chaps in Vasant Vihar and Gurgaon. John had said he would like to be close to a golf course.So, what did John’s move herald? Someone said John was likely not happy with the move. More speculation flew around.The call started and Harry Sugarman thanked everyone for being on the call. He then broke the news: John, the new Asia regional head, had died a few hours ago following a massive heart attack.A chorus of gasps left the 11 who were online and for some time there was chaos. Harry had expected this. He waited as the incredulous teams expressed shock in turns.Subeer sliced the cacophony when he said, “I don’t believe this at all! Just last week we were talking. He had seemed so excited to come to the region from the US. He had never lived in Asia before and the variety of the work we were doing seemed to interest him a lot. He would be moving over in about 20 days’ time and had discussed with the local staff the various possible housing options before him. And here … O boy!Jamie: What happened? How come … I mean, what happened?Harry: A sudden heart attack, a massive one. Not sure what led to it. May be runs in the family…Joshua: Brought on by work-related stress, clearly.This was the first thought that had come to Subeer too. John was hit by a silent killer. But Madhav? Was Madhav’s paralysis also a silent stalker that pervades some stressed out lives?Harry said the entire region in Europe was overcome. They did not want John to go and he had said they should try and hold him back … he was being funny.Or was he? The many computers that held on to Harry’s had one question, “Did you not see it coming?”Harry took a deep breath and said, “John had seemed so enthusiastic about his move to Asia, how could you not believe him? He has been nuts about Indonesia all his life and here it was coming true. He had turned some brilliant work for Kitch (Luxetta’s home appliances product division) in the last two weeks, that our CEO Marcus Marsh had commended — you should watch the video of John’s wonderful presentation at the worldwide conference last month — he was in form! And all in all, he seemed to have an infinite amount of energy to do all the things he was doing. He did not look like a man harbouring any illness. What happened was sudden, he had not complained of any symptoms until then.”Subeer thought. A massive heart attack happened because of some neglect. Either knowingly or unknowingly and both were controllable factors to a very large extent, he thought. But there must have been some symptom, some prelude…The funeral took place the next day with a whole lot of people from the company attending. News filtered in from some colleagues who had met John’s wife Mariann. She told them that John had been having occasional discomfort in the neck and jaw and there had been shortness of breath after some soccer games he played with the boys. “But we never once thought he was ‘unwell’ or needed help. Rather unusual for him,” she had said and added, “I wish I had taken that seriously.” But because John was 6’7, he alluded that to his cervical pain brought on by too much work in the lab. “He told me he would be better once we moved to Asia,” said Mariann. “I just had not shared this with his co-workers, after all any admission of sickness would be a wimpish thing to do. Moreover, the CEO had said he depended on John to turn things around at Kitch, which was facing so much competition — John was telling me. And this high visibility event at which they both presented the latest breakthrough idea, meant so much to John. He kept telling me that the idea launch could not wait as ‘we have to be the first to enter the market with the idea’.”Mariann’s words held some pointers to the pressures on John but they were pressures in the course of business, most felt.Luxetta Worldwide had been experiencing a churn for some time. The Chinese market had put paid to some of its key initiatives or so Luxetta bosses claimed in conferences. Last year, Luxetta’s competitors from China had stolen a march over them. “Someone even said that the Chinese competitor had simply hired our entire senior research team, leaving us high and dry just as we were getting close to the end product,” Graham had told Subeer. “We were under pressure from our shareholders and board to show some quick results.”That situation had soon resulted in the entire global company becoming one large pressure cooker. Tempers flew, global R&D head Harry had a tiff with CEO Marcus, he was sidelined for a few months, which then gave rise to rumours that the new R&D diagnostics division would be shut down. Luxetta had set up a new diagnostics R&D division to include new product development diagnostics, which also examined post-purchase usage, consumer disappointment and particularly usage situation behaviours.A flurry of activity got generated by the seeming fluster and frustration hitting Luxetta. Unproductive conversations, pointless speculations … and some of the younger folks started scanning job sites for newer opportunities. Some in R&D also moved to sales in sheer desperation. It was sad, because some were thorough misfits in the sales organisation, and the stress quotient shot up carrying the ripple all over the organisation.Luxetta was hurting everywhere. The China bogeyman reared its head up every now and then. So every meeting would have flavours of : ‘Now China has launched it but in a shorter time. So we must cut short our development time and R&D must also take responsibility for quality.’This had been John’s nemesis — speed versus quality.Everyone wanted new packaging, new product, and they wanted it ‘now’. And if you delivered ‘today’ but your product failed on quality, then you were told you are a hard worker but not a smart worker. It was funny how nobody was willing to face failure. Subeer told Graham, “I know we work for success, sure. But if something fails, we have never been willing to examine and study the failure. It is absurd how people go off the handle! Nobody wants negative fallout on a brand. Do you know our noiseless juicer failed in three markets rather badly and was withdrawn from the market but marketing carried it on the website anyway? Because we were in denial, we did not want to admit our juicer had failed.”Technology was changing so fast that it had them gasping. Technology was not just ‘convenience’; that was primitive and ‘old fashioned village talk’. Technology was deconstructing existing businesses and in some cases demolishing them. No doubt it was also creating new markets as in the case of cell phones, and naturally a crazy, large segment of new users, which is what made business even more efficient and lives more productive, but then looking at some of the debris, John and his team had been aghast and often floundered when they had to recommend new product ideas because even as it remained in research, chances were somebody was already standing there with a hammer that would come down heavily as soon as the next technologically fabulous product was in the market.For example, just yesterday in India, exactly this played out much to the confusion of R&D. There was this fabulous five-door refrigerator which John and his team had kept in research for three years. In 1980, ‘three years in research’ would have won them bonuses and gold medals. In 2013, John nearly lost his job for not pulling the refrigerator into the market faster.So the Liza Extra, the fabulous multi-door with a central panel that stored wine, which was meant to knock the winds off the sails of three competing brands, failed in the test round as the through-the-door ice and water dispenser feature failed again and again…and again. John had been unhappy with the failures but he was unwilling to push it into the market. He had said that this one feature would ruin the brand name as these were the most repair prone parts of the fridge. And there had been an argument over whether the ice-dispenser was a male thing or a female expression of convenience too and many veered to the view that ice-through-door was the