Lata’s Book

There’s a management lesson from Rabindranath Tagore which goes “Jodi tor đak shune keu na ashe tôbe êkla chôlo re”. The enlightened reader certainly does not require a translation. That as a starting point, Lata Subramanian has written, edited and self-published her maiden work (A Dance with the Corporate Ton) on Kindle. If publishers missed the point, her courage didn’t.

Cyberspace and technology provide enough facilities for expression, provided there is something to say, have the expressive power to say it, uncaring of opinion and are willing to go it alone. There is a joy in writing sure; if profits follow it’s a bonus. If bouquets follow great, if brickbats follow, wonderful – someone’s reading. Sure we want everyone to love us; but that’s impractical and we have to accept it. No school of Management teaches this fundamental truth.

While this book is a personal journey; she has woven into it managerial lessons which will stand (especially) management students and young managers in good stead. That working life begins somewhere and it ends somewhere. Not necessarily at the bottom or the top. Not necessarily with too much ease or too much pain. And it does not necessarily start with a bang or end with a whisper. Sometimes the other way round. That mistakes will be made and successes will come. What is important is the journey and the lessons learned. As she puts it “life is a fairy tale, which it is not”

Dealing with biases are an important life lesson. One of her themes relates to the harsher realities of pigmentocracy and impact of skin colour, appearance and dress in careers. Bosses and HR people will shrink with horror when confronted with the fact that these biases exist. God Forbid! They chant. The truth is unkind. As Daniel Kahneman, in his great work Thinking Fast and Slow, explains “Systematic errors are known as biases and they recur predictably in particular circumstances. When the handsome and confident speaker bounds onto the stage, you can anticipate that the audience will judge his comments more favourably than he deserves. The availability of a diagnostic label for this bias – the halo effect – makes it easier to anticipate, recognize and understand.

In the introduction of his wonderful book Being Mortal, Atul Gawande writes “I learned about a lot of things in medical school, but mortality was not one of them”. In Management School a lot is taught; management of disappointment, failure, boredom and especially boredom is missing.

In her journey through Oberoi Hotels, Lintas, Trikaya/Grey up to Sterling there is a recurring theme of boredom. It takes courage to admit that it happens so often in a career. What are the outcomes? What happens in a job change? Management of incidents in the organization when personal life is going around the bend out there.  It is only in stories like these that facts emerge.  They are facts. They are neither ‘right’ nor ‘wrong’. That is what Students of Management need to comprehend.

Thought she quotes George R.R. Martin “Nobody is a villain in their own story. We are all heroes” she writes honestly on many dimensions, especially on figuring her self.  “It also didn’t help that I was very opinionated and vociferous with my judgements on how the agency should be managed”. And “I had failed to learn the art and benefit of emotional impassivity from the Corporation”. At another stage she figures “You highlight the positives and dramatize a story that can be sold, even from your personal life. It’s how you position yourself and build a personal brand. It’s an age old art, which is now known as personal branding”. From one extreme experience she writes “I also think those three months of waitressing made me a better person and manager overall.”

Honest self-assessment is an art and a science. It has to be learnt, only from experience or from the experience of others.

Her tough advice to her reader “I still hold by that belief. Employees are better off if they learn to safeguard their own future by reading the trends in the environment and gearing up for the future.” True but tough. Tough, because it’s tough to do.

Schools of Management should make her book available to students on laptops, I Pads, Kindles or whatever e-medium young people interface with. They will get a practical workbook on life on the grind. As Ms. Subramanian says “It depends on which side of the tunnel you approach the question from – the short view or the long view”.

Do note she doesn’t talk about light at the end of the tunnel. That is for the enlightened reader to understand, that there’s always light there.

Rajesh Pant

Pune

April 2016