What influences Viewpoints??

I stumbled upon an article/Tweet of an acclaimed journalist whose articles I read for the past 25 years. In the past, she was very clear in her approach, thought process and lucid in her writings. She was informative seldom colouring her feelings on the topic she was making a viewpoint. To sum up she was giving direction to readers' thought process with shades of opinions. 

I had one of the articles of her stored accidentally. She wrote it for a political magazine. I archived the magazine for a different reason.  I pulled out the magazine and read it in comparison to what she writes today. There is a sea change in her approach. I see the writings completely in contempt, highly coloured and slipping into personal abuse at times. She has become highly opinionated.  It is difficult to digest her style of writing now for someone who would like to know the facts of an issue from an unbiased viewpoint. There is no ideology, source of inspiration to which she is guiding readers to understand her viewpoint from.

My first reaction after comparing the articles was to condemn and highlight to her as to how her writings and viewpoints started moving from issues to personal opinion. I wondered what made her change. Is it the age? Fame? Arrogance? Societal position? Or is it that the senior journalists have right to be personalised in their opinions.

Newspapers is a great way to reach out to large set of audience. The audience base their knowledge on these articles, editorials and notes written in the Newspapers and spoken out in the channels are well researched and the journalist/Editor takes an unbiased view to position the news and let the reader take a stance on the issue. Based on these viewpoints the people opinions are formed. The Journalists thus became popular for their ability to research a topic thoroughly and give a viewpoint and influence the opinion of the audience. They were the conduits of knowledge transfer. Therefore the journalists have a great responsibility to balance their opinions and act as a critique to the issues they are raising without any personal animosity or attachment to the point in discussion. That will make a common man sit back and understand a topic and frame a logical and may be a sensible opinion.

Many of the journalists have written various articles and books. In all these books there is mention of the incidences and instances of meeting people in high society, bureaucrats, film personalities, businessmen and women and not to forget the ministers both at state and central level. They even mention as to how people from these walks of life beg them to cover them in better light. Some journalists have gone to the extent of personally advertising/campaigning for the candidates seeking to get elected and taking a position on such personalities. Some have taken stances for and against the stars.

Once I asked a journalist as to how he escaped a situation where he should ideally was supposed to be fined severely. He boasted of his links due to his journalist career. He says people will be scared if they have to fight him due to the "Press" sticker that is stuck on his vehicle. He went on to say that they become mutually dependent over period and thus give and take need to be there.

With age comes name and fame as journalists would have built their career on reasonable hardwork. At ripe age they end up feeling that their opinions are superior and the young journalists should emulate them. They are in preaching mode and thus age brings not only enough knowledge but also enough ego and arrogance as for any human being. If the journalists' position in the society is better off, then it is a deadly cocktail.

At first the name of the journalist will be mentioned just above the news he/she is covering. But as they become a name in the area of their coverage the name of the journalist is prominently displayed. May be, this emboldens them to take sides and form patterns of opinions which they may bother or not to update or upgrade. A world that is not in conformity with their views may not exist for them. By this age they have their name, fame, connections, wealth and growth in place. So taking bold stances does not affect their career oath of unbiased journalist.

There is also dilution of basic traits of hard work, referencing, updating one's own knowledge and thus banking on views that they framed some time back. This dilution of ideology and questioning of what they don't know makes them response everything with a question bordering on arrogance. This does not help the writer nor the reader as there is no takeaway.

To summarise, nobody can escape the reality of name, fame, wealth, connections and societal positions. As the landscape of politics, economy, urban strata, wealth distribution changes it is all the more difficult to become relevant day in and day out. Easiest way is to cling on to the personal opinions that were formed over a period of their career and rub them on to the audience which they readily have. Else, with none of the influences the world would be more quieter without incitement from this corner of journalists. As every rolling stone gains mass, these opinion makers are no different. Few can be unaffected by the ground they are rolling on. No viewpoint is authentic and devoid of bias as long as it does not quote an ideology, source of information and backed by statistical analysis.