cool-factor that men sought for it allowed them to enter the kitchen and seem like self-help kings which they were not.John had laughed then. He agreed. His footfall would increase in the kitchen as a result but, jokes aside, he didn’t want the product to be declared a failure as a result. He had explained to marketing that if the door dispenser failed as it was prone to, the whole contraption on the door was going to be the ad for the fridge. “Imagine your young lady friend walks up to the fridge to shake some ice into her glass and you say, Oh-oh, honey, the ice thingy is temporarily out of order…. And her eyes go straight to the brand name…. you want that?”Marketing had said he was overstating a small feature problem but when John took it to his team they were angry.John’s Europe team — Joey, Sally, Theo and Larry — was indignant. Graham, part of the support team of this same team shared with the rest on Hangout: “We had worked on this thing for months and were proud of it. We wanted to see the product succeed. Every time I see a Kitch product in the multi-brand stores on my way home, I swagger just that little bit. I know my department has had a role to play in creating those beauties.... So, when John came back and said that marketing wanted to get the thing into production right away, we were mortified. ‘How can you allow this to happen, John?’ everyone yelled. John explained the importance of getting it out — the MR team had intelligence that showed at least three other brands were about to announce their products this year-end and our company was behind on schedules. No, the problem had to be fixed. But Sally and Theo were certain it wasn’t a design issue. It was in engineering and production…”Raul Magor from the Washington team had also been at John’s funeral. Raul now shared the discussion he heard the others have, as he stood by politely. There had been Mariann, John’s wife, Harry and Sara Woods from Operations. Mariann was saying, “He never talked detail, he was always a smiling, ‘Hi honey’ kind of person, loved the kids to distraction, took it to heart when he missed their soccer game… so he was not going to sit and tell me this went wrong or that. But he asked me if I cared about an ice dispenser on my fridge...Later, you Harry, told me there had been a battle over the ice dispenser?”At another web meeting three days after the funeral, people had the same questions. Today Nalpat from India asked, “Harry, never mind the ice dispenser. Are we saying John was under stress? Are we saying the ice thing built his blood pressure upwards? Or are we saying he had a proneness to hypertension? Which one is it?Harry: His last medical tests had shown his BP was erratic. So, he was on mild medication.Jaffer Nenzee: It had to be much more to knock him out for good.But they sat alone in their work stations after the lights on their laptops had been shut… each one roasting in the confusion of John’s sudden passing. What the hell, they thought. It is not that they did not know of life’s unpredictablility but they knew that some things were so easily predicted. Such as their own product sales. Such as stress and the heart’s response. Then what was a company like theirs, that was known the world over for its technological greatness, limply falling prey to a cardiac arrest? This was immensely stupid.Jaffer called his doctor Dr Nathani, “Doc saab, our boss who was to move to Asia and who has been in touch with us almost round the clock, just died of a massive heart attack. Are these things so silent and secretive?”Dr Nathani: In today’s day and age to die of cardiac conditions is easy and difficult as well. Easy, if you are a careless idiot. Difficult if you know the simple rules of the game. There are rules of diet and discipline and respect for the body machinery. It is as simple as that. But it demands discipline.Jaffer: That is what is tough. Work keeps me till 9, 10 p.m.… I eat dinner at 11… what should I do?Dr Nathani: I can tell you, but will you do it? Quit your job!But John had instead quit life ….. no, this was not as simple as that, felt Jaffer. To be continued...casestudymeera@gmail.com(This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 24-08-2015)
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Subeer Bhattacharya grabbed his mobile phone and peered at who was calling. It was 4.40 a.m. The name was not clear. He reached for his glasses. It was Arundhati Raina. So early? People have gone mad. Maybe she was still in the lab? “What happened?” he asked worried.Arundhati: Harry has called for a video conference at 5 a.m. our time. Be there!Subeer was confused. Why an unscheduled meeting? He opened his mailbox on his phone and saw an invitation from Harry Sugarman, Luxetta’s global head of Product R&D (research & development). The meeting would start in 20 minutes, and the entire global R&D team was invited. He dialled in and saw that very few of the Indian staff were on the call. After all, there was not much notice given…A few desultory side chats started up, as they waited for Harry to come on and start the meeting. No one knew why this meeting had been called and at such a time. There had been rumours of a management change. There were rumours that a few people would be laid off. A few product developments had gone awry or at least that was the verdict. The entire energy was negative, there was a lot of tension in the air. The annual R&D team meeting had not been held this year. Budget cuts, they said. Vacant positions had not been filled for over a year and everyone was stretched. Often they did work that they were not actually qualified to do….Subeer yawned. He had come home at 3 a.m. after an R&D audit — an accessory on a home appliance had been found to be faulty after the launch and the heat had been turned on by marketing. If it was not rework then it was because ‘technology changed while you were brushing your teeth …’The entire R&D team at Luxetta had been living on the edge for over a year. New technologies were coming at R&D every day. Jamie from the European region was yawning too as he said, “SOS meeting was called last night; someone in the auto industry invented something and suddenly there was this idea that ‘it could be borrowed into one of our products to make it more interesting’. (Others laughed) Seriously! None of us knew what it was about and yet, we were all giving an opinion about it. We were all having these conversations and getting super worked up about it, and reading up on it. But seldom do we pause to ask the question, ‘Is it really necessary to load more features onto a refrigerator or microwave oven, even if it sounds like a grand idea?”Subeer: Crazy times. Our managers are being pushed to squeeze more productivity out of all of us, so working in areas that were not our specialisation. We would be passed off as experts to the 3P vendors to give them specifications for product design. No idea what they were asking about but we would emphasise the learning and then brainstorm with friends in industry, old colleagues, classmates, whoever we could find.Of course, sometimes this resulted in hilarious situations like when Govind got some numbers mixed up and blew up the prototype of C16-8X that was nearly ready for marketing to comment on. We lost weeks of work and, of course, the frustration got to all of us.Nalpat: Oh, yes, there was even this time when someone sabotaged the computer that Andre was working on. We were all very stressed.Graham: And John (Kramer, head of Europe R&D), the star of the organisation in the eyes of the CEO, was turning cartwheels trying to meet the growing and larger than life global expectations. It is absurd. But super hero that he is, he made no mistakes.Bill Denver (Florida, USA): Not a good super hero though. I had heard from his previous team in the US that he passed on most of that stress to them, asking them to perform unrealistic tasks in unrealistic time frames, asking them for answers to questions that they had no idea about, and all that “in the next two hours”. He