What's your Personal Work Ethic ?

The personal work ethic is a topic I always wanted to write about. Ramnath triggered this piece, by posting a short review of the book, The 4-hour Workweek at the Sai Students Portal. The book is mainly about how you can manage to work only 4 hours a week and amongst others, suggests outsourcing personal tasks. Some discussion ensued and here are my comments at that blog, made out into a post (with a few edits ) here :

I havent read the book, I find the title and theme of the book as described, quite interesting. But I find that the "methods" that he suggests are a bit cliched, just a e-Yuga rehash of the old school lessons of time management, personal efficiency, goal setting stuff talked by a lot of other books.

That apart, the ability to contemplate on why we do what we do and the conflict between what we want (at our ideal level of aspiration) and what we do, is something we lack in our times. What Dritharashtra said in the context of Dharma is also applicable to goals, Jaanami Dharmam Nacha Me Pravritti, Jaanami Adharmam Nacha Me Nivritti..., the gap between knowing what to do and doing it in-deed.

The personal work ethic that each of us bring to the workplace is something that I have always found interesting to observe. How much of what we do is because of the control system that pushes us and how much of it would we do in its absence ? How many hours of work is "right" or "optimal", assuming you want to be just loyal to the contract, not any less or more ? Peter Drucker once said, that the best motivated employee is a volunteer. What is the substantially differentiating basic attitude towards work, between, say a waiter whose opportunity to bring originality to the work is limited, and say, a Google employee who gets to spend 20% on it ?

Why work ? Well, that can be a dangerous question :) . If you deconstruct this too much from the Advaitic angle, you might end up with a fallacious conclusion : Don't work. Which we knew already and we are good at. :) To avoid that, you should start from Gita's premise, that work is inevitable. You can't not work, dude, the software doesnt provide that feature. Given that, and all of us have the same 24 hours, a deep thought on 'Why do I work ? ' can provide custom answers to what satisfies you. It can differentiate achiever from a non-starter, a poet from a mechanic, a saint from a sinner. It can be a basis for the development (or lack thereof) of other qualities like loyalty, dedication, team spirit and ambition. You can find some of these qualities and an amazing work ethic in some workers and simple people, so it may not actually be a function of the money you get. It's probably just a function of what custom answers you form in your mind, after you solve the equation for yourself.

Of course, there are major implications when you institutionalize the optimal work ethic of an individual, because, "market" forces like competition, cost, performance pressure, peer presence etc chip in to make it complex. But probably, the large scale orientation towards metrics and efficiency in modern management, is pushing the individual more and more away from his or her optimal band of work-life balance. As a race, we have moved from success in survival to success in war to success in trade. The common element in those phases has been competition. What's the next dimension of success we will move towards ? And what will that revolve around ?

I also wonder whether people doing one kind of work (say intellectually challenging strategy work ) are any more "busy" than, say, a construction worker who carries bricks all day. We usually think the former kind to be much more "busy" and perhaps "better contributive", "better value-adding" than the latter, but, in terms of the time spent, they both spend the same amount of time (give or take a few hours) on something that they have chosen (or say forced to have chosen) to do. And in most cases as part of a contract. When someone says, I am more busy than you, it's most often untrue, it just means, what I am busy with, has more visibility than what you are busy with. Or, I may have all the time in the world, but that time is not for you. :)

One type of work may be more satisfying than another, depending on what satisfies you. But is one type of work, intrinsically superior/good than another ? Is a painter better off than a conductor, because his work is creative ? If it is, what parameters contribute to its superiority ? Say, "to create a better world", is one such. The person who is at the top of such a company identifies directly with it and probably closer to that vision whereas for the person who is involved three levels down the work hierarchy, it would just be, being a waiter, a job to do for the pay he takes. The reverse is also possible in their attitudes, someone takes to it as carrying a stone (or pushing numbers), and someone else takes to it as building a cathedral. We once spent a whole night loading trucks with rice, clothes and relief material for the victims of the Gujarat earthquake. Oh, we found it very satisfying when the series of trucks were leaving the campus. Why was that ?

