The lost Man

Back to blog after 5 years almost...

The liberation of man has not happened yet. Not only woman, but man also needs a great liberation movement - liberation from the past, from the slavery of life negating values and social conditioning which have been imposed upon mankind by all religions for thousands of years. Priests and politicians have caused a tremendous split in man. They have created a guilt ridden man, who is alienated from himself, fighting a permanent inner conflict between body and soul, matter and mind, materialism and spiritualism, science and religion, man and women, East and West...

Life can be lived in two ways: either as a calculation - in science, technology, mathematics, economics - or as poetry - in art, music, beauty, love.

Every man, from his early childhood, is being conditioned to function and survive in this efficiency-oriented, competitive world, and he joins the ambitious struggle and race for money, success, fame, power, respectability and social status. As a small child he learns to adopt the goals and values of his parents and teachers, priests and politicians, of all vested interests, without ever questioning them. Thus he becomes distracted from his true nature, his original being, and loses the capacity for unmotivated joy, childlike innocence and playful creativity.

He is cut off from his creative potential, his ability to love, his laughter, his lust for life... The way he is brought up by society deadens his body and his senses and makes him insensitive and dead. He loses access to his innate feminine qualities of feeling, gentleness, love and intuition and become a head oriented, efficient unfeeling robot. 

Man needs a new psychology to understand himself. And the basic understanding that needs to be deeply imbibed and experienced is that - No man is just man and no woman is just woman; each man is both man and woman, and so is each woman - woman and man.

My vision of the new man is of a rebel, of a man who is in search of his original self, of his original face. A man who is ready to drop all masks, all pretensions, all hypocrisies, and show the world what he, in reality is. 

Because to be yourself is the greatest blessing in existence.  

People - the lost focus.

One the challenges that I face constantly is making sure that my team performs, and performs well. The dream of any manager is to have an empowered, enthusiastic and dedicated team of subordinates that delivers on the KPIs. Most managers are good people, and they spent adequate time grooming and training their people. Yet most subordinates disappoint us. Where is the gap? What's wrong?

I am not an Ivy league professor nor a Human resource expert. I don't do mubo-jumbo or academic theory. Just real world stuff that I've used myself.

One of the things that I learnt the hard way is that people everywhere are unhappy and stressed out at work. Gallup 2012 Employee Engagement Index says only 29% employees are engaged at work and only 45% are satisfied with their job.

The root cause of non performance is not in manager alone, but also in the broader frame of work. The environment, the culture, the strategy and the policies.

Engaged employees work harder, longer, with more focus, increase productivity, increase customer service, better quality, more satisfied customers, more sales, more profits and better performance. In other words you can have the best strategy in the world, but if nobody cares - it isn't going to matter.

Companies should invest in Employee Engagement. A good EEI score is 4+ on a scale of 5 being best and 1 being lowest. The rule of thumb is 4 + is great and if you see 2 you're going to lose people like rats leave a sinking ship.

You would be thinking, it costs millions to create engaged employees, or to measure EE. It's not. You can get a readymade questionnaire online easily. Run a quick survey in your company. At a very nominal cost you can get the basic hang of things. What are the areas that need attention.

The challenge is Employee Engagement like most other initiatives that matter, is a Top Down initiative. Its easy to implement but difficult to accept the scores of the first survey. And thus most Top Mgt avoid it, and build artificial recognition systems and farce initiatives to show that they care.


It takes just 12 weeks to run a Employee Engagement Survey cycle, and change the skepticism into engagement. Engagement is a habit. Habit of communication, growth, recognition, and trust.

HR Fragrance: Serve Them to Retain Them

HR Fragrance: Serve Them to Retain Them: Interviewed By: Saleh Abdullah Alkhamyasi Gurubinder S Punn With the diverse options available for the consumers in the market, eac...

Acting Crazy

It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity. - Albert Einstein


If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push button finger. - Frank Llyod Wright

Einstine and Wright had some pretty strong thoughts about technology, thoughts that are particularly prescient since they were uttered decades before the invention of the Internet, the Smartphone and the iPad. Consider the following all too typical scenario.