has been pretty manic.Subeer heard them through his half sleepy state. He did not think John passed the buck. He liked John. On impulse he said, “We like John. He is going to spend three months in a year in India. He has spunk.Arundhati (interrupting): …and the raw end of the US’ convoluted strategy…Bill: How do you mean? I am US …Arundhati: HQ expectations have been rising higher every quarter. We are working odd hours to keep pace with work. We have to work with teams in other parts of the world in order to help them meet those tough deadlines. Come on, what is all this if not convoluted?the announcement had come a week ago. John was moving to Asia. John Kramer, head of Europe region’s R&D, was moving to Asia. (but John was the rope in a tug of war … More on that later). He had chosen Indonesia as headquarter, but was toying with India too. He loved India, really loved India. But the clutter was insane he said. Just too much of everything and the traffic. But he would work summers in India when most people went away on vacation. The load will be less, he had laughed. Jenna in New Delhi was already talking to some real estate chaps in Vasant Vihar and Gurgaon. John had said he would like to be close to a golf course.So, what did John’s move herald? Someone said John was likely not happy with the move. More speculation flew around.The call started and Harry Sugarman thanked everyone for being on the call. He then broke the news: John, the new Asia regional head, had died a few hours ago following a massive heart attack.A chorus of gasps left the 11 who were online and for some time there was chaos. Harry had expected this. He waited as the incredulous teams expressed shock in turns.Subeer sliced the cacophony when he said, “I don’t believe this at all! Just last week we were talking. He had seemed so excited to come to the region from the US. He had never lived in Asia before and the variety of the work we were doing seemed to interest him a lot. He would be moving over in about 20 days’ time and had discussed with the local staff the various possible housing options before him. And here … O boy!Jamie: What happened? How come … I mean, what happened?Harry: A sudden heart attack, a massive one. Not sure what led to it. May be runs in the family…Joshua: Brought on by work-related stress, clearly.This was the first thought that had come to Subeer too. John was hit by a silent killer. But Madhav? Was Madhav’s paralysis also a silent stalker that pervades some stressed out lives?Harry said the entire region in Europe was overcome. They did not want John to go and he had said they should try and hold him back … he was being funny.Or was he? The many computers that held on to Harry’s had one question, “Did you not see it coming?”Harry took a deep breath and said, “John had seemed so enthusiastic about his move to Asia, how could you not believe him? He has been nuts about Indonesia all his life and here it was coming true. He had turned some brilliant work for Kitch (Luxetta’s home appliances product division) in the last two weeks, that our CEO Marcus Marsh had commended — you should watch the video of John’s wonderful presentation at the worldwide conference last month — he was in form! And all in all, he seemed to have an infinite amount of energy to do all the things he was doing. He did not look like a man harbouring any illness. What happened was sudden, he had not complained of any symptoms until then.”Subeer thought. A massive heart attack happened because of some neglect. Either knowingly or unknowingly and both were controllable factors to a very large extent, he thought. But there must have been some symptom, some prelude…The funeral took place the next day with a whole lot of people from the company attending. News filtered in from some colleagues who had met John’s wife Mariann. She told them that John had been having occasional discomfort in the neck and jaw and there had been shortness of breath after some soccer games he played with the boys. “But we never once thought he was ‘unwell’ or needed help. Rather unusual for him,” she had said and added, “I wish I had taken that seriously.” But because John was 6’7, he alluded that to his cervical pain brought on by too much work in the lab. “He told me he would be better once we moved to Asia,” said Mariann. “I just had not shared this with his co-workers, after all any admission of sickness would be a wimpish thing to do. Moreover, the CEO had said he depended on John to turn things around at Kitch, which was facing so much competition — John was telling me. And this high visibility event at which they both presented the latest breakthrough idea, meant so much to John. He kept telling me that the idea launch could not wait as ‘we have to be the first to enter the market with the idea’.”Mariann’s words held some pointers to the pressures on John but they were pressures in the course of business, most felt.Luxetta Worldwide had been experiencing a churn for some time. The Chinese market had put paid to some of its key initiatives or so Luxetta bosses claimed in conferences. Last year, Luxetta’s competitors from China had stolen a march over them. “Someone even said that the Chinese competitor had simply hired our entire senior research team, leaving us high and dry just as we were getting close to the end product,” Graham had told Subeer. “We were under pressure from our shareholders and board to show some quick results.”That situation had soon resulted in the entire global company becoming one large pressure cooker. Tempers flew, global R&D head Harry had a tiff with CEO Marcus, he was sidelined for a few months, which then gave rise to rumours that the new R&D diagnostics division would be shut down. Luxetta had set up a new diagnostics R&D division to include new product development diagnostics, which also examined post-purchase usage, consumer disappointment and particularly usage situation behaviours.A flurry of activity got generated by the seeming fluster and frustration hitting Luxetta. Unproductive conversations, pointless speculations … and some of the younger folks started scanning job sites for newer opportunities. Some in R&D also moved to sales in sheer desperation. It was sad, because some were thorough misfits in the sales organisation, and the stress quotient shot up carrying the ripple all over the organisation.Luxetta was hurting everywhere. The China bogeyman reared its head up every now and then. So every meeting would have flavours of : ‘Now China has launched it but in a shorter time. So we must cut short our development time and R&D must also take responsibility for quality.’This had been John’s nemesis — speed versus quality.Everyone wanted new packaging, new product, and they wanted it ‘now’. And if you delivered ‘today’ but your product failed on quality, then you were told you are a hard worker but not a smart worker. It was funny how nobody was willing to face failure. Subeer told Graham, “I know we work for success, sure. But if something fails, we have never been willing to examine and study the failure. It is absurd how people go off the handle! Nobody wants negative fallout on a brand. Do you know our noiseless juicer failed in three markets rather badly and was withdrawn from the market but marketing carried it on the website anyway? Because we were in denial, we did not want to admit our juicer had failed.”Technology was changing so fast that it had them gasping. Technology was not just ‘convenience’; that was primitive and ‘old fashioned village talk’. Technology was deconstructing existing businesses and in some cases demolishing them. No doubt it was also creating new markets as in the case of cell phones, and naturally a crazy, large segment of new users, which is what made business even more efficient and lives more productive, but then looking at some of the debris, John and his team had been aghast and often floundered when they had to recommend new product ideas because even as it remained in research, chances were somebody was already standing there