I think there are actually very few templates in which majority of us fall in. Very few actually get to do something that is substantially different, creating a new template altogether. Although we often want to claim and feel what we do is somehow "unique", and say so in our marketing brochures and interviews, most of the time it's the same cycle and the same pursuits, with minor variants/derivatives of what we call in programming design as an Abstract Class. Brings me to the thought: how much of programming work is different from plumbing ? You fix one valve and there goes the next, phut. What, we actually use the words like architecture, platform, address, tunnelling and named pipes... :) If you push us a little more, we'll start coming out with software equivalent terms for concrete, steel, emulsion paint, waterproofing and so on.

In every area of work, there is the exciting part, the boring part and the hated part. That exciting, boring and hated tasks come as a package in any vocation is something you may have to live with. Like doing the dishes after the party. For this reason, I have always failed to resolve one of the usual guidelines that personal effectiveness books suggest : Prioritize and ensure you give your time to high value-adding tasks. The fallout of this is that you are forced to categorize a certain set of tasks as low priority, with the effect that they are first ones to get rescheduled or postponed. Over a period of time, these tasks will build up to become critical or requiring immediate attention and graduate to become high priority and then you run to it. Whereas the very buildup should have been averted in the first place if you paid due attention to those seemingly low priority items on a more distributed basis. Cleaning, maintenance, fixing things that dont work, backing up your computer, stitching that button in time and a hundred other little things would be called low priority in a "Value-Time-Matrix" that these books would draw for you. Of course, the rationale is to avoid getting lost in a ocean of little things, but too much focus on high value items only results in escalation purely born out of negligence. At the workplace, everyone tending to high value prioritization can cause defects that are not noticed and people finding their own little ways to cut corners even as they continue to present a nice greeny picture on the high value items.

To be able to give every task its due entails the acceptance of a certain amount of boredom that comes as a package with enjoyable work. Tenacity, thoroughness, exhaustive level of detailing can all turn to boredom, but one may have to go beyond that attitudinal fatigue to be able to deliver good work.

On a personal level, outsourcing comes at a more pinching cost than it does for orgs. In the hostel, there were always two sets of guys, who always washed and pressed their clothes even if they could afford and the ones who outsourced them. I used to find it strange when someone said "I love doing this myself". My favorite outsourcing question used to be : why dont you grow your own paddy ? :) . Hmmm, that explains the success of Farmville ! (and my failure therein).

The famous quote "enjoy what you do and you don't have to work a day in your life" is so cliche now. That also entails a certain amount of re-orienting our attitude towards work, if not opting out of the entire work stream that one may be currently involved in. I think it's a flowery way to encourage those who find that boring and hated components of the package are greater than the exciting part. Either find work that you enjoy or learn to "book" something as enjoyable :) :)

This shouldn't be depressing, however. The point is that, what we think about the work we do and want to do, has a lot to do with how happy we are. Happiness, in a mundane sense, is a function of what we do, why we do and how we do but it's like an ice cream. As long as you get the flavour A you like, you are as averagely happy as another person who liked and got his flavour B.

The ideal personal work ethic would probably be a cross-product of buddhist, protestant and the Gita approaches to work, with collectivist lessons drawn from communism and the achievement orientation drawn from capitalism. Well, that would be NextGen Sociology !!

Will the Nano click ?

My only concern is: I hope there are no quality issues in an effort to cost-cutting, since the Tatas are under cost-pressure nowadays from all sides. Political decisions, Costly acquisitions, Industry downturn, Expectations from dealers and vendors [and even bankers :) ]. If the first few batches hit the roads and then turn out with some defects, that will be terrible. But if they are able to deliver the quality they promise for that price (which the Tatas have always been good at), then, I think it's going to be a huge hit, both in India and very soon, abroad.

