Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway

Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway
Susan Jeffers

This book provides an insightful and engaging look at the destructive effects of fear in all aspects of our lives and guidance on how this fear may be overcome.

Anyone engaged in creating change will face their own fears and those of others and this book provides both an understanding of the roots for people’s fears and an understanding of how people may be helped to understand and better deal with fear.

The book highlights the paradox that whilst we seek the security of a fear free life, this creates an environment in which we are denied the satisfaction of achievement or advancement. The result is the catch-22 of fear of change and fear of staying the same.

The conclusion is that fear is a necessary and essential element of life and pushing through fear is actually less frightening than living with the underlying fear that comes from a feeling of helplessness, hence ‘feel the fear and do it anyway’.

The first part of the book creates a picture of the widespread and damaging effects of fear, in its many forms such as fear of changing jobs, fear of illness, fear of failure, etc. It introduces a progression of truths which serve to illuminate the effects of fear and build the case for the active choice of how fear is addressed. A simple but powerful picture presents the option to address fear through positive power rather than as a victim of passive pain.

As you work through the book the emphasis shifts towards the actions that you can take to change your attitude and approach. A number of simple models and techniques are introduced which are presented in an easily understood form. When strung together these provide a structured programme with which to set about changing your attitude and behaviours.

The book benefits from a liberal scattering of first hand accounts of people at various stages of succumbing to or addressing their fears. These stories do much to help explain the approach and provide an engaging dialogue and encouragement that lightens up the message and creates the feeling that improvement is possible.

The book rightly confesses that though the message and techniques are relatively easy to understand their application presents more of a challenge, not because they are of themselves difficult but they have to be applied and sustained. The challenge therefore for any such book is to leave the reading list and bookshelf and become embedded in the actions of the reader.

Does this book meet the challenge? I have adopted some of the techniques and recognise that others will be of benefit. Having read the book I know that I will return to read it again and I hope will have felt the benefits of conscious active use of the techniques over the next few months. Time will tell as to whether the book helps create change so I hope to return to this review in a few months time.

In the meantime I recommend this book for its insights into a topic that affects us all. My personal perspective is that the effects of fear can become so ingrained in our lives that we fail to recognise the fear and simply feel the numbness of dissatisfaction and a vague inability to focus on doing anything about it. This book will help create focus so you start to question the way things are and why you allow them to remain so. The challenge of addressing them is by definition a life long journey and this book will provide an excellent platform from which that journey can begin.

The Ultimate Book of Business Thinking

The Ultimate Book of Business Thinking
Des Dearlove

For those dealing with change or dealing with people dealing with change this is an invaluable reference book. It’s subtitled ‘Harnessing the Power of the World’s Greatest Business Ideas’ which I think over eggs the pudding a little, but in its around 300 pages it does a pretty good job of introducing most of the improvement initiatives you are likely to come across.

It is structured in alphabetical order by name of initiative and covers around 50 business ideas, tools or techniques from Action Learning to The Virtual Organisation. A quick calculation reveals that there are 5-6 pages for each topic but this is ample space to provide an overview and each is supported by a list of further reading should you wish to find out more.

What I like about the book is that it doesn’t present a purely technical summary but also includes some personal perspectives and reflections on the approach, its application and the way in which it is perceived. For example the section on downsizing identifies the major problems that this approach created in companies who shed jobs and also the failed politically correct attempts to rebadge it as ‘rightsizing’. In addition each entry has a section called ‘Ideas into Action’ which provides a brief example of the approach used in a real business environment. These sections provide some real insights into the application of the approaches.

I like the fact that the book doesn’t set out to advocate any of the approaches, but provides a very useful introduction which can form the basis for further reading. If you find yourself in the sea of acronyms applied to the current fashions of business improvement this will help you unscramble your JIT from your BPR and your Emotional Intelligence from your Strategic Inflection Point.

Here for information is the list of business ideas covered.
Action Learning – Activity-based Costing – Adhocracy – Agility – The Balanced Scorecard – Benchmarking – Boston Matrix – Broadbanding – Channel Management – Core Competencies – Core Values – Crisis Management – Decision Theory (including Kepner-Tregoe and Ringi) – Discounted Cash Flow – Downsizing – E-Commerce (including Customer Relationship Management) – Emotional Intelligence – Employability – Empowerment – Four Ps of Marketing – Game Theory – Intellectual Capital – Interim Management – Just in Time (JIT) (Kanban) – Kaizen (Quality Circles) – Knowledge Management – Leadership – Lean Production – The Learning Organisation – The Managerial Grid (Blake Mouton) – Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs – Matrix Model – Outsourcing – Porter’s Five Competitive Forces – The Psychological Contract – Re-engineering (BPR) – Relationship Marketing – Scenario Planning – Scientific Management – Seven S Framework – The Shamrock Organisation – Shareholder Value – Strategic Inflection Point – Strategic Management – Succession Planning – Supply Chain Management – Theories X and Y (and Z) – Thought Leadership – 360-degree Feedback – Time-based Competition – TQM and the Quality Movement – The Transnational Organisation – Value Innovation – The Virtual Organisation