with a hammer that would come down heavily as soon as the next technologically fabulous product was in the market.For example, just yesterday in India, exactly this played out much to the confusion of R&D. There was this fabulous five-door refrigerator which John and his team had kept in research for three years. In 1980, ‘three years in research’ would have won them bonuses and gold medals. In 2013, John nearly lost his job for not pulling the refrigerator into the market faster.So the Liza Extra, the fabulous multi-door with a central panel that stored wine, which was meant to knock the winds off the sails of three competing brands, failed in the test round as the through-the-door ice and water dispenser feature failed again and again…and again. John had been unhappy with the failures but he was unwilling to push it into the market. He had said that this one feature would ruin the brand name as these were the most repair prone parts of the fridge. And there had been an argument over whether the ice-dispenser was a male thing or a female expression of convenience too and many veered to the view that ice-through-door was the cool-factor that men sought for it allowed them to enter the kitchen and seem like self-help kings which they were not.John had laughed then. He agreed. His footfall would increase in the kitchen as a result but, jokes aside, he didn’t want the product to be declared a failure as a result. He had explained to marketing that if the door dispenser failed as it was prone to, the whole contraption on the door was going to be the ad for the fridge. “Imagine your young lady friend walks up to the fridge to shake some ice into her glass and you say, Oh-oh, honey, the ice thingy is temporarily out of order…. And her eyes go straight to the brand name…. you want that?”Marketing had said he was overstating a small feature problem but when John took it to his team they were angry.John’s Europe team — Joey, Sally, Theo and Larry — was indignant. Graham, part of the support team of this same team shared with the rest on Hangout: “We had worked on this thing for months and were proud of it. We wanted to see the product succeed. Every time I see a Kitch product in the multi-brand stores on my way home, I swagger just that little bit. I know my department has had a role to play in creating those beauties.... So, when John came back and said that marketing wanted to get the thing into production right away, we were mortified. ‘How can you allow this to happen, John?’ everyone yelled. John explained the importance of getting it out — the MR team had intelligence that showed at least three other brands were about to announce their products this year-end and our company was behind on schedules. No, the problem had to be fixed. But Sally and Theo were certain it wasn’t a design issue. It was in engineering and production…”Raul Magor from the Washington team had also been at John’s funeral. Raul now shared the discussion he heard the others have, as he stood by politely. There had been Mariann, John’s wife, Harry and Sara Woods from Operations. Mariann was saying, “He never talked detail, he was always a smiling, ‘Hi honey’ kind of person, loved the kids to distraction, took it to heart when he missed their soccer game… so he was not going to sit and tell me this went wrong or that. But he asked me if I cared about an ice dispenser on my fridge...Later, you Harry, told me there had been a battle over the ice dispenser?”At another web meeting three days after the funeral, people had the same questions. Today Nalpat from India asked, “Harry, never mind the ice dispenser. Are we saying John was under stress? Are we saying the ice thing built his blood pressure upwards? Or are we saying he had a proneness to hypertension? Which one is it?Harry: His last medical tests had shown his BP was erratic. So, he was on mild medication.Jaffer Nenzee: It had to be much more to knock him out for good.But they sat alone in their work stations after the lights on their laptops had been shut… each one roasting in the confusion of John’s sudden passing. What the hell, they thought. It is not that they did not know of life’s unpredictablility but they knew that some things were so easily predicted. Such as their own product sales. Such as stress and the heart’s response. Then what was a company like theirs, that was known the world over for its technological greatness, limply falling prey to a cardiac arrest? This was immensely stupid.Jaffer called his doctor Dr Nathani, “Doc saab, our boss who was to move to Asia and who has been in touch with us almost round the clock, just died of a massive heart attack. Are these things so silent and secretive?”Dr Nathani: In today’s day and age to die of cardiac conditions is easy and difficult as well. Easy, if you are a careless idiot. Difficult if you know the simple rules of the game. There are rules of diet and discipline and respect for the body machinery. It is as simple as that. But it demands discipline.Jaffer: That is what is tough. Work keeps me till 9, 10 p.m.… I eat dinner at 11… what should I do?Dr Nathani: I can tell you, but will you do it? Quit your job!But John had instead quit life ….. no, this was not as simple as that, felt Jaffer. To be continued...casestudymeera@gmail.com(This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 24-08-2015)
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If your industry is driving you to create a pressure cooker, make sure you create plenty of safety valves, and plenty of room to let off steam in a safe way, writes Hema HattangadyDo companies as dysfunctional as Luxetta exist? Indeed they do. And what is a pity is that many of them win awards for sustainability, employee well-being and innovation! With the twin drivers of rapid disruptions of entire industries by technology and the blurring of lines between need and greed (looking at the valuation bubbles building up, would you think the global financial crisis was just six years ago?), it is easy to mix up speed with haste and to take our eye off the long-term ball…So, can companies do much about cutting out employee stress? Is stress not a concomitant of fast progress? Or can we as leaders and managers actually make it a joy to come to work each day? The answer to that question is what differentiates the really great companies from the good ones.Luxetta’s Board, working with Marcus Marsh, CEO, should have looked at creating employee well-being at three levels:The first is to cut out as many sources of stress as possible. This means there should be drive, energy and focus to design HR policies to ensure right fit from the start: through selection, recruitment, induction, appraisal, training, development, incentive plans, etc. As if this were not demanding enough, it is also essential that the fit is tested each time there is a change in an employee’s role/ external reality like market or change in competitive scene/ organisation structure, etc. People evolve and grow in their emotional, learning and financial needs and what seemed enough yesterday does not measure up tomorrow...Luxetta seems to thrive on creating misfits by putting unrealistic pressure on productivity, imposing impossible timelines, thus making people pretend to be who or what they are not. Employees give their best when the support systems help them feel secure and comfortable in their own skin.The second level is to have an early warning system with alerts rather like in a well-designed production monitoring system. One can get very creative in this area, for example, having an informal buddy system so that someone reacting negatively to work pressure is spotted by peers who are trained to look for warning signs. Or, including spouses/kids in social outings once or twice a year. In this case study, for example, John’s wife Mariann could have shared her concerns of John’s neck and jaw pain with a senior leader in HR who may have suggested a complete medical work-up.Kids can be painfully open about parents and even if it means momentary embarrassment, an