IOU - The Man Who Knew Too Much!

Vivek Sharma, a young and upright officer, working for one of the premier central police organization (CPO), stood in attention as he listened to his boss --- the Inspector General of police.  Vivek was the Deputy Superintendent of police and lived with his wife and six year old son in Rohini area of Delhi.

Vivek was mediocre in studies but was very good in sports. He always wanted to join the armed forces. Unfortunately he could not make it but got a lateral entry in a CPO. He had high ideals which he had imbibed from his father and grand parents.

“I have firm belief that only you can carry out this operation, though you have to stay away from your family till the mission gets over”. The IG looked to see the reaction of Vivek. He was in cloud nine as he could not believe that he has been included in such a secret mission. Yes, I have the ability and I can do better than others, he thought. Vivek was given the choice to choose his team members.

Vivek’s first stop was at Anupgarh in Sriganganagar district (Rajasthan). He stayed there for a couple of months and as decided his next destination was Bikaner in Rajasthan.  Vivek was given the task of finding out the nexus of government officials with the narcotics cartel operating along the Indo-Pak border. Vivek was not allowed to phone back home nor was he allowed to disclose his destination. He was strictly forbidden to use his official identity and stay at government buildings.  Vivek had also a cover name “Rajiv Dubey” which he often forgot.

In the last phase of his mission at Bhakasar (bordering town of Gujarat, Rajasthan and Pakistan Sindh province) Vivek was very happy. A sense of fulfillment and achievement had been accomplished. He did his work to perfection and had collected scores of evidence. He was startled by the fact that many of his own colleagues, famous politicians both at the state and union level were hand in glove with the narcotics smugglers. Vivek was depressed.

Back in Headquarters Vivek Sharma submitted the report to his boss. It was appreciated. The zeal in Vivek’s work went missing. A constant question kept hammering inside him. Am I working for these corrupt people who are not clean in their hearts?

The next day’s morning newspaper headlines read--- “DSP, Vivek Sharma shot dead while returning from office”.

 

Sitendu De is the author of this story.

Disclaimer: All characters in this story are fictitious and their resemblence to any actual character might be a strange case of co-incidence only.

One word that has power to change - almost everything!

Now with more than 200 years of industrial age backing us we seem to be moving to a new age.

We are yet to decide what we would call this new age. Different people have different names for it. Some call it 'Participatory Economy'. Some love to say, 'Collaborative Economy' or 'Contributory Economy' while some rather outrageously call it 'Neo Capitalism'. Probably it has a bit of everything thrown into this new transformative experience. These more or less point to the new direction we are taking.

Whatever it might be two things are clear. First, we clearly want to get rid of the baggage of concepts of the industrial age that no longer seem to work well in the new reality. Second, we realize a social transformation where consumers are becoming producers of goods and services.

While all these are now playing in the background we seem to be carrying with us a big legacy of ideas governing productivity.

Don't get me wrong. I am not for a moment suggesting doing away with the useful concept of productivity. The fact of the matter is that new technology aided ways, which we are quickly adopting are already pushing productivity to unprecedented levels, never experienced before.

So, what am I trying to express?

The old and now nearly obsolete concepts of 'productivity enhancement' firmly embedded in our collective minds are all set to change. Traditionally, there were two prevailing schools of thought on productivity.

The Western school of thought centers around the idea of leveraging assets through scale of operation and capital infusion driven on management ideas.

The Far Eastern or more specifically Japanese school of thought is closely focused on minimizing wastage driven by hardcore technology.

Today, it seems both concepts have served their time and purpose with the constant blurring of national boundaries, lowering of tariff barriers helped more by the unprecedented use of information technology that brought into being more equitable distribution and use of information as the basic building block for all human activities.

The envelope of such human activity is constantly being expanded by the insatiable human desire for sharing individual collection of artifacts, mostly knowledge, strongly backed by the urge for social recognition, both of which were tightly bottled up during the industrial age that promoted secrecy and loyalty to particular clans, tribes, organizations and nations over other human values.

With equitable distribution of information and sharing of individual collection of artifacts we are now in an enviable position in human history to draw upon such deadly combination virtually from anywhere to create something novel and useful to serve society.

That brings human beings right into the center of activities than ever before replacing machines as the center of attention and action.

As we see now, except for a few limited areas, organizations and countries can no longer boast of superior technology or use it as a competitive barrier. Nor can they boast of superior brain power or be upbeat about advantages gained through educational or economic superiority as world economy is becoming economically interdependent than ever before for survival.

So the mantra of improving productivity and a host of other related issues like design, marketing, etc would have to be distinctly different to earlier mantras on 'productivity enhancement' considered sacrosanct but ready to be dumped unceremoniously.

The one word mantra that now holds the power to change the world and dent the universe is 'RESPECT'.

Everything important would depend on it and would grow out of it, like,

a) Collaboration

b) Learning

c) Designing and Creativity

d) Empathy and Feelings

e) Marketing

f) .....

g) .......

h) Productivity.

How do I know? Having sat through countless meetings, negotiations, collaboration teams, problem solving engagements, training courses in the last thirty one years, I have seen how disrespect buried brilliant ideas, brushed aside human values, blocked feelings, thrown out of the window the whole in favor of partial incomplete solutions, given lip service to teamwork, welcomed cookie cutter rules in place of real innovation, dampened human passion for work, trampled well meant objections, manipulated people, murdered careers and played ball. And all the while Productivity took a real beating. People suffered. Organizations suffered. Societies suffered. 

Unfortunately, RESPECT is an almost forgotten word and hardly appears in the vocabulary of present day leaders. How do we develop RESPECT and embed it into our day to day activities is a billon dollar question yet to be answered properly by leaders of our societies for collective sharing and growing rather than helping individual gains?