Human adversity and Start up adveristies

Humans endure trauma, stress, accidents and adversities in different ways. Some cope up with great intensity and some succumb. From a Psychology perspective these are all "challenges" that a person faces when an adversity hits them. Research shows that the ability to cope up from these adversities depends on various factors including genetic makeup of the person. The rising above the challenges reveal a person's hidden abilities. Majority of the times the adversities changes 'self concept'. None can understand what makes us endure and what we are capable of enduring. The second class of benefit concerns relationships and the third common benefit is that the trauma changes priorities and philosophies toward the present and toward people.(1)

Drawing parallel to the psychoanalysis of human trauma and adversities to corporates, corporates are not as non-individualistic as we expect them and as they are portrayed legally. Promoters have a great say in the way they run the organisation. The culture and personal traits of individual promoters have a great bearing on the culture that a corporate inculcates. Many corporates, especially when they are young as start ups and are growing face with good number of adverse situations. These adverse situations are related to the acceptance of the product, selling processes, marketing effort, challenges with people, accounting methodologies adopted and so on. The key lies in the way the man at the helm of the affairs sits down and addresses these issues paves the way the corporate copes up with such situations. Some promoters take the bull by the horns as they clearly see that the issue can be fixed only by them and spend enough time in changing the course of the corporate to come out of the situation. 

Every organisation worth its name would have had a phase where they face these adversities. The adversities and challenges once they are endured and overcome make a strong organisation. People in the organisation proudly talk of how they came out of the situation.

I remember reading the interview of Bharti Mittal some years back. At that time he said that the biggest challenge they saw that was coming was the launch of Reliance Telecom. Reliance with its deep pockets and marketing effort captured the imagination of the people and market share. Airtel was afraid of de-growth as it is yet to be present nationally and was only present in pockets in various states. Once they saw through the phase of launch by Reliance, they were able to redraw their strategy and come back strongly. It was Mr.Mittal’s personal grit and determination that saw the organisation through the adversity. 

There are good number of start ups where the promoters had a tough past. Some promoters went through rough patches in the previous businesses and scraped through and in some cases promoters have lost everything and started all over again and in some cases promoters made some money by selling the earlier business after challenging years of running the business. In all the cases, they exhibit fair amount of confidence and are extremely optimistic of making it big. This attitude is what makes them cross the hurdles and face challenges with determination. This endurance makes them look positive side of the situation and rebuild.

In Indian context the post traumatic growth applicable to individuals is applicable to all organisations except for public sector companies. In these companies no individual can command and create a culture as much in privately held companies, thus making them succumb to the adversities than overcoming them in spite of the back up from the Government ownership.

Why some children are particularly vulnerable to adversity? Genes guide brain development throughout childhood, but that development is also affected by environmental context, and overall safety versus threat. Good parenting can help tune up the attachment system to make the child more adventurous; yet even beyond such effects, if the child’s environment feels safe and controllable, the child will develop a more positive affective style, and will be less anxious as an adult. But is the environment offers daily uncontrollable threats, the child’s brain will be altered, set to be less trusting and more vigilant.(2)

As I was chatting with few of the seed funding companies in a conference, one of the statements made by them caught my attention. He said he would like to bet on young team. It went against my intuition. When I dug deep, I realized that there is something called “memory bump”, an autobiographical memory, which is a recall of memory of a person between the ages of fifteen and twenty five, is more prevalent in the age groups beyond thirty than the younger ones. Younger teams take more risks, show more agility, fall back less on experience and more on intuition and learn their way out of problems quickly.

More the cycles a startup goes through the make-measure-learn, the more it is experienced to handle any adversities and correct the course of action or overcome a hurdle. Therefore, constant evaluation of the external environment and letting the team exposed to the facts is the best method to ready people in the organisation for the challenges to come. So from a suspecting mindset the organisation will successfully move towards sure footed actions as they would evaluate before they start coming to conclusions. A sense of less trusting and more vigilant behaviour among the team down the organisation structure is helpful in one way or the other as the organisation is made sure footed by weeding out various issues right from the ground level. 