insight like “my dad loves to play soccer with me but he can’t play too long... he gets breathless” should send alarm bells ringing even in an un-empathetic culture like Luxetta’s. After all, no one WANTS to lose a top level resource in R&D! The third is the creation of systems, processes and documentation that supports all functions in doing their jobs well… in design, sales, business development, marketing, after sales support, government relations, commercial teams, etc. And even more importantly, an R&D and manufacturing philosophy that is based on the principle of “building in reliability and building out maintenance”.Unfortunately, even companies that are otherwise enlightened can be very myopic in this area. In the firm belief they are being frugal, they cut back on crucial field trials for new products, lab tests on prototypes, competitive material and case studies that would help a salesman sell a product confidently against competition, etc.Luxetta’s impulsive and chaotic approach to R&D, with an emphasis on mindlessly loading features into products when the customer was looking for basic functionality, is suicidal. SOS meetings, people forced to work outside their areas of specialisation with no resources to train them, etc. It is almost as if Luxetta’s aim is to set up people to fail...So, who is accountable for ensuring these stress mitigators are in place? How about the Board of Directors in tandem with the top management team? What was Luxetta’s Board doing? Worrying about the pressure from shareholders on results and its impact on stock price? What happens when that worry is passed on to top management whose KPIs are linked in large part to stock price/company results? Can they now focus on the long term?One of the key dimensions of governance is to ensure longevity and sustainability of the company and its people. It is the job of the Board to act as the buffer between the shareholder demands and what the company needs to do to survive in the long term and to set the direction and strategic intent which will guide the company through many disruptions. This is best done if the periodic goal setting and budget exercises are conducted in an environment of candour, with realism tinged with ambition, and with all the facts one can possibly lay one’s hands on. It is important to check if there is an environment that encourages people to speak up, to share their concerns and vulnerabilities without being treated as “wimps”!In my discussions with people working in big and small companies on the topic of stress, I was surprised to see how much emphasis the senior managers in sales or R&D put on being backed by the right strategy, adaptive marketing policies based on a sound understanding of realities of the market place and, above all, the sensitivity of the top leadership to the stretch people in various roles and functions are feeling.One national sales leader I spoke to said the company he worked for never encouraged him to pretend he was anything but himself with the external world, that he was always provided an opportunity to have periodic interactions with the services/consulting teams (who met the customers as ‘advisors” and therefore had very good insights into what the customer pain points were), with the design team which, in turn, wanted to learn about the customer needs plus share realistic constraints of product features and try to reduce the salesman’s habit of over-committing to meet topline targets.And most importantly, at an individual manager level, his KPIs were always in synch with overall strategy, however frequently market needs dictated change in strategy, with due weightage for adhering to the company’s code of conduct and value system. This last element acted as an anchor in all he did to achieve sales targets and acted like a moral compass. The need to align the purpose and mission of the organisation from top to bottom through a strongly communicated set of values cannot be overemphasised.What do you make of Luxetta’s value system?! Did one even exist?Thankfully, I now see many companies in India with policies that focus on creating a support system for employees to cope with stress.SKF India, based in Pune is a very good example. It is one of India’s leading companies providing technology platforms and solutions for friction reduction, energy efficiency, etc. and employs 2,400 people across India. It has won recognition as one of India’s most admired companies, due in part to the innovative HR policies it follows:1) Attempts to minimise the effect of social, financial and emotional stress arising from medical issues.2) Adopts policies that are sensitive to the role of family in Indian culture, which can contribute hugely to an employee’s sense of well-being. For example, insurance cover for parents up to age 85 in addition to coverage for the spouse and children.3) Ensures that employees can walk in and out of the hospital without worrying about finances as they have cashless cards for medical cover.Many companies now provide paternity leave and extended paid maternity leave including for adoptive parents.While stress prevention can be addressed through the HR measures described earlier, annual medical checks for stress prone roles is a must. Six years after I exited from my business, I still meet grateful colleagues who discovered latent medical problems that could have been life altering or worse, thanks to mandatory annual medical exams and follow up by HR teams to ensure that the doctor’s advice was being followed.in the final analysis, all measures to enhance well-being are of value only if they are meaningful in the eyes of the recipient and agile enough to apply to anyone.To conclude, if your market/industry/ shareholders are driving you to create a pressure cooker, make sure you create plenty of safety valves, and plenty of room to let off steam in a safe way, while you figure out how to build a more wholesome and nurturing environment to stay alive in the long run... The writer is a serial entrepreneur, coaches young entrepreneurs, independent director and thought leader. She co-owned Conzerv Systems growing it from a family firm to an Indian MNC until she sold it to Schneider Electric in 2009(This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 24-08-2015)
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The magic begins to happen when individual foresight towards one’s self and the leaders’ vision for their constituents find utterance, writes A.V.K. MohanHuman beings in general and corporate people in particular have been experiencing greater stress with every passing generation. It is a fact that in the last 100 years, ever since industrialisation took over the world like no other event of the past, the greatest byproduct has been increasing levels of stress. Ordinary lives have been replaced by complex lives and we have been bombarded by relentless change in every aspect of our lives. Change is now such an integral part of to our existence that it creeps into our lives unnoticed, even though we may not want it always. When I read about the lives of people who have taken sanyas or renounced this world, I find that even their lives too are not free from change.Against such a backdrop, Luxetta is no exception; the lives of its employees are not very different from those of the average corporate citizen nowadays. The sad and untimely demise of John Kramer, head of global R&D at Luxetta, is a reflection of how we live our lives these days. Rather than learn from it, we feel the pain and anguish of that event for some time, but other overpowering events take us over the next moment and we find ourselves back into the race. The events at Luxetta clearly point out that John did not pay heed to the warnings his body was giving him. We thus feel that Luxetta’s global R&D team, and by extension, Luxetta as a whole, needs to do many things to improve the quality of life of its employees in general.Nowadays, we hear of many cases of sudden death where people were not able to identify the