Chicken Soup for the Soul at Work

Chicken Soup for the Soul at Work
Jack Cranfield, Mark Victor Hansen, Maida Rogerson, Martin Rutte & Tim Clauss

This is one of a growing series of books. It began with Chicken Soup for the Soul which has now appeared in several servings and has led to a range of books which provide Chicken Soup for specific target audiences such as mothers, teenagers, even golfers and in this case for those at work. The Chicken Soup referred to is not literal but the nourishment of your soul and spirit. Each book contains 101 true stories of human experience which in this volume serve to inspire by sharing experience of compassion courage and creativity in the workplace. This sort of book isn’t to everyone’s liking but even with the American bias I find these collections extremely powerful. I always find examples in the stories that stick with me as role models and as examples of what people can achieve that I can then share with others. I’ve read several of the series and was attracted to this one for its focus on the workplace.

The stories, rarely more than a couple of pages long, are grouped within nine sections, each a business theme such as ‘The power of Acknowledgement’ and ‘Overcoming Obstacles’. The book contains no editorial attempt at instructing the reader on what is right or what to do and simply leaves the stories do that. Each story is preceded by a relevant quote typically from a business leader.

For example a story about training Shamu a 19,000lb whale to jump 22 feet out of the water and perform tricks at Sea World is preceded by Tom Peters quote ‘Celebrate what you want to see more of’. The story outlines how the training of Shamu is based on reinforcing the behaviours they want to see. They start  by ensuring the whale can’t fail. The rope it has to jump is actually submerged at first and the whale is congratulated fed and patted each time it swims over it. If it swims under the rope it isn’t punished, no constructive criticism, no development feedback and no warnings in the personnel file; its taught that its negative behaviour will simply not be acknowledged. Using this approach of positive reinforcement the whale achieves its remarkable performance. The story makes the point that most of us get most things right most of the time, yet we often find we focus our attention on those things we don’t want repeated and didn’t want in the first place, rather than what we do well.

Stories such as this provide real practical examples written by ordinary people of what we might do differently. In the space of 300 or so pages we have 101 opportunities for most readers to be inspired to change something for the better. This is no mean achievement for any management book and a delight in a book that is so easy to read.

Another story which stuck in my mind was that of an act of generosity and encouragement without which Scott Adams would never have achieved his aim to be a cartoonist. As a fan of Dilbert I wonder at how easily we could have been denied his creation and am led to think about how better I can encourage others.

One thing you find when reading these books is the desire to want to share some of the stories.

In summary a collection of real life experience stories all relating to work. If you are the sort of person who is inspired by stories of what can be achieved, some of which will tug on your heart then you’ll enjoy this book and probably others in the series. If you want an academic treatise on management approaches this probably isn’t for you.

Who Moved My Cheese?

Who Moved My Cheese?
Dr Spencer Johnson

The subtitle ‘An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and In Your Life’ is a little spurious. This is a simple book that will take less than one hour to read from cover to cover. On the basis of a word count, or if you’re looking for a management book with answers, this will score very poorly. However that’s not what the book sets out to do.

It presents a rather whimsical story of life for two mice and two small people in a maze. The maze represents the environment for change with unknown futures and the accompanying fears. The four characters are used to represent different attitudes to change. The mice Sniff and Scurry represent the fairly straight forward reactive approach to change. As mice they’re not credited with great intelligence but when their source of cheese is moved, react by setting off to find new cheese supplies.

The little people, Hem and Haw, are credited with the intelligence of men which in many ways provides a hindrance to their ability to change. When their cheese is moved their ‘intelligent’ response leads to a wide range of reactions including denial, recrimination and resentment which disables their ability to set off to seek new cheese. Gradually Haw comes to terms with the need for change and the contrast with Hem is used to illustrate how fear of change can be disabling and how this fear might be overcome.

This simple story illuminates a range of responses to change and provides four different characters to illustrate these response types. These types are inevitably presented in simple forms and can’t deal with the complexity of real change. That isn’t the purpose of the book and is indeed its strength. The four characters provide a vocabulary that many will find useful in describing their, and their colleagues, reaction to change. The approach taken to make that vocabulary accessible is to make the story simple so that the book can be quickly read and passed on to spread the word. The book is so easy to read that I can imagine it being passed on to a colleague to be read in the next hour and moving through a team in a day, rather than languishing in an in-tray for three months awaiting spare time that will never arrive.

