30 days in open office

Recently, about 30 days back, I joined an interesting company … ThoughtWorks. These are the 30 days I am referring here … 30 days in ThoughtWorks’ open office.

I have been working in corporate world for 20 odd years. It’s a pretty long time to form opinions and to believe that you have seen it all. But I was fooled by this company. Today, the place I work in, the open office, is hardly any office in reality; at-least not in the same shape that I knew all these years. When I was called in for an interview, I saw people working off the dining tables … everyone in the office sitting around these tables with their laptops (and most of them using Mac … as ‘Windows’ for this company are real windows with glass panels and not some program on computer). So my trained corporate mind told me that this must be a garage start-up company … only to be surprised to know that ThoughtWorks is pretty old company with offices in almost all continents (barring South Africa) and that they do some real cool work. Anyways … I do not want to bore you all with company propaganda … but do check out www.thoughtworks.com if you feel like it.

But I do want to talk about open office that stretches beyond just open sitting. I am more impressed with the ‘side effects’ of this open sitting environment. These side effects have caused few WOW moments in the span of 30 days. I want to talk about couple of those wow moments.

1. For starters, I was having real hard time finding out who are the ‘senior’ people in the company … as I wanted talk to them to get an idea of how Pune office is run. You see, there are no cabins and not a single soul wearing tie or a coat or even business casuals; so how am I suppose to find ‘key people’? And then someone told me, everyone is important. I need to talk to everyone. And sure enough, as I started talking to people … I struggled ever harder to find a non-key person... I could not. WOW! So this is for real … not just some ivory tower man saying “people are our biggest assets”.
   
   
2. Next week I participated in an account prioritization call. Just before the call, my colleague told me that “ThoughtWorks takes only Java / Ruby / .NET projects … and that too only development projects. We are a technology company and we ensure that we work only on ‘interesting’ projects. Additionally, we make sure that customer is fully aligned with ThoughtWorks way of working, i.e. customer is ready for Agile project methodology. We also are very serious about our social commitment … e.g. we do not generally work for Tobaco companies. (Revenue) Numbers are important for us, but so are people and our values; at-times we have walked away from a potentially good revenue generating account if it did not fit our value system”. And I actually saw all of this reflected in the account prioritization call. WOW! I came from the world where top-line and bottom-line came first, second and third; and all other stuff was for quarterly all-hands meetings.

3.     …

There were more … but I am sure you get the idea. If any of this has triggered your interest, go read http://bit.ly/cIssRq. ThoughtWorks is indeed more of a social corporate experiment.

I am sure, not everything in ThoughtWorks is great and I will eventually come across things that I do not like, policies that bother me, work-life balance that tilts more towards work than life etc. I am also sure that following such ‘principle centered’ way of working must be very very difficult. But for now, I am impressed with the company that is walking a different path. Hopefully I will have the courage to walk that path too.

Oh, and the last line … ThoughtWorks is hiring.

Speed or Direction? What one should concentrate on?

I learned about this interesting concept …  of People having better sense of Time (Speed) than that of Direction … in a management development program at XLRI couple years ago. I liked the concept; it was interesting and vague enough to attract my attention. Before I tell you why bring this up all of a sudden, let me explain the concept in few lines:

There was a famous study conducted, in early 90s, as part of the research topic (do not remember the author details etc), trying to figure out the professional career success mantra. The not-so-surprising part of the finding was that: Successful people had obsession with not wasting time. The finding was based on interviews of all types of successful people … businessmen, politicians, great teachers, social workers, sports personalities, religious leaders and even movie stars. They all had this obsession with not wasting time.

Now the surprising part:

• Of these 70% said they  feel they wasted their life
• Only 30% said they lived a life worth living

The climax is: majority of these 70% did not say so because they wanted to achieve new highs in their chosen field. Rather, they thought they should have done something completely different … than what they had mastered (to feel worth of living).