As to going global, they may have a tough time fulfilling local demand, but when they do, their timing might just be right. People would just be emerging from bad times and the need to look for cost-effective products with comparable utility will be one of their top-of-mind concerns. At last, some engineering-based Indian product will arrive in the global scene !! If it clicks, I really hope and expect it to rock !! It would make US and European carmakers sit up and get worried, (if they are still around), although, actually, from their perspective it would be just another, age-old-concept, cheap car, except for the price shock they get. (I can't say the same thing about Japanese, however). It might be no match to the premium range excellence and finesse of the Germans, gadgetry of the Japanese or the lavish feature-kill of the Americans, but, the starting line for the race is not in that segment. Unlike the Chinese electronic goods, it would be a world-class, yet frills-free utility car, at the Indian prices (!) which India has so far been able to deliver in service sectors and some manufacturing sectors like textiles. We should really appreciate Tata's daring to attempt that. I often wish something like that happens for India in the products market in software, unlike the ITES and BPO where all the focus (and the tax sops) seem to be. As to environ and cars-per-road issues, they are industry-wide regulation issues and a single brand can't be isolated to be responsible for the flooding the roads in its sincere and determined attempt to create value for money.

Is Maruti listening ?

Spade and the Rose, Buddy and the Boss

Bablu had a lot of buddies at his workplace. He and his friends were a great gang who always used to hang out together. They worked for one of the 30 companies that comprise the Sensex, so life was a poor-fit sine curve of hectic days at the workplace and chilling out at parties and vacations. All of them had been recruited on campus in the same batch and now it was almost three years since. One fine morning, Bablu was called by their boss and asked to "mentor" the others in the gang and review parts of their work from time to time, as part of these leadership grooming exercises they have from time to time, percolating succession planning right upto the grassroots level. He suddenly found there were plenty of issues to be sorted out and needed review. Efficiency needed improvement, he had "discovered". Till recently he had been one of those who needed to be "sorted out" by his boss, but now he had to sort things out. Bablu was what they call the "soft-type" guy and often wondered how to tell the guys about the areas about their work. Hey we all grew up in the same farm, man, we had our meal from the same plate, that kind of feeling. During a riverside walk, He meekly put this question to another friend of his, Munna.

Munna is a one-man university. He always answers questions at any forum he comes across. He jumps with glee to hear the phrase "to anyone who has a point of view", even though he may not have any. When he sees "to whomsoever it may concern" on an invoice envelope meant for the checkpost, he naively thinks it's for him. He uses a customized version of an old adage and believes: Preach today what you want to practise some day. The riverside dust rose to give a hazy halo to Munna as he started doling out advice by the dozen, as if Gabriel had just deliberated with him inside the cave on this very topic and the whole duniya had gathered on the sands to listen to his gyaan. It was the Republic Day, and though the chat had nothing to do with patriotism, he used a red bench on the riverside as a pedestal to get a feeling of addressing the multitudes from Red Fort.
Excerpts:

It's usually tough, but only in the beginning. After a while, the "dog eats dog" world teaches the goodie softie folks the lessons in aggression and they, after having learnt them, have to "moderate" it with the goodness they have learnt before in their "pure" times. First of all, these buddies come in 2 types. One is a set of buddies whom we start out by occasional nice interactions but later graduate to a well-formed friendship. The other is a set of buddies who have come together "just like that", here to stay only for a short while with us and go their way after the temporary phases get over. And you can try the same way of interaction with both types, though the output will be different, I'll come to that later. In these situations, they say, it's better to be the natural YOU, however good or bad that might be. And grow as a person, over a period of time. If you are irritated because others are being unfair to you, there is nothing wrong in letting people know. A certain amount of anger, well-expressed, might actually be good for the body, the mind and even for the profession, the longterm health of the workplace and quality of work. You shouldn't rock the boat, of course, but that doesn't mean you have to suppress all your feelings to the level of indignation and compromise on basic objectives at the workplace. If you are uncomfortable, you should let people know about it. If you are uncomfortable doing even that, then, well, you shouldn't and probably wait for patience to wear out a little more, (not fully tear out), so you are better off expressing it. Others may be worse off by your expressing it, but thats fine, because you would have already decided that you have reached a threshold level. If at that time, still some part of you wants to be nice and not direct, (God help !)then you can try to minimize the embarrassment by hinting or sarcasm or trying to tell in a nice way.