It is the endurance of tough situations of the leadership team that make the culture of the organisation which in turn is capable of enduring changing and troubled situations. Such companies are more capable of enduring and coming out of tougher situations they face in the journey than the promoters who faced lesser challenges.

Constructive role of advisors helping entrepreneurs build their organisations - A Perspective

I encountered interesting behaviours of few entrepreneurs and promoters in the past few months. Some useful for me study, some for my own improvement as a person and some became interesting subjects for my study. I am focusing in this article on the conflict of advisory and entrepreneurs' requirements.

Entrepreneurs take enormous risk in the path to build their businesses. Sometimes, the risks and gamble pays off and sometimes it doesn't. I am using risk with the meaning that the information available on hand is sufficient for a person to take a decision in that direction, whereas gamble is a clear directional call without any deep study.

As an advisor, Iam used to constantly watch for the risks and gambles of the promoters and post a warning signal and create a path around the potential traps. This process is the toughest. The reason being the visibility of the results of our work are not visible remotely from where the entrepreneur stands forget about being at the round the corner. Entrepreneur is always in a mode to address the immediate issues than worry only long term. They struggle to balance both the time frames. The mind set and thought process has to change often to live up to the requirements of both strategic and tactical requirements. Entrepreneurs say "now and here". Therefore the mantle of long term planning and strategy building falls in our lap.



Entrepreneurs have a great task of balancing the short and long term objectives. This balance is extremely critical as they would loose sight of their existence if any of them are ignored.  In my experience the entrepreneurs are good at combining the short term to look at long term. Their ability to handle current issues and finding quick solutions to even the path is amazing. These have to be combined with the long term implications. Therefore, they need strong sounding board.  Entrepreneurs seldom like to take no for their ideas and thoughts and force you in one way or the other and come around to pressurise you to say yes. That's why you see lots of yes men around entrepreneurs. In one of the case an entrepreneur has given the responsibility of taxation to his admin assistant who slept on the issue for a long time and woke on the tax filing day. There were some thoughts provided from our end from a long term perspective. The entrepreneur felt very happy to see the admin guy putting a lot of hard work to save the tax than look from the long term perspective. Yes entrepreneur is right as he immediately saves tax but has to face long term implications of short cuts taken. This is the trait which I always admire and abhor in entrepreneurs. Admire for the reason that short cuts addresses their immediate requirements; abhor because long term implications are ignored. Then you don't need an advisor.

Majority of the times I get a dirty look when I get introduced as Advisor and few jokes on advisory and consultancy will kick off and the discussion will hover around bad experiences with advisors they had when the consultants were engaged.

One of the entrepreneur commented that I have all the professional qualifications and B school degree to give him quick solutions. The entrepreneurs feel that we have a magic wand to quickly arrive at solutions and deal with situations. The situations are generally related to investors, people, fundraising, sales ets. If they are not addressed in a day's time they feel that they are wasting money and energy in employing us. Advisors are to think long term by balancing the short term executional objectives.

As Dan Ariely describes in his introduction note in Behavioural Economics guide 2015 "There are lots of biases, and lots of ways we make mistakes, but two of the blind spots that surprise me most are the continuous belief in the rationality of people and of the markets. This surprises me particularly because even the people who seem to believe that rationality is a good way to describe individuals, societies and markets, feel very differently when you ask them specific questions about the people and institutions they know very well. On one hand, they can state all kinds of high order beliefs about the rationality of people, corporations, and societies, but then they share very different sentiments about their significant other, their mother-in-law (and I am sure that their significant other and mother-in-law also have crazy stories to share about them), and the organizations they work at. Somehow when we look at a particular example of life up close, the illusion of sensible behavior fades almost instantly".