symptoms in time. This is unfortunate because we live in an age when technological developments in the fields of science and medicine have made it possible for people to recover from serious ailments provided there is timely detection and proper application of preventive medicine. A.V.K. MohanThe moot question then is: Do we have the time, knowledge, motivation, commitment and respect for our wonderful body to service it as much as we use it? Do we have organisations that make it a part of their corporate objectives to instil that into their people? It is sad that we are more bothered about servicing and repairing our material possessions than ourselves.There are many who lead healthy and better quality lives even in this chaotic and stressful world. For every John who is unable to manage his health, there are several others who through sheer focus live quality lives and improve their health quotient. What do we notice in such people? What learnings can we derive from them so that in these times of relentless change and mindboggling pace of events we are able to manage our health better? Yes, only relatively better, not in the absolute sense. I see that these people do ‘one’ thing far better than those who are unable to manage their health — they are able to manage the paradox of life in their minds. They are able to attain a level of equanimity that helps them take the highs with the lows of life with a greater alignment of mind, body and soul.Unlike John, who took so much pride in his work but seemed to care little for balance, people who succeed more than others in managing a sustained quality of life are seekers of ‘balance’. Such people show a higher success rate in investing time in all quadrants of life — professional, spiritual, social, mental, physical, etc. In doing so, they are able to de-compartmentalise the stress that gets built in one quadrant of life and de-stress with fulfilment from other quadrants. If success means getting what you want and fulfilment is wanting what you get, then those who succeed are people who learn to balance the two far better than others. In today’s world, we hear so much about success that fulfilment is forgotten. We chase success all the time without really asking ourselves whether we genuinely want what we are seeking. And in the process, we build stress to levels that the body just cannot handle, leading to a breakdown.When people become habituated to chasing success, even preventive diagnosis is of little help to them. Such people find it difficult to get off the treadmill of success and eventually pay a price.If we closely observe people who maintain greater balance between success and fulfilment, we notice great time management, clarity of purpose, mindfulness, awareness, reflection in the midst of action and, strangely, the ability to see the futility of everything and the capacity to observe oneself. People who can see the futility of all they do learn to take themselves not too seriously if it is damaging to self and others.One may wonder that simple traits such as those outlined above make people live better lives than others. If we closely observe people, we will not miss those elements or traits in them. Nature is full of these elements.In the pull and push of our lives, we seem to have missed the woods for the trees. But people who do better than others in all aspects of life score more on the above-mentioned traits and hence find the balance within and without. Such people recognise that if something bad were to happen to them, their families would be adversely impacted; they are therefore committed to and mindful of their duties and responsibilities towards their families. They are aware that corporations will soon forget and move on — as it happened in John’s case — but their families will go on suffering for very long.We all intuitively know that if we live in harmony with nature, we experience a greater sense of tranquility, lesser levels of stress and a better quality of life and living. What does that really mean? It means a greater sense of awareness and mindfulness of these traits that nature possesses in abundance.So, what can organisations like Luxetta do? I think they can create an environment for making fulfilment as compelling as success. It will be akin to individuals working to achieve the balance between success and fulfilment. This will happen when leaders like Marcus Marsh (CEO) and Harry Sugarman (global head of Product R&D), with the help of their Board, reflect on what is well and what is not with Luxetta. This will happen when they will find ways and means to bring this discussion to the forefront as much as other strategically important subjects. It will happen when they persist with this agenda long after John’s memory fades, and are keen to make a difference and differentiate Luxetta from other competing brands.The next question is how to go about it. It can be done just the way organisations strategically achieve something by planning, designing, developing, deploying, following, reviewing and re-doing. It can be done by aligning the organisation’s measures to improve the quotient on balance with its deep-rooted culture. Anything that is done as a knee jerk reaction will be alien to the deep-rooted culture and is bound to be rejected. It cannot be done by declaring Yoga week and then following up with odd hours of working; in Luxetta global teams particularly in India routinely work till 10 or 11 p.m. This is what great leaders recognise and spend a great deal of time to think through the issue before acting with conviction. The magic begins to happen when individual foresight towards one’s self and the leaders’ vision for their constituents find utterance. It greatly echoes Dr Nathani’s comment: “Easy if you are a careless idiot and difficult if you know the simple rules of the game.”Finally, it is all about discipline. And research clearly shows that all great organisations that succeeded over competition had one thing in common — the discipline of execution. Helping people find balance in their lives is also all about the discipline of execution.It is never easy. It never was and will never be. When Buddha declared the ‘Middle Path’, it was so simple as a concept but profoundly difficult to execute. The trick lies in the mind switching on for a new way and overcoming the mind of habits that wants to control for its selfish but utterly necessary need of protecting us. When Krishna unveiled the Gita during his long sermon, a confused Arjun asked him to give him an executive summary of the same. To which Krishna said: When humans have a balance between Aahaar (diet) and Vyavahaar (conduct), they are bound to find balance. And that is what differentiates people and organisations ; we have checks and balances in place to overcome the tyranny of imbalance, which is a byproduct of the times we live in. The memory of John should live long enough to help Luxetta overcome this bias. The writer is senior director, Group Human Capital with Max India. The views are personal(This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 24-08-2015)