The only problem might be : If we straightaway mention whatever comes to our mind aggressively and harshly, it's quite possible we get wrong and we are expressing our impulses without thinking like a brakeless bell-less bicycle. Not recommended. But if there is a pattern that is repeatedly happening and if you have thought about it coolly and fair to all parties, true to your basic objective and quality of work, then you should communicate your displeasure. There is nothing wrong with this. ( I have told you this before, but again, because removing guilt requires repeated scrubbing). Don't get "worked up" and "get mean" when you are communicating, although others might react in that way. Remember, if something has started to build up that recurs and haunts you, and if you know you are being fair to both sides, then it has to be expressed. In fact, if you don't express, you might be contributing to the inefficiency in the system and if you express, you will be acting true to your basic objectives although you may not please individuals. It's good that small mistakes have to be corrected immediately, sometimes, even with big punishments so that those small mistakes do not proliferate to become big mistakes one day. Like the robber in prison who blamed his mother because she never chided him for stealing a pencil as a kid in school.

The harsh extreme stance is that, each one is there to move their muscle and do a decent amount of work for the plump pay they receive. Managers who are ruthless are usually more efficient and well-defined but not without demerits. They either get "worked up" with impulsive anger and lose out on the personal touch (care a damn even if someone is sick or mourning). They will actually be a boon in handling "real thugs" or "junk idlers" by whipping them up a bit with their outbursts and threats, but if they try the same with another employee who has average motivation already, they might be harming the existing morale. Why are you always looking over my shoulder and breathing down my neck ?. And more often than not, their ruthlessness usually works only with their subordinates, and when it comes to interacting with their superiors, they will be forced to "moderate" their aggression. Or made to learn !! After all, they can't be ruthless with their boss, they would say ! Also, these are usually good at "technical" areas of work where things are usually well-defined as X or Y. They can, for example, demonstrate and snub their superior, by showing, that other things remaining the same, an X query, written by A runs thrice as fast as a poorly written Y query written by B. And to be fair and promote better quality work, you have to agree with that. But when it comes to people-driven work like team projects and management skills, a balance between how you speak and how you get work done, matters a lot for getting further work done :) !! There may be situations, when you call spade a spade, it might fall on your neck, next time you see it, you will start calling it a rose !! :)

That said, the actual methods may vary based on the circumstances. Assume, you want to mention to your buddies that quality of work is suffering. You can do that over a cup of tea. Or mention it in the office cubicle when all are present. You can even mention it when some are present, anyway it will reach the other intended recipients !! You can mention it to whomever you think is "closest" among the lot and whom you expect to be more understanding. You can say, "Hey, Of late, these things are happening, ya. It's not proper, no?. I mean, we can chill out all the time, but work is suffering.". Or you can make a logical appeal of the consequences of inefficiency. "see folks,if we keep on postponing carelessly then issues will unnecessarily build up, and later we only have to sit and sort out each of them painfully. Suddenly one fine morning, boss will wake up from hibernation :) there will be plenty of pressure and that time not a single soul will help us. So why not, finish off then are there. Not only that, we will also get some satisfaction that some parts of work are already finished, tied up and kept aside, right ?". In higher levels of management, they do this efficiency review talk at team meetings, they have to do the harsh talk at the office and attempt to make it up at parties and get-togethers. :) But it may be, that at your junta level, your office cubicle or the coffee machine is the maximum you can think of !.

Another approach is, to act like a pukka team lead or manager while in office and be a friend or a buddy outside. This is not to say, you should lose out on all the fun in the workplace. But along with all the fun in between, you can also (do some work) make and present the task list, give instructions, review things. In the beginning, your behaviour may be confusing, people wonder are you a buddy or are you a boss. But over a period of time, people know you for "work is work and fun is fun".

Either ways, be prepared for different types of reactions (in the short term) from different kinds of people. Might quite happen, some buddies start buzzing that "you have begun to show off" or "you have started to boss around" or "the power thing has gotten to your head" or "you want to impress your boss about your leadership". It is said, Power corrupts, Absolute Power corrupts absolutely. One can actually add here, "So say the powerless !! ". And probably the anyway corrupt. Hopefully, these should be a smaller segment. "Ignore them" would have been the easier thing to say, but in reality, it's tough to ignore an entire lot of people. Ignore their meanness, is a better way to put it. Be fair to them, whenever possible be kind and fish out their good suggestions from mean behaviour and show them you value those. That day I differed from you, that was different, but today you have a valid point. Even if it's about me. Who knows, they might even graduate upwards, depending on how you handle them and how you react to their mix of meanness and goodness.