If you approach this as another pebble to be tossed into the pool of your ideas. It’s a small pebble but for many a very useful one. It is very accessible and might provide new thoughts, images and vocabulary with which to describe and most importantly share ideas on change. It doesn’t have the answers but no book ever can. People have the answers and the aim of this book is to encourage them to set off to look for their answers, their new cheese.

The Tipping Point.

The Tipping Point.
Malcolm Gladwell.

This is a fascinating and thought provoking book that looks at how ideas and behaviours reach and pass through a threshold beyond which they spread like wildfire. Malcolm Gladwell draws on a number of examples of this phenomenon such as the transformation in the crime levels in New York, the adoption of the ‘once unfashionable’ Hush Puppy shoe or the dramatic growth in the athletic shoe producer Airwalk to illustrate the crossing of these thresholds or ‘tipping points’ at which dramatic advances are made.

In exploring the mechanisms which account for these tipping points he identifies some of the people involved in creating these transformations. and their characteristics that contribute to the spread of ideas. Three distinct types are described; Connectors who contribute through their ability to maintain effective networks to connect ideas with people; Mavens who are the collectors of knowledge and its analysis as information brokers; Salesmen who provide the link to convince the population of the merits of the idea.

The book includes other examples of each of these contributions to the spreading of ideas and for example has some fascinating insights into the work done in the development of the TV series Sesame Street to ensure the stickiness of the educational ideas aimed at children.

This is an engaging, fascinating and stimulating read that provides a number of insights of value to everyone who shares the objective of making new ideas stick and lead to transformation.

Freakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner.

Freakonomics
by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner.

A rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything.

Steven D Levitt is an interesting man. He is a trained and expert economist, who doesn’t really like economics. Someone highly skilled in the use of a suite of tools, but who chooses not to use them in the context or the way in which they are routinely used. He thus deserves the title of maverick as he takes his toolkit of measurement and data analysis and points it, not towards the same questions as his erstwhile colleagues, to be used in the same way to glean the same answers. Instead he focuses his attention wherever his interest takes him.

Mavericks are interesting people, they do the unexpected, and see the unseen, and through this book he illustrates what can be discovered if you truly explore questions rather than being led by the existing answers.

As a maverick he needed the guiding hand of a writer, Stephen J Dubner, to settle the ideas long enough to create a book. Together they have created a stimulating volume which will have you seeing new things in the topics they have covered, which range from how elections are won, how teachers and sumo wrestlers cheat, how your estate agent works or doesn’t work for you, to how profitable it is to sell illegal drugs.

Steven delights in taking conventional wisdom, and examining it through his measurement trained thinking. He discovers that much conventional wisdom, is strong on conventional, but weak on wisdom. As you read the pages you’ll discover that money doesn’t win elections, that its far more dangerous to have a swimming pool in the garden than a gun in the house and that the biggest contributor to the reduction in serious crime in the United States were changes to the abortion law.

For example in one chapter the book explores the often considered question of nature v nurture. As parents this is a question that sometimes haunts us. How much of what our children become comes from genetics and how much from the way we raise them? Through analysis of a mound of data, including that of children adopted and raised by non genetic parents they concluded an interesting result. Their conclusion is that what we do has little impact on our children, what we are being is what matters.

This has a very strong resonance with my thinking. To paraphrase; taking your child to the museum has no impact on their development, but being the kind of parent who thinks of taking their child to the museum is all important. The subtlety of this difference, I believe divides those that simply ‘do’ change, from those that become change.

More fundamental than describing new insights, their aim is not to change what you think, but how you think. This is nicely captured in their description in the closing paragraphs of the book.

‘You might become more sceptical of common wisdom; you may begin looking for hints as to how things aren’t quite what they seem.; perhaps you will seek out some trove of data and sift through it, balancing your intelligence and your intuition to arrive at a glimmering new idea. Some of these ideas might make you uncomfortable, even unpopular…. You will find yourself asking a lot of questions. Many of them will lead to nothing. But some will produce answers that are interesting, even surprising.’

This is an entertaining read which will help you question much conventional wisdom, and perhaps spur you on to take this questioning with you wherever you go. So inspired, who knows what power for change this may give you.

Screw it. Let’s Do it. (Lessons in Life)

Screw it. Let’s Do it. (Lessons in Life)
Richard Branson

Richard Branson is well known not simply for his success in business as head of Virgin, but for the manner in which he has achieved it. In this short book he sets out the key lessons that he has learned and which guide his approach to life and business. He manages to cram a lot of ideas into the nine short chapters, and reveals insights into his childhood, the development of his business and the personal challenges he as undertaken as driver of record breaking power boats or as a pioneering balloon pilot.