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“So there’s no such thing as work-life balance. There’s work, and there’s life, and there’s no balance.” — Sheryl SandbergBy Meera SethJanki Vallabh sat in her car looking devastated. She had been so lost in her world of workshops and training and support and schedules and rearranging and rescheduling and teaching and discussing... even arbitrating... that she had clean missed an SMS that had been coming to her day after day after day. Her batchmate from B-school, Raghu Mani had been struggling with his mother’s ailment and had been messaging her daily in a manner of reaching out. Janki had read them and tried to remember to call but her memory eluded her and she ended up remembering them late. Finally, in two of his recent SMS-es he had mentioned the prayer meeting for his departed mother, asking Janki to be present. “She was your music teacher and she remembered you a lot during her last days...”Janki had not meant for things to come to such a pass. Never, never at all. She was being bounced from wall to wall without a moment to inhale. And being in sessions almost all day she had left her phone with Mercy, her assistant, in case Ma called. And by the end of the day, another 100 SMS-es (of which at least 40-60 would be idiotic offers to lose weight or speak in public fearlessly or buy property at rock bottom prices in Noida or Nellikupam ... these idiotic messages had buried Raghu’s reminders.How was she to face Raghu? Would she tell him, ‘Gosh Raghu, I have been so busy...?’ This was precisely the kind of moment that told her the foolishness of a life like hers. Often, when she dozed off in her car driving interstate, she would surface during her semi-aware state and remember Wilfred Owen ask, ‘Was it for this the clay grew tall?’(‘Futility’)Yet she had been so charged and driven by doing all that her work demanded, work that brought meaning to the lives of so many at Teffer, who wished to get ahead as career people, as functionaries, as managers, as leaders... their needs spurred her into more action, not out of a sense of wanting to glow in their darkness — not at all; but to see them climb out of various states of ‘I cannot’ to ‘Oh, I can do it!’ and in the process, make Teffer a far more efficient place.Someone had once accused her of lacking a life... that maybe there was something missing which she was trying to fill with work... Janki had nodded then and said that it was possible. And it was all right to fill gaps with work you enjoy, and everyone who lacked something should fill the gap with that which fills the gap and not wallow in the empty spot....but Janki was devastated that Raghu’s mother, ‘Music maami’ as she was always known, had been ill and then passed away and then she had missed the prayer meeting.She had met Raghu and his wife just now and they had been very affectionate and understanding. Raghu had quit corporate life six years ago to set up a music studio, and in his words, ‘a pony tail and long beard later, without the artifice of an organisation, I am more free and happy...’ She too was. Except her brand of ‘happy’ was different.... As she started to reach out to her various groups in the UK, Europe, US, China, Australia, New Zealand, Africa and the Middle East, she felt she was building good relationships, and the odd hours of day and night didn’t matter...for performance was improving, people were feeling fuller and happier and line managers were more deeply concerned with the needs of their staff.Janki had a number of self-doubts that rose during moments when she missed a social or family event. She had begun to notice that her day started at 8 a.m. and often ended at 10 p.m., only to resume at 10.30 p.m. again. True, she found no time to connect with friends and family or external networks or even herself... her mother remained her biggest most preoccupation outside work.Yet, she felt aware that she had missed Raghu’s grievance, missed being with her music maami during her last moments. Much as she hurt, she also knew her life pattern was fixed. Ma had chided her lightly for being so immersed in work. But Janki had reacted, “Ma, I don’t want this to have happened; your getting annoyed is not making it any easy, my work has consumed my life, I am almost on auto pilot, what should I do, quit?”Today, she visited Raghu and was embarrassed to see herself fret as her schedules fell like dominoes, as a result. She was telling Ahmedbhai every 10 minutes, jaldi chalte hain, ok? Jaldi wapas aanaa hai, do meeting hain, Ma ka programme hai nau baje, record karna hai... and she was taking calls on the drive, so people wouldn’t get nose out of joint!At work, she was forever caught between the US and the UK, both being different in attitude and organisational needs. At one level, it could be because UK was head office and dominating came naturally to them therefore. But Janki also felt it was because culturally they were very conscious of personal time and therefore unwilling to bend their norms. Her team in India argued that only Indians were happy being transferred left, right and centre. As Abhilash Kannuga, the HR head for the western region, said, “ This is why Indians are so versatile and capable, adaptable, agile, and very easy to accept challenges. In the UK very few have lived and worked outside home country and are perhaps not as culturally diverse or malleable!”But what made being global director worse, was the need to be inclusive, which meant: being available round the clock or late evening India time. And on such days, she ended up being up till early morning.Some days things drained her, some days she felt gung-ho. Teffer was very supportive. Janki’s boss allowed her all the flexibility she needed, saying ‘do what it takes’, but it was easily said than done. Because Asia Pacific was equally important and it had five distinct countries with very distinct cultural needs, which also determined their product mix. So, when she got out of the West, she fell straight into the Eastern time zone; then, when does Janki get thinking time? Her role was also about thought leadership and influence — that meant reading a lot, talking a lot, getting information, and of course answering a barrage of e-mails. How often she would be talking to a team at 2 in the morning and saying, “I will send the stuff to you in the morning,” and she would be crawling into bed at 4 a.m. after a marathon with Australia, promising to remember the promise made, only to wake up at 6 and be buried under another frantic 100 mails.Talking of broken promises, a few days ago Peter Fowler (Succession Academy in Singapore) had called, wanting two 90-minute slots with her. Just as she agreed to 4-5.30 with Peter, for a different day, and sent off the confirmation e-mail with Mercy in the CC, in flew Mercy.Mercy: Oh, Janki! Not that time slot! You have a dentist appointment that day, and we have rescheduled this at least four times, Jan!Janki: Oh, heck. Let us postpone it.Mercy: No Jan, don’t do that! And after that you also have to go to the prayer meeting at 8 p.m. (referring to Music Maami’s prayer meeting, which she ended up forgetting).Janki stared at all the dates that stared back at her. Blinking within each were a zillion time slots cramped with another zillion tasks to be accomplished. She got the feeling her life was unusual. Maybe abnormal too. Some day she must poke her head out the window and see what other lives were like. ...Mercy: Janki, take 3-4.30 IST and meet the dentist at 5.30.Janki: Oh, but you forget there is this Beijing briefing happening at 3 ... how are we to fit all this? Move the dentist appointment ahead, na? Ask Dr Mistry if he will see me at 6.30 p.m.?Mercy: Ok, I will try but let me also keep a plan B. If he says he is occupied at 6.30, then when?dr mistry said 7 p.m., adding, “I hope you have some teeth left for me to work with by then!” Janki cursed him (he was an old friend too) and turned to Mercy, “Ok, 7 p.m.” But Mercy flipped the page right before Janki and tapping the diary (knowing the doctor was on the line), she whispered: 7 p.m. you have a catch up team session. What about that? Shall I cancel it?” And that was how both of them lost sight of the prayer meeting.Janki was devastated. Uncovering the mouthpiece she said, “Pervez, if 7 is good, can 8 p.m. also be good?”But Mercy was already shaking her head briskly to say ‘That won’t work!’ but Dr Mistry was talking ...”You are lucky I am in the same building. Those teeth need care, Janki, what is wrong with you corporate sorts? We have rescheduled you so many times. Please find a convenient slot and call me, I have a patient on the chair,” he said and hung up.But despite all the breakdowns and chaos, it seemed as if what kept her from crumbling was more work. But it also kept her from doing all those things that were necessary on her personal front.Meanwhile elsewhere in the world an unexpected glitch happened. A tech filter in the system resulted in