Karma Sutras: Leadership and Wisdom in Uncertain Times
Author - Debashis Chatterjee
Publisher - SAGE, Rs 450
Karma Sutras by Debashis Chatterjee decodes the secrets of effective leadership in uncertain times. It is a blueprint for success in the organisational & personal sphere. An edited excerpt:
From the perspective of leadership, there is much more to work than just getting a job. In fact, a significant percentage of those jobs that existed even five years ago would not exist in the next five years. On 20 June 2014, the first 3D-printed metal part, a humble titanium bracket, took to the skies on board a commercial jetliner. With this, aviation history was made by Airbus. Imagine how many design and manufacturing jobs a 3D-printed model aircraft will displace going forward! Not just manufacturing jobs, service sector jobs in legal, medical and other professions will yield ground to digitization and automation. In fact, all jobs that can be broken up into a simple cause-effect relationship will be taken over from a human being by a more efficient device.
A leader’s work, fortunately, is deeper than what is demanded by a stereotypical job. Cal Newport’s book raises this issue of deep work as the core of a leader’s contribution in the age of automation.
To remain valuable in our economy, therefore, you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things. This task requires deep work. If you don’t cultivate this ability, you’re likely to fall behind as technology advances. (Newport 2016, 13)
Deep work is the ability to focus on a chunk of a job for a sustained length of time without any distraction. If you are able to lend your entire attention to solving a problem in your organization for one hour of uninterrupted time, you will develop the ability to plug into a space of deep attention in your neural structure. This kind of work is difficult to replicate in the machine world. Newport explains further:
The Deep Work Hypothesis: The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare and at the exact same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. …the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive. (Newport 2016, 14) Decoding the history of people who have produced worldclass work such as the biologist Charles Darwin or the author Charles Dickens, researchers have found that they never worked for more than four or five hours a day. However, their work was deep and uninterrupted by the onslaught of modern technology.
Someone aspiring to be a leader will need to set aside specific time to engage in deep work. They have to clear up digitalfree time and stay away from smart devices that fragment attention. This will help them not only in doing high-quality work but also more efficient work. In short, deep work will help leaders produce better work in less time.
Modern Misconceptions about Work
If you were to visualize your world as a limitless field of action, which it is indeed, your work would seem like a narrow, artificial boundary created by you. When you finish a job successfully and exclaim, ‘I have done a great job today,’ do you realize that your claim to greatness does not acknowledge the role of many other people who have contributed to your triumph? Do you acknowledge, for example, the following contributors to your success: the employer who gave you your job, your college teacher who taught you the skills necessary for it, your mother who brought you into this world, your father who paid your way through school, the compassionate colleague who helped you when you were in distress, the old farmer in South America who produced the breakfast cereal you ate in the morning and the orange tree in Florida whose fruit nourished you? If you did not acknowledge the role of all these people and many more besides, perhaps your statement, ‘I have done a great job’, would be only partially true. Our work is an expression of a universal field of action, yet we create an artificial definition (i.e., making something finite) out of an infinite dimension of our work. From this crisis of vision arises the following misconceptions about our work:
Misconception 1: Our work is equivalent to our qualifications.
Misconception 2: Our work is a 9-to-5 affair.
Misconception 3: Our work is a product, not a process.
Misconception 1: Our Work Is Equivalent to Our Qualifications
In many of my workshops, participants introduce themselves as ‘I am an engineer’, ‘I am an accountant’, ‘I am an ENT specialist’ or some such qualification. To explore the element of truth implicit in the statement, ‘I am an engineer’, one may ask the following: ‘Am I an engineer, or do I have an engineering qualification? Obviously, my identity as a human being in this world and society is much larger than an engineering degree.’ One of the maladies of a highly specialized society is that our world view is often shaped and dominated by our skills at work. Sometimes, our world view shrinks so much that we begin to see ourselves as impersonal cogs in an economic engine.
Misconception 2: Our Work Is a 9-to-5 Affair
A great illusion that we love to hold on to is that our work lasts only from 9 am to 5 pm, after which we go home. The truth is that our entire existence is nothing but work. The very fact of our being alive is ample testimony that we are at work, whether we are breathing in or breathing out, working our muscles or exercising our minds, working for ourselves or in spite of ourselves. Taking into account the amount of work that nature does to keep us going (e.g., maintaining our heartbeats) should convince us that our work is not temporal but existential.
Misconception 3: Our Work Is a Product, Not a Process
Often, what we do is perceived, defined and measured in terms of a product that is external to our efforts. Yet all significant work is really an intrinsic process of the unfolding of human consciousness. Even the most tangible product of our work is really a process. The men who invented the first hot-air balloon must have hailed their creation as evidence of humanity’s final triumph over gravity. Had they lived to see the development of the most sophisticated rocket, they would have readily admitted that their balloon was only a small and visible step in an unending and invisible process of mankind’s inner quest for perfection. Neil Armstrong, the first human to set foot on the moon (20 July 1969) said, ‘That’s one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind.’
So it is with all our work. We become caught up in the product or in the ‘idea’ of the product so much so that the process remains obscure to our limited vision. The glib, oft-heard expression ‘mind over matter’ exposes the limitation of a vision that sees the conquest of external nature by the mind as the only worthwhile work in this world.
An excerpt from Karma Sutras: Leadership and Wisdom for Uncertain Times by Debashis Chatterjee, published under the SAGE IIM-Kozhikode Series for New Managers by SAGE Publications India