The book is full of insights which weave lessons learned in childhood, with their application to his life. The role of luck, serendipity or synchronicity, as well as hard work and following your instinct are all brought to life. When we look at someone like Richard there’s a temptation to think that he had something special, something denied to the rest of us. That’s not how he sees it. A key message is that we can all achieve, as he says, ‘I’m a believer in people, and what they can become.’

It is clear that Richard’s success has more than an element of good fortune to it, but this is not something handed out only to a few. Opportunities are all around us is we are able to become receptive to them, and willing to take the risk of succeeding. Once you do there’s no knowing where it may lead.

This is a great little book packed with good ideas and advice, as well as some glimpses into Richard’s life, including the fear and danger that have been part of some of his more public adventures.

Once bought the format and fun style of this book will encourage you to read it, and its messages will prove worthwhile.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Robert Pirsig

This is not an easy review for this is not an easy book. One thing I think I’m sure of is that it’s not about Zen or motorcycle maintenance.

On the surface the book is the story of the author and his son with some friends travelling across America. However this provides the environment for the author to share and explore a range of questions and issues including rationality, attitudes to technology, philosophies of life and the meaning of quality. What the book does is create the opportunity and invite the reader to explore these questions and others that they are stimulated to identify themselves. It’s a book that provokes and requires the reader to think. In a sense the book becomes and is what the reader makes of it.

What I made of it, and what makes the book exciting for me, is this approach through the vehicle of a novel of creating an environment in which the reader is teased into thinking through a range of extremely challenging philosophical questions. Many readers unwilling to engage in this process may see little in this book of value viewing it as being over complex and lacking in immediate gratification of a standard novel. Others looking not for questions but answers will be disappointed that the book has not the rigour they are looking for and provides no solutions.

However for those who want their thinking stimulated and their understanding challenged this is a demanding but very rewarding read that will probable warrant being reread several times.

I realise that the above says little about what the book is. I take comfort by quoting a passage from the book that I think releases me from having to describe what it is and invite you to find out what it becomes for you.

“The trouble is that essays always have to sound like God talking for eternity, and that isn’t the way it ever is. People should see that it’s never anything other than just one person talking from one place in time and space and circumstance. It’s never been anything else, ever, but you can’t get that across in an essay.”

All I can say is that whilst this isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, it’s the kind of book that just might change the way you see yourself, your world and your future. If you decide to read the book I recommend the 25^th anniversary edition as this has some additional explanatory information by the author and also an interesting exchange of correspondence between the author and publisher which gives an insight into the creative process.

Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?

Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? is an account of IBM’s historic turnaround as told by Louis V. Gerstner, Jr., the chairman and CEO of IBM from April 1993 until March 2002. Lou Gerstner led IBM from the brink of bankruptcy and mainframe obscurity back into the forefront of the technology business. After a brief foreword and introduction in which Gerstner provides his pre-IBM background, he jumps right into the story of his IBM experience. The book is divided into five parts: “Grabbing Hold,” “Strategy,” “Culture,” “Lessons Learned,” and “Observations.”

Part I, “Grabbing Hold,” is the story of how Gerstner wrestled with the idea of taking the IBM job (he turned it down at first), followed by highlights from his first year on the job. It provides an interesting insider’s view of the CEO recruiting process for a Fortune 50 company and describes how Gerstner addressed IBM’s severe financial crisis in the early ’90s and managed to keep the company solvent. It also reveals just how precarious IBM’s financial position was during that time, which many readers (including myself) might not have known. Still, although Part I is quite interesting, the real meat of the book is in the subsequent parts.

After stepping back to provide a brief history of IBM, Part II (“Strategy”) dives more deeply into how Gerstner repositioned IBM’s corporate strategy to keep the company together and pull off a successful turnaround. When Gerstner came on board, the conventional wisdom, from both industry pundits as well as many IBM insiders, was that the only way to save IBM from eventual disaster was to break it apart. But Gerstner looked beyond this advice and opted to preserve the real strength he believed IBM brought to customers. His decision to keep the company together and “teach the elephant to dance” was “the first strategic decision, and, I believe, the most important decision I ever made — not just at IBM, but in my entire business career,” Gerstner writes.

Fixing IBM: “All about execution”

What Gerstner realized is that IBM had a unique and unequaled capability to “apply complex technologies to solve business challenges.” It was this unique value proposition that would enable him to bring IBM back from near extinction. But to accomplish this, IBM needed not only a corporate makeover, but also a complete facelift and some liposuction as well! Gerstner likens his arrival at IBM to stepping through a time warp and arriving back in the ’50s. A massive, difficult, and painful reengineering feat was required to get the insular IBM to focus on bringing value to the customer in the marketplace. Ultimately, though, this led to the “new” IBM. It also gave rise to a hilarious statement that the book credits to a senior IBM executive: “Reengineering is like starting a fire on your head and putting it out with a hammer.”