The second kind often realise that you have become a boss and therefore, can no more be a buddy, and start interacting formally. They do their work properly and make sure work doesn't suffer but they may not chill out with you anymore and go on to find other buddies. Let go, no silly feelings, dont bid them farewell as buddies but they have a human reason to act in the way they do. Understandable, because it's actually tough to have someone as both buddy and boss. If one can achieve this, it will be great. Thats the third kind, people who know you are fair, you are friendly, but work is important so you might act in a particular unpleasant way for the sake of work and you don't keep things to heart, you don't carry emotional baggage. This produces the maximum team results along with maximum personal relationships, though it's rare to find, takes long time to build and usually involves a continuous personal growth of the manager himself.

When we are fair, and don't mean to be harsh, it's quite possible, people still find us harsh. We are not harsh, but strangely, we sound harsh to them. No one wants to be "told", so if someone "points out", the fairness fades behind and harshness hops in the front.
Remember, when you are straightforward, Good friends usually understand. Or rather, those that understand go on to become good friends. Sometimes, we also have to allow for friends to be "not understanding", if we believe they are good friends anyway, and probably their "not understanding" is one-time or short-term behaviour. Probably he got up on the wrong side of the bed which led to a fight with his wife which led to his driving on the wrong side of the road which led to... and so on.. You think you are straightforward, they might return the favour in the same straightforward currency and as good friends, we will end up being understanding!!.

Along with fairness, allowing traffic from the opposite side helps. When someone points out your inefficiencies, bring the same fairness and "technical" detachment to the table and take it by the merit of the argument. Laugh at yourself. Instead of empty defence, blame game or "you-rub-me-wrong-side-now its-my-turn", you might actually move on with a plain realisation "Oh yeah man, thats a goofup" or "my battery is down today" or "I am a joker" or "I better be careful next time" even if you don't want to "profusely" apologize. You can quip/joke by saying things like "It seems software companies give away t-shirts to people who find the best bugs, in my case, I have to buy an entire showroom". "Do unto others...." , the old adage, still has its value.

Some say, "Stop worrying about what others think of you. It's impossible to please everyone all the time". True, but it's better to keep this on the back of your mind and "moderate" it in practice to allow for team work and feedback. Because it allows you to correct yourself in case you are wrong. If you entirely stop worrying about what others think, then you never know when things "get onto your head" and will be the proverbial emperor in new clothes. You might spend crores to shoot a movie entirely on brilliant sets, have a great music score, but seriously believe the audience would surely appreciate the hero's new towel, only to lose the audience out in the first 15 minutes.

It's important to differentiate between long-term response to your leadership style and short-term response from smaller segments. Also to differentiate between responses from mature minds and responses from mean minds. And to allow the possibility for someone who is mean today to grow up and become mature tomorrow and hence the label is not for the person but for the response. That will train you to give value to a valid point from a mature mind and not fret too much about the outpourings of a mean mind. Long-term responses are a result of your effort to practise whatever you think are long-term values and your continuous effort to grow as a person and as a manager . By the time you grow up, you may not have the same team that sulked earlier to appreciate your growth now, but you would now make better teams and thereby, a better world. Amen !!

Fresh Upma and Old Bindi Fry

Let me serve some old cold bindi fry from the refridgerator as promised in the opening post. Here are links to stuff I have written before.

Before I landed with Blogger, I used to linger in BBC's H2G2 for a while and these are links from that phase. (Note: You won't require a h2g2 id to access these links, so you can click on.)

On Leadership and Management
On Micro-Finance
On Open-Source and Healthcare. This is admittedly an emotional-type article, but it isn't entirely off-track since Economic Times mentions this as a development that is brewing in this debate a few days ago.