a leadership course invitation going to grade 3 managers as well so that enrolments began to pour in and Janki woke up the next morning to a barrage of 20 e-mails asking her to sort it out before it got out of hand.The whole day was spent sorting this out including answering many angry line managers who were completely bereft of script when their grade 3s announced they were off on a leadership programme.When she got home, it was 8.40 p.m. She was so relieved that the day was over and she has no US call today. As she let herself in, she saw her mother sitting at the head of the table the way she did, solving her Sudoku. The light on in the dining room meant she had not eaten her dinner. Janki was angry. “You know you are not supposed to delay your dinner beyond 6.45 or 7 and I have told you that if I am reaching home by 7, I will call you. So, why did you wait?Mother: But you didn’t call.Janki: Ma! I didn’t call you, but you could see that 7 o’clock came and 7 o’clock was going. You could have started eating!Mother: No, but you always call me and you didn’t call me.Janki was despairing. If Mom did not eat in time, her gastric problem would act up, then her hypertension too could, and then, she would have to take her to the doctor. And all this could well happen at 12 in the night. Ma was getting very old she felt. She really, really wished Ma would not lose her wisdom in this manner. Suddenly, her eyes filled over and she was crying. Was she not seeing her mother growing older everyday? Both of them had been comforting each other since her father died many years ago...Just then her phone beeped an incoming message. It was Hector Norkay from the New Jersey office. “Need to talk to you, will call 10 p.m. IST.” Janki decided not to reply as she was now feeling bad for Mum and sniffing too. Hector was the HRD for one of the businesses and she knew he was grappling with a legal situation on hand. There had been some audit, which team was now saying that as part of your process, you said these people will be trained in security and safety. And I know that you were to do this. But we have found that this never happened. And I have no idea why that programme did not happen.Janki recalled having done all that was needed for the programme and asked them if they were good to go with it and they had mumbled something and she knew they would run with that plan.It was now a crisis and she had to deal with it. Or did she? It bothered her that local teams threw up their hands sometimes rather easily. And did he need to call her? Would not an e-mail been enough? And he had the gall to say he would call at 10 p.m. IST.Teffer was very process driven and there was as an internal audit process around how you are building internal capability. This was part of their performance efficiency audit. Hector had told her yesterday, “Many sessions have not happened despite our committing to it. Against 12, only seven have been done. How do I explain why the remaining is not done yet?”Seeing the message, Janki called up the US and as Hector complained it was too inconvenient for him to take the call, she said, “It will be more inconvenient for me to have an argument with you at my 10 p.m. because my mother is not doing too well. So, I thought I would tell you that the agreement we had between us was this: I would do a handful of sessions —and I did seven, not just a handful. You guys were supposed to run the rest. Why are you now asking me?”A semi-heated discussion broke out. Just then Janki felt she heard her mother groan. Stepping out of her room she went towards mom’s room, pushed the door open and saw her doubled up, holding her chest as she normally did when she had a gastric chest pain. Janki thought, if I hang up now, this guy is going to think I am rude. And it was an important call. Janki was also annoyed with her mother. “She does these things for no reason! This is a critical call, now let her deal with it... I will keep an eye on her and ...ok, let me get her a Pudin Hara...” And as she handled the chest of drawers and dug out the medicine tin box, the lid fell and made a horrific sound. Hector from the other side, already irritated, said, “Why is there so much noise?”Within minutes the watchman was at the door saying, “Woh neechey wale madam keh rehe hain ki awaaz aa raha ahi...”(the lady in the flat below is complaining that your home is noisy.)And Hector was saying, “What’s going on, Jan? We can’t seem to have a conversation in peace!”Janki: At 9.30 p.m. in the night, peace is what I want. So, I suggest you call me at 11 a.m. tomorrow, when I am awake and bright. I have had a very tough day.Hector: Who doesn’t have a tough day?bidding him a Good Night, Janki went to her mother’s room. She had skipped dinner and was eating Threptin biscuits. Janki refused to take note. But she sat by her side and began talking about their holiday next week. As things warmed between them, Mother said, “Bhairavi is getting married in Chennai. I want to attend that wedding.” After a round of ‘Who is Bhairavi’, Janki said, “Ma, you have not met them in years!’ But mom suddenly chose to wear her halo and said, ‘But I have to represent Daddy.’Janki: Daddy? Ma, dad left 25 years ago. It is not making sense.Ma: You have hurt my feelings by being rude.Janki sighed and said, “Sorry, Ma. Ok, we will go. In that case let’s do this, we will leave for our holiday out of Chennai. And she put that into her phone reminder for 8 a.m. next day. The next morning she called Sumati in Chennai and asked her to book two tickets to Chennai-Jaipur on x date.The next five days were a blur of workshops and ‘Meeting my Boss’. This was the funniest because somewhere through all the communication that flew at her was this one that told her she needed to meet her new boss. Ava Norman, the boss was new to the system and she was doing her orientation conferences. Even if Janki only had to meet her virtually, she could not see one sensible gap in her diary. This was overwhelming.Mercy had been yo-yo-ing between Norman’s office in Manila and Janki’s diary for a ‘Get-to-know-you’ video-call. “ I can’t just do this blind,” said Janki, “ I have to prepare for my getting-to-know-you session; I have to think through what I want to tell her. What I think she needs to know about my priorities, needs, focus points; I have had no time to work on this or plan this!”Rushing as she was between events, Mercy told her there were two days left to leave on her holiday to Jaipur and would she like to set up her call while on vacation as Norman’s would be the only ‘work-related’ call?Janki was delighted silly. “But of course! What a grand idea! Please let Norman’s office know ASAP I am embarrassed that I have not been able to meet my own boss!”One day to go and Janki was already feeling good. She popped into Mother’s room when she got back from work, and saw that mother had been packing and almost everything she owned was strewn on the bed. Janki saw a set of three Kanjeevaram sarees waiting to be packed. “Ma, Kanjeevaram sarees to Jaipur?”Ma said, “We have Bhairavi’s wedding...no? Now, you please give me the Mumbai-Chennai tickets, I have taken out the new handbag and I am going to carry the tickets and do the boarding pass and all that myself.”Bombay Chennai? Janki’s heart sank. What Bombay-Chennai? Good Lord... She had not booked it! She had done Chennai-Jaipur through Sumati, she had cancelled Mumbai-Jaipur... but “.... oh, no!”Rushing to her room, she put the “I am on a call” placard on her table so that Ma may not rush in with a bowl of something, and chased every travel agent on her iPad to find tickets for Chennai. Every site returned her a regret. No tickets. It was the wedding season. Janki got on the phone to Mercy: “I have goofed so badly. Please call the head of MakeMyTrip and tell him it is me, that I need two tickets Mumbai-Chennai for day after... for any price, Mercy! casestudymeera@gmail.com(This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 10-08-2015)
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