The paper goes on to claim that ‘people have better sense of Time than sense of Direction’. Essentially once you are on some path / any path, good people will always find ways to run faster than the rest of the pack. Even the society encourages this and rewards a fast runner. E.g. If you are an automobile engineer, you will get better pay, better respect, and better social status if you know the art of auto making better than others. Once you have established yourself as a great auto engineer, it’s that much easier to run even faster and widen the gap between you and the next best auto engineer. The adrenalin rush from this is so great … that it will be 20~30 years before you even think if you really wanted to be an auto engineer. And when you do, you would have come so far on this path, that choosing anything else would be almost impossible.

So much for the theory, but then how do you really ‘know’ what you want in life? How do you know that all these successful people are not cribbing for nothing? These are very hard questions to answer. I too do not know.

I regularly coach and guide students exiting from 12^th into college and exiting from college into industry. And of late, lots of students have started asking me this question… how to find out what will make them happy? Should they become an engineer or a doctor or an architect or teacher? That very question led me to this blog; to share with you what I am planning on doing for these kids; to get your views on what else I can do.

There is no easy answer … but I have started taking this question very seriously. In addition to guiding students on various softer aspects of getting into new job / new college, we are proposing to do their personality type profiling and linking it to career preference … that may help us partly answer this question. E.g. If you are an empathetic person, try looking for a job closer to hospitality industry or if you are a people person, look for HR / training etc. Even when you link the practicality of campus placements to it, just the sheer knowledge of knowing one’s personality type and career preference would help students. If you are a ‘people person’ and have done great in computer engineering, by all means go ahead and join a great paying IT company; but then look at contributing actively to activities like training and recruitment within the company that will take you closer to your type (of being a people person).

In the end, I hope students find right direction before they catch speed on their chosen path.

You’d Better Be Running … the chase is on

Past few weeks, from mid March to now, have been especially exciting for Education enthusiasts of two nations: India and the US.  Both these nations have announced ambitious programs to reform their education sectors … programs that hold promise to transform not only education system but to make entire nation competitive and progressive.

Few months ago, Obama administration had announced an ambitious program called ‘Race to the Top’. The program is designed to encourage States to advance education reforms by promising discretionary and competitive grants. Phase 1 of this program was completed couple weeks back. Overall aim is:

1.     Adopting standards and assessments that prepare students to succeed in college and the workplace and to compete in the global economy.

2.     Building data systems that measure student growth and success, and inform teachers and principals about how they can improve instruction.

3.     Recruiting, developing, rewarding, and retaining effective teachers and principals, especially where they are needed most.

4.     Turning around lowest-achieving schools.

India unfolded its own education reforms …  mainly in 2 areas: ‘Right To Education’ act and ‘Foreign Educational Institution Bill’. While RTE focuses on primary and secondary education, FEIB looks at making higher education effective and world-class. Both these programs are a big step in right direction. While there are skeptics, mainly doubting the implementation of these programs, I am very optimistic. Not because these programs are well thought out and have the right details embedded in them … which by the way they do … but mainly because of the enthusiasm shown by Minister of Human Resource Development Mr. Kapil Sibbal and Prime Minister Mr. Manmohan Singh. In India political will can move mountains … and this indeed is a mountain.

Given the demographics of two nations and looking at the ambitions of both these nations to retain / get their share in world’s economic and political power; I think, programs unveiled by India are more far reaching and will have bigger impact if executed perfectly. At the same time, these are the very same programs which will be difficult to implement than the one by the US. Time will tell how true the US and India remain to their intent. But one thing is for sure, educational reforms are not just necessary but critical to survival of both these great nations.

To complicate it further, both these nations are mainly banking on ‘knowledge work’ and ‘brain power’ for capturing their fair share in world hierarchy. And better education is absolutely critical to grooming knowledge workers, innovators and entrepreneurs. In that sense the US and India is competing head-on. But for a change, both can win this race… crux is to run faster and faster on this path … others are watching and chasing.

I will close with an African proverb:

Every morning in Africa a gazelle wakes up

and it knows it must run faster than the fastest lion

or it will be killed.

Every morning a lion wakes up in Africa

and it knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle

or it will starve to death.

It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle.

When the Sun comes up, you’d better be running.