Quite interesting, that my first movie review is not on a movie in English, Hindi or even Tamil but a Telugu one. Coming of age as son-of-soil of Rayalaseema, Uh ? A kind of content and theme review of Bommarillu on MouthShut, after I saw it at a friend's place. For the type of person I used to be, it might even come as a surprise to many, that I am writing, of all things in the world, a movie review!! But riverside walks and talks may range from pin to plane, so you never know, I might even write about Hindustani Music tomorrow !!

If you have an Orkut Id, you can read up on how I had answered someone's question on:

Why did Jesus Christ and Mohammed not explicitly restrain the consumption of meat and alcohol among their followers?

If you don't have an Orkut Id, please wait till an edited version of that is put up here. Or as they say, watch this space for updates.

Each of the above are longwinding and verbose posts, so typical of a whirling mind and so untypical in this age of SMS-slang blogging. So reserve them for a Sunday afternoon. I always wanted to have a diverse topic cloud on my blog, I guess this post comes close. Life goes on in phases and patterns, so I hope the day doesn't come when I have to post this blog's links on some other website after a few years. :) :) For those who have already read all these before, please wait till fresh upma is served. :)

Customer Service - Tonty Pour By Cheven

After my younger brother passed away last summer, I had to deal with the financials of his estate. If you think I haven't seen much of the world in 30 years, I had to see quite a specimen of it in those 30 days. Among the names I had to deal with, mostly in the BFSI segment: Citi Cards, ABN Amro Cards, Kotak Mutual Fund, LIC, New India Assurance, Medi Assist, ICICI Lombard, TTK Healthcare, United India Insurance, Central Bank of India, Bank of Baroda, ICICI Bank (including Cards, Loans and ICICI Direct), Royal Sundaram Insurance, TVS, Airtel etc. Add to this, a suite of government / PSU institutions, like RTO, BSNL, Government Medical College Hospital, BharatGas, BPCL Office, Income Tax Office, Office of the Superintendent of Police etc. The list is somewhat like that of a diversified equity fund and it was interesting to handle all kinds of customer service responses and to meet the procedural abracadabra face to face.

Years ago, I had done a project work on the role of front-line employees in customer service, but travelling to all the four directions of the city almost everyday is no match to a spiral-bound booklet you write after some literature survey and a stretch of imagination. I can't write about the frustrations here, because, my blogging guidelines prohibit ranting. (I did make a list of my own blogging guidelines before I started the blog which I want to post only if the blog survives 25 posts). Perhaps, I should convert some of those experiences into more generic issues and present them in a non-rant fashion some day.

I was mentioning to my friend about the variety of service personnel I had to interact with, in this array of companies and offices and he asked, "Hey, why don't you blog about the good part of the show ?". I thought, yeah, it's a good idea, I had always thought the media often under-reports the good news and doesn't give the beauty of the world its due. Needless to say, it's a very subjective opinion and wouldn't mean much in terms of organized research and the rating I give in the end are entirely the riverside walker's indigenous service ratings, so please read this post sitting next to a salt godown so you can pinch it whenever you want.

One thing I found common in every place is, unless you follow up, nothing, nothing ever happens. I used to have a bengali boss, an operations guy, who did nothing but make a list and follow up all the time at regular intervals. Many times, he won't even know the specific detail of what exactly he is following up, he just knows it's a follow up issue for him. For example, someone says to him "Sir, we need an Exchange Server to be set up so people can send emails to each other". He would sometimes get only half the words and would often say, "Did you set up the Exchange ? I want to have email." He would put it in his organizer as "Exchange" with a particular deadline and priority. Someone used to jovially mention, "for all you know, he must be thinking it's a piece of equipment like Telephone Exchange". But he would indeed follow it up and get it done because you can't escape his follow-up claws.