In Gerstner’s own words, “fixing IBM was all about execution” and required “an enormous sense of urgency.” His whole approach was to drive the company from the customer’s view and “turn IBM into a market-driven rather than an internally focused, process-driven enterprise.” And it worked. It was all about execution — and honest ways to measure its effectiveness. Before Gerstner arrived, IBM had a tendency to fool itself with bogus indices and data (e.g., customer satisfaction numbers generated from hand-picked samples; subjective product milestones, etc.), but he changed all that. “People do what you inspect, not what you expect,” he explains.

I couldn’t help thinking that perhaps Gerstner took a peek at Rational’s mission statement and Five Field Measures to craft his IBM strategy, but then I know these things work because they are based on sound general business principles. As a new IBM employee, I was very encouraged by Gerstner’s maniacal attention to customers’ notions of success and his single-minded focus on responding to marketplace needs. If his market-driven approach to doing business really does pervade the “new” IBM culture, then it will be no surprise if IBM ends up dominating the technology landscape in this century, just as it did in most of the last one.

Culture is everything

Part III (Culture) was particularly interesting to me because one of the main reasons I wanted to work for Rational was the company culture, and I was concerned about its compatibility with IBM’s culture. Many Rational tech reps (myself included) say they have enjoyed working at Rational because the company culture empowers individuals to make a difference. Fortunately, company culture was another of Gerstner’s main targets for change:

Until I came to IBM, I probably would have told you that culture was just one among several important elements in any organization’s makeup and success — along with vision, strategy, marketing, financials, and the like. I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game; it is the game. In the end, an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value.

Gerstner’s most important and proudest accomplishment was to institute a culture that brought IBM closer to its customers by inspiring employees to drive toward customer-defined success. Now, the company’s strong customer focus will allow Rational to continue pursuing the same mission that has guided us for more than twenty years.

Wisdom and Insights

There are nuggets of wisdom throughout the last two sections of the book. In “Lessons Learned” and “Observations,” Gerstner points out that some integrator, fundamentally acting in a service role, controls every major industry. This was the basis for building IBM Global Services. Another shrewd Gerstner insight is that every major industry is built around open standards. It was this realization that led IBM Software to enable and build on open standards in a network-centric world, and Gerstner provides a compelling argument for abandoning proprietary development and embracing software standards (e.g., J2EE and Web Services). In fact, Gerstner argues that the most valuable technology companies are OEM suppliers who leverage their technology wherever possible; therefore, IBM must actively license its technology in order to be successful. The book’s three appendices contain, respectively, some interesting e-mail correspondence, Gerstner’s vision of e-business (including the IBM IT On Demand, autonomic, and grid computing initiatives), and a financial overview of IBM from 1992 to 2002.

The latter clearly demonstrates that Gerstner got results. Although many people criticized IBM for selecting a non-technical CEO, based on IBM’s performance during his reign (and the insight he reveals in this book), Gerstner was definitely the right person for the job. His reinvention of IBM was one of the most dramatic corporate turnarounds of the twentieth century, and the numbers in Appendix C of this book will certainly shut the mouths of any would-be critics.

Before opening this book, I had assumed it was Gerstner’s autobiography and would highlight not only his IBM career, but also his years at the consulting firm McKinsey and Company and his executive tenure at American Express and RJR Nabisco. I also assumed that, as is typical of many books by high-profile executives, the book was ghostwritten in part. Gerstner dismisses both of these assumptions in the foreword. Not only did he write the book himself, he claims, but also the book deals (as the subtitle “Inside IBM’s Historic Turnaround” suggests) almost exclusively with Gerstner’s IBM years.

Under other circumstances I might regard this book as just another well written and interesting memoir from a captain of capitalism; both Rational employees and Rational customers now have a stake in the success of IBM and will gain a better understanding and appreciation of the company by reading this book.

INDIA UNBOUND

In 1997, when India celebrated

the 50^thanniversary of its independence, the world paid homage to its most populous democracy. Other countries had grown richer in those postcolonial years. Many had escaped the political and religious convulsions that had so often shaken the region. But almost alone in the non-Western world — barring a short interruption in 1975, when Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency — India had clung doggedly to its democratic convictions. A slew of books commemorated the achievement. One of the finest, Sunil Khilnani’s “Idea of India,” described India’s polity as “the third moment in the great democratic experiment launched by

the American and French Revolutions.