Jonathan Haidt in his book Happiness Hypothesis talks of the both sides of the brain and the interlinkages that exist. He makes an important observation that people on whom experiments were conducted where the interlinkage between the both sides of the brain is affected. He quotes patients seeing things but not able to spell out as seeing and speaking are controlled by different sides of the brain. He even says that they manipulate the answer to satisfy the examiner. Taking a page from that experiment and its results, entrepreneurs take this invisible risk and fall back on people to execute. What they is invisible to people around. So is the job of advisor keeping in mind the situation on hand what can be the best for the entrepreneur. The most common criticism is that whether I have ever tried to be entrepreneur and succeeded to to capable of advising. Frankly, it is immaterial.(Though I tried my hand and was successful and not so successful in some of the trials).

Education is an important tool that plays a big role in bridging the understanding. Equally educated can converse on the same lines and any disparity will drag the discussion in different directions and might end up on a jarring note. Education in this context does not mean the certificates one has earned. Brain treats familiar topics with ease compared to unknown and difficult ones. Majority of the friction arises here as an advisor wishes to pool all his knowledge and push down the throat of the organisation but the organisation may not be ready for it. So entrepreneurs beware of bringing in advisors before your organisation is ready.

A Company where I was asked to implement the processes was very happy to see the template of the processes and manuals. But I ended up reading them myself and started reciting to all than anybody taking the ownership of implementation. So I became the creator, doer, trainer, updater and what not. Then suddenly promoters step in and feel that the processes are not yielding results. Critical lesson is that the weight of the management to implement what is suggested as process is important. I had to question the intent and readiness of the promoters who later on took the issue seriously and implemented and saw the results coming through.  

My father in his hey days used to advise people who come with problems sometimes strange. His natural reaction and advise was to say "everything will be fine with the time" at the end of all his statements. This advise used to come after listening to all the details spelt out and detailed narration by the other person. After listening to him time and again saying the same thing majority of the times, I countered him as to why he is not addressing the real issue. He gave me an excellent piece of his mind which I can never forget in my life. To share it briefly, "No human being is devoid of problems. The solutions always lie within. No external solution can fully satisfy the other person. Majority of the problem is solved when the person shares with the person he believes that he can provide solutions. While stating the problem the person carefully puts in perspective as to how he should narrate it and identifies the strengths and pitfalls of his narration and by the time he ends the narration, he would have identified the solution to a large extent. If not he is searching for a technical solution which he is not in know of. Inspite of all the narration the person who is listening is never in the complete know of all the facts the other person is narrating nor can he imagine the situation the person is going through. It is therefore important for us to put the facts in order, provide technical feedback and make the narrator find the solution rather than stating the solution". Initially I felt that this was an escapist mode of giving a solution. His method was to counsel people in a passive way. But as I grew up and started facing issues and sharing them with my friends, I never was in complete agreement with the solutions they gave but it definitely kept me thinking in different directions and forced me to arrive at solution; good or bad.

A guy doing research in Psychology is well aware of Psychological situations and problems a patient might go through but is he the right person to treat a patient? Same way, the division of labour and knowledge separates advisory from entrepreneurship. Each is equipped with their own skills which should complement the business than contradict.

An elite B School guy can never give you advise when you don't want to listen in the first place. When you want a solution that is there in your mind and if you want it come through the Advisor one is doing great disservice to their own mission. Dan Ariely studies on irrational behaviour when it comes to decisions taken while dealing with money are eye openers. As businesses are meant to be money spinners there will never be dearth of irrational behaviour.

An advisor's primary duty is to go by Habit 5 of Franklin Covey:"Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood" to start with, then to his Habit 3:"Put First Things First" and then to Habit 6:"Synergise" and then to Habit 4:"Think Win Win" and not to forget Habit 2:"Begin with the End in Mind". The fruits of entrepreneurship are enjoyed by those who got in with their ideas. Bring in as a team  those who share your passion and ideas after careful filtering.