The other night I went out to dinner and a movie. Dinner was at a popular local restaurant known for its chinese food and casual ambiance. As the waitress led us to our table, I couldn't help but notice how nearly every single person had a cell phone lying flat on the table right next to their dinner plate. Literally, it seemed as though most people were eating fish with a side of smartphone. As we ordered and ate, I watched diners continuously pick up the phones, tap some keys and put them back down, only to repeat the same action again and again. Younger people appeared to do this more often, but nearly everyone, young and old picked up their phone at least once during the meal. It felt like I was watching a room full of people enagaging in obsesessive compulsive behaviour.

The same scenes were witnessed at the movie theater also. When the movie ended, every single person immediately pulled out their phones, even before the credits started rolling, and scrolled through whatever it was that they had missed over the last 90 minutes. If I didn't know better I would say that many of the moviegoers were suffering from some form of attention-deficit disorder.

Where does this rapid influx of technology leave us as we cruise into the second decade of new millennium? What we are looking at is a new disorder, one that combines elements of many psychiatric maladies. Its the subject of a new book by Rosen Larry called iDisorder.

Simplify, Simplify, Simplify...

Our life is frittered away by detail.... simplify, simplify!

The mass of men lead lives of quite desperation... I am convinced that to maintain oneself on this earth is not a hardship, but a pastime, if we live simply and wisely. Most of the luxuries , and many of the so called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.

Do people ever do what they really wish? What they by nature intended to do, and what they were best suited for. Everywhere I see people squandering the precious substance of their lives in pursuit of material gains. Everywhere I see people feverishly piling up property and possessions, enslaving themselves at the cost of things that really count.

I am sure there is something more to life than the mere collection of treasures.

World's greatest men, wisest men, great thinkers, philosophers have lived lives of simplicity. Can we take any clue from them.

Henry David Thoreau lived for few years in Walden Woods in solitude as an experiment. He then returned to Concord and wrote "Walden". He said Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in the extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two and three and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million - count a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand and one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simply, simplify....

So I say what Thoreau said. Simplify your life. Don't waste the years struggling for things that are unimportant. Don't burden yourself with possessions. Keep your needs and wants simple, and enjoy what you have. Simplify, simplify. Don't fritter your life away on non-essentials. Don't destroy your peace of mind by looking back, worrying about the past.

Live in the present, enjoy the present. Simplify!

GP's Gyan: RICHES

GP's Gyan: RICHES

RICHES

Man must be thrifty in order to be generous. Thrift does not end with itself, but extends its benefits to others. It founds hospitals, endows charities, establishes colleges and extends educational influences.

The duty of helping the helpless is one that speaks trumpet-tongued; but especially to those who profess love to God and goodwill to men. Its a duty that belongs to men as individuals, and as members of the social body.

And ironically, It is not necessary that men should be rich to help others.
Nothing is so much overestimated as the power of money. Some people have an idolatrous worship of money. The Greeks had their Golden Jupiter. The lowest human nature loves money, possessions and asks the silly questions - What is he worth? If you say there is a thoroughly good, benevolent, virtuous man! no body will even notice. But if you say "There is a man worth a million of money!" he will be stared at till out of sight.

Men go on toiling and moiling, eager to be richer; desperately struggling as if against poverty, at the same time that they are surrounded by abundance. They scrape and scrape and add penny to penny, and sometimes do shabby things in order to make a little more profit; though they may have accumulated far more than they can actually enjoy. And still they go on worrying, themselves incessantly in the endeavor to grasp at an additional increase of superfluity.

Perhaps such men have not enjoyed the advantage of education in early life. They have no taste for books. They have nothing to think of but money, and what will make of money. They have no faith, but in riches. They keep their children under restriction, and bring them up with a servile education.

At length an accumulation of wealth comes into the hands of children. They have before been restricted i their expenses; and they now become lavish. They have been educated in no better taste. They spend extravagantly. They will not be drudges in their business as their fathers were. They will spend so fast and so much that by the time the 3rd generation comes up there is no wealth left.

English proverb says - Twice clogs, once boots. The first generation wore clogs and accumulated wealth, his rich son wore boots and spent it all, and thus the third generation took up clogs again.

What a miserable end.

A man that makes nothing but money is a poor man.