Like many of these books, Gurcharan Das’s “India Unbound” is a broad summing-up of the last half century. Part memoir, part journalism, part history and part management bible, the book begins shortly before independence and continues until the new millennium. A former C.E.O. of Procter & Gamble in both India and America, and currently a venture capitalist and consultant, Das is less concerned with political than with economic history. And where authors like Khilnani cherish the revolution that began with independence in 1947, Das does not find full cause for jubilation until 1991, when India unleashed a series of economic reforms, the start of an “economic revolution” that he believes “may well be more important than the political revolution.”

Those reforms were forced upon India, adopted less than enthusiastically when the nation found itself with foreign exchange reserves worth only two weeks of imports. Over the course of what Das calls a “golden summer,” a newly installed government surprised everyone by easing foreign exchange restrictions, devaluing the rupee, lowering import tariffs and undoing the byzantine controls that had stifled Indian industry. Many — Das included — feel the reforms should have gone further, but the results nonetheless have been dramatic: after decades of chugging along at the so-called Hindu rate of growth (a dismal 3.5 percent per year), the economy grew by an average of 7.5 percent in the mid-1990’s. The growth in disposable incomes, and the opening up of the country to world markets, has altered the face of Indian society, creating a new consumer middle class. Das argues that these changes are only the beginning of a dramatic reversal of fortunes. “The theme of this book,” he writes, “is how a rich country became poor and will be rich again.”

At the heart of “India Unbound” is a deep ambivalence about Jawaharlal Nehru, the architect of Indian independence but also of its disastrous economic policies. Das recognizes the political contributions made by Nehru, and he writes of the admiration he felt as a young man for the handsome leader whose lofty ideals inspired a nation. But, echoing an increasingly common attitude in modern India, he feels that Nehru’s faith in Soviet-style central planning cheated the nation of the prosperity enjoyed by some of its Southeast Asian neighbors. Nehru’s revolution, Das argues, was incomplete, delivering political liberty but failing to unshackle the nation economically. In one of the more eloquent expressions of this sentiment, he tells of a meeting at which the industrialist Rahul Bajaj is threatened with imprisonment for producing more scooters than permitted by his quota. “My grandfather went to jail for my country’s freedom,” replies Bajaj. “I stand ready to do the same for producing on behalf of my motherland.”

Such stories enliven what could easily have been a dull piece of economic history. Das had a ringside seat at the events he describes, and the result is an engaging account that moves easily from the big picture to the telling anecdote. Through Das, we are introduced not just to the standard pantheon of political figures but to a range of lesser-known characters from the corporate world. These include old-fashioned industrialists like Bajaj and also a new brand of businessman — entrepreneurs like Narayana Murthy, the C.E.O. of Infosys, India’s most successful software company, and Subhash Chandra, the founder of a global Hindi satellite television channel, often called “the Murdoch of Asia.”

Das’s sympathies clearly lie with this later generation of managers. He sees the earlier breed as dinosaurs, pampered by a protectionist government and doomed to oblivion. His enthusiasm for the new order becomes most apparent in the book’s final section, where he succumbs to a certain giddiness over India’s prospects in the 21st century. Das is particularly excited about India’s software industry, a sector whose great success has led many to predict — as the head of India’s largest mutual fund recently did — that “what oil is to the Middle East, infotech is to India.”
Such optimism is not entirely misplaced. India’s high-tech industry has been the most visible success of the reforms, generating fabulous wealth and great opportunities. What is less clear is the extent to which this wealth is trickling down to the 300 million Indians who still live in poverty and the 75 percent who live in the countryside, far away from the new economy. Das is undoubtedly right that poverty has tarnished India’s democracy, but he seems less concerned that unequal prosperity may have the same effect. To be fair, he does argue that democracy and capitalism need not be mutually exclusive, and cites from the work of Amartya Sen, who has repeatedly written on the importance of integrating the two. But despite his professed preference for “democratic capitalism,” Das’s faith in free markets can come across as overly zealous, as when he complains that too many Indians “are still listening to the background noise of democracy when we could be listening to the music of entrepreneurship.”

However, one doesn’t need to share Das’s unbridled fervor for markets to appreciate this book. “India Unbound” is like an opinionated but insightful guide to a rapidly changing nation in which old clichés about spirituality and poverty are increasingly irrelevant. Near the end, Das writes about his son, who has decided to leave a job in New York and return to India to start a company. “He’s caught up in the spirit of our times, when every young person is willing to risk the security of a job to pursue his passion,” Das writes. That “spirit” signals a dramatic widening of horizons, a new self-confidence. Something tremendous is happening in India, and Das, with his keen eye and often elegant prose, has his finger firmly on the pulse of the transformation.

The Alchemist

An alchemist traveling in a caravan in an unspecified place and time recounts a fable that he read along the way. The story is a modified version of the myth of Narcissus. The twist in this version is that the lake in which Narcissus drowns weeps for the death of Narcissus not because of his beauty, but because the lake could gaze at its own beauty in the eyes of the young boy. This idea is taken from a short prose-poem by Oscar Wilde called ‘The Disciple’.

Santiago, the protagonist, grows up with poor parents who struggled their whole lives to send him to seminary. But Santiago has a strong desire to travel the world, and so his father allows him to use his inheritance to buy a flock of sheep.

As a shepherd, he spends several years traveling the countryside of Andalusia in southern Spain, enjoying the care-free and adventurous life of a wanderer. As the story begins, we learn that a year ago Santiago met the beautiful daughter of a merchant in a town he is soon to revisit. Even though he spent only a few hours talking with this girl, his strong feelings for her make him question his life as a shepherd and make him consider the merits of a more settled life. He sleeps in a church where a sycamore tree grew where the sacristy once was (refer to end).

When he arrives in the town where the girl lives, he first decides to go to a gypsy fortune-teller to help him decipher a recurring dream that he had been having. Santiago always dreams that a child is playing with his sheep and then takes him by the hand and brings him to the Pyramids of Egypt to show him the location of a hidden treasure. But Santiago always wakes up just before the child is going to reveal to him the exact location of the treasure. The gypsy says that he has to go because if it is a child that tells, it exists.

At first, the boy does not mind what the gypsy says, but when an old man, who calls himself Melchizedeck, the king of Salem, tells him that it is his Personal Legend or his purpose to live, he is interested. Melchizedeck tells him a wonderful story about a man who found true happiness by fulfilling his Personal Legend. The king gives the boy two stones, Urim and Thummim, one black and the other white, the black meaning “yes” and the white “no”. These, he says, are for making decisions, although it is best to make them himself. Santiago decides to travel to Africa. He sells his sheep and goes to Tangier, a port in Africa near Spain. But in Tangier, he is robbed. Losing hope, he decides to walk about the city; up in a hill, and finds a crystal shop. He finds that business declined when the nearby city developed. When the boy enters the shop, he cleans the dusty crystal glasses in exchange for some food to eat. As he is cleaning two customers enter the store and buy some crystal glasses. The Arab merchant says that it is a good omen, and hires the boy. Santiago learns that every person’s fate is written, and that there is a Language of the World (unspoken) learned partly by his dealings with his sheep.

After almost a year, the boy decides to leave the crystal shop since he has enough money to buy a flock of sheep twice the size of the one he had before, and since he has since learned Arabic, can sell to Arabic merchants too. But he never buys a single sheep. He decides to fulfill his personal legend – to find his treasure.

He joins a caravan going to the desert where the Pyramids are found. In the caravan, the boy meets an Englishman who for twenty years has searched for true alchemists. The Englishman has many books on alchemy that are unusual to the boy. In the caravan, he learns the language of the desert and the Soul of the World.

As the caravan rolls on toward the oasis, the two people in the caravan decide to learn from one another. As the Englishman attempts to observe the desert and learn its language, Santiago reads the Englishman’s books and learns about alchemy. The Englishman tells him that the goal of alchemists is to purify metal by heating it for many years until all its individual properties are burned. After a while, Santiago stops reading and returns the books to the Englishman, and each tells the other he is not able to learn anything. Santiago concludes everyone has his or her own way of learning things.

When it arrives in the oasis, the caravan is welcomed and told that it will not be permitted to proceed further because of tribal wars. Santiago helps the Englishman look for the alchemist. He meets a desert woman named Fatima who tells the group where the alchemist lives. The boy is infatuated with Fatima’s beauty at first sight, and tells her that he loves her and wants her to be his wife. At the very same time, the alchemist living at the oasis realizes that he will meet a disciple who would learn from him the secrets of alchemy. Apparently the disciple turns out to be Santiago.

Santiago meets the alchemist after averting a threat of tribal attack on the oasis through a vision he has after reading about the flight of two hawks. The alchemist tells the boy that he will never be happy unless he fulfills his Personal Legend. Reluctant to leave the oasis because of his love for the desert girl Fatima, Santiago tells the alchemist that he wants to stay there, accepting the new role of councilor which was offered to him by the chieftain when Santiago saved the oasis. But the alchemist warns Santiago that in the future he would lose his ability to see omens because he stopped listening to the omens that told him to find his treasure and fulfill his Personal Legend. As a result he would lose his position as the councilor and he would regret not pursuing his destiny of finding his treasure.

Eventually, Santiago decides to leave the oasis with the alchemist in pursuit of his treasure. While traveling through the desert, the boy learns from the alchemist. He learns that each person who fulfills his personal legend enhances the Soul of the World, and that the world is just here to show to show God’s glory. The alchemist also tells the boy to listen to his heart and understand it so it will not betray him and tell him in fear that it is not wise to find his treasure. Santiago and his heart become one, and Santiago’s heart tells him that he has learned the unspoken Language of the World.

Santiago and the alchemist are captured along the way by one of the warring tribes. The alchemist tells the chief that they have brought money to give to him. the money is accepted without question as it can buy many arms; the alchemist then declares that Santiago is a powerful alchemist and can turn himself into the wind and destroy the military encampment if he wants to. The leader demands to see this and tells the boy he has three days to demonstrate his power or the two will die. This is the ultimate test of Santiago’s knowledge of alchemy. On the third day, Santiago leads the group to the top of a cliff and tells them that the action will take a while.

Using his knowledge of the Language of the World that he learned from his heart on his journey, Santiago talks to the desert, and teaches it about love, and eventually the desert allows Santiago to use his sands, saying that he would also need the wind to blow them. Santiago turns to the wind, and tells it that it hasn’t met its full limits. The wind, curious about what it could do, strikes up a conversation about love with the boy. The wind is unsatisfied, and suggests the boy talk to the heavens (the sun). The boy tells the wind that it must blow the sands so he will not be blinded when looking at the sun. The boy proceeds to talk to the sun, and after the sun tells him that although he is wise, he doesn’t know how to turn Santiago into the wind. The wind, overjoyed that he knows that the sun has its limits, blows even harder.

The “Sinum,” the sandstorm that results, almost destroys the camp. Two commanders with the chief are fearful and tell him that they should stop this. The chief replies that he wishes to see the greatness of Allah, the Muslim god, and makes a mental note to remove the two from command as true desert men are not afraid. Santiago is told to talk to the hand that wrote all, that is, the Son of God. The boy and the Son of God have a silent conversation, and the soul of the boy becomes one with the Soul of the World, which is the Soul of God. The Soul of God can perform miracles, and Santiago turns himself into the wind and moves off the cliff to the far side of the camp next to a sand-covered sentinel.

After turning himself to wind, Santiago and the alchemist travel on to the pyramids with an escort party provided by the general-chief. They stop at a monastery, and the alchemist tells the escort party to return to their camp. There he meets a monk and they talk in the Coptic tongue. The monk invites them in. In the kitchen, the alchemist shows Santiago a demonstration of turning a pot of lead into gold. The alchemist divides the gold into four quarters and gives the monk one of the pieces for his generosity and hospitality. He gives a piece to Santiago, and one for him to return to the oasis. He gives the final piece to the monk for Santiago in case he ever needs it. Santiago and the alchemist separate not far from the pyramids. Santiago’s heart tells him that he should dig for his treasure where he weeps after getting to the pyramids of joy.

Robbed once again near the pyramids, Santiago gives up hope, but the robber tells him that he is stupid to have traveled so far. He then tells the boy of a recurring dream in which he had seen a treasure in a church where shepherds and their sheep slept, hidden under a sycamore tree growing where the sacristy once was. The boy, who slept in this church as a shepherd himself at the beginning of his adventures, goes back to the monk to get money for the return trip and finds the treasure, a chest of Spanish gold coins.

The idea for this story is taken from a short prose-poem by Oscar Wilde called ‘The Disciple’.

THE MONK WHO SOLD HIS FERRARI

The Deepak Chopras and Eknath Easwarans have done a great service in calling attention to ancient scriptural wisdom that is in danger of being forgotten.

And now there is a new kid on the block. Robin Sharma, a popular media personality in the US, who runs an institute that, conducts leadership and life-enrichment programmes and has authored several books on related subjects.

His latest foray ‘The Monk who sold his Ferrari’ unravels the miraculous transformation of successful but overworked lawyer, Julian Mantle who, having reached atop the success ladder suddenly stops to take a long look the life he is leading.

His search for spiritual solace takes him to India, to the Sages of Sivana where he drinks from the fountain of higher knowledge and unlocks the secret of youthful vitality.

‘The Monk…’ imaginatively reiterates the ancient truths of Sivanan philosophy in a very forceful manner. The Monk…. effectively expresses ancient truths in a modern idiom.

Sample a few messages from this book: “There are no mistakes, only lessons”, or “Life pretty much gives you what you ask from it. It is always listening”, or again, “Stop spending so much time chasing life’s big pleasures while you neglect the little ones”, and so on.

This is one book that perhaps the corporate-variety or the workaholics would do well to read, along with their ‘One minute manager’ or ‘Think and grow rich’ handbooks.

Julian Mantle could well be their alter-ego.

The book has interesting fables and innumerable anecdotes, but one attributed to ‘ancient India’ is suspiciously similar to Oscar Wilde’s, “The Selfish Giant’.

Having said it all, I’ll say book is a stimulating read.

Wisdom Revisited
A tale of a modern man’s discovery of the transforming power ancient wisdom