Among the private players, Kotak Mutual Fund stands out. There was an investment with Kotak MF that had to be transmitted to the legal heir and this one also had attached accident insurance cover. There were other companies with whom I had to interact under a similar scenario with heavy follow-up, but Kotak was different. They would follow it up with you, actually. Isn't that nice ? I had been to the Kotak MF office in Coimbatore. Their ambience was good, their notice board was full of internal team contests, performance targets, winner of the month and so on. Hey cool, looks good, I thought, let's see if they are worth their display. Ironicaly, the officer didn't know the exact procedure to be followed in the case, although he had a hazy idea that there is a procedure somewhere regarding this. In fact, I knew what is likely to be the procedure, so I said, we are ready to present an application from the legal heir, along with whatever documents you may require, so you let me know the list of what you want. And we also wanted to send it by courier since we were moving out of Coimbatore shortly. He offered me a seat and a glass of water since I was sweating in the May heat. He made a series of phone calls, probably to his head office, made notes, asked the officer, to send an email immediately detailing the requirements. As he was explaining it to me, the email arrived, he fired the print and gave it to me, took my email address and also forwarded a copy. And yes, you can send the bunch to the specified address by courier, he said. He gladly gave his contact information and asked me to inform him after I send the application so he can follow it up. I told him we are moving out of Coimbatore, he said he would make a note and facilitate any follow-up accordingly. We sent the application and someone from the head office called to acknowledge it. Later they called to say, while the insurance documents were in order, one more document was required for the transmission of the investment and he would e-mail the format. We sent that too, and within 10 days, we received the insurance claim as well as transfer of the investment. With a nice letter saying, we are sad to know about this, we can't help you in any other way, your documents are in order and we are admitting your claim. We replied acknowledging receipt and thanking their quick service.

Among the banks, Bank of Baroda stands out, No, Citi or ICICI bank don't even come a close second. We had to close the PPF account at BoB. As usual, we had all the docs ready on day one and we were worried that, since the amount was high, there will be much delay because of a series of signatures. We submitted the docs. Here too there was a little training issue. The officer said, he is not exactly clear about how to input this kind of transaction in the Core Banking software to which he was only introduced recently. He said he will find out the next day from the manager and try to get it processed. Nowadays, it doesn't take much time, he assured us all the docs were in order. We mentioned that since my dad had undergone surgery recently, he has authorized me to collect the payment on his behalf and we also had the attested authorizations and the IDs ready. He said, that shouldn't be a problem since they will be issuing an a/c payee cheque, asked us for our alternate bank account details and gave me a specific date and time by when it will be available. I went at the stipulated time and he was ready with the cheque. He apologized for the bit of delay on the first day and quipped, "now that I have learnt it, I will be able to serve someone else better next time.". Frankly, I never had experienced or expected such a nice response from a nationalised bank, which was probably cynical of me, but I guess the running around wears down your positive thinking capacity. They didn't have the leadership contests on the notice boards or neck ties for the officers but they had a kind of simple devotion and sincere interest in the work they do.

More than the frustrations, I learnt, from people who served me well, how to do so carefully and courteously and from those who made me suffer, how not to do it myself in a similar situation. It was humbling when people yelled at you and soothing in contrast soon after when someone else spoke better in the office you climbed next. In both cases, it's not that they had all the required skills. But they took pains to find out. It's not that they flouted accounting controls to give premium customer service, but they communicated the procedure firmly and gently, gave an exhaustive list of requirements in one go, not requiring the customer to come up and down a hundred times and releasing the documents one by one in stages as if it were some assembly line, understood specific situations that needed attention, gave a date and kept it. And were courteous all throughout. Both offices were so different in externalities, but had the same kind of impact on the customer. Both had technology to help in efficiency but retained the value addition of human interaction. One spoke in posh English and the other didn't, but you can study in tamil medium and be equally good at trignometry. One was 10 years old and another was 100 years but both knew what really matters at the end of the day. That it is as much important to make a goodwill impact on someone who stepped into your premises as it is to spend millions in advertising to get someone there.

A third experience was even more interesting. And that had to come from the "unorganized" sector. The day before we left, I spotted a household scrap dealer in the colony nearby. Hey, I said, we are vacating and we might have something to sell away as scrap, would you come to my house sometime ? The young lad was a real excited fundoo guy, he immediately gave his cell number and said, call up any time, and he added: Tonty Pour By Cheven, Anna. I was surprised and complimented him for his attempt in English and found that he had discontinued education after the fourth class, many years ago. We didn't have much time, I said, and I will reach home only by 7.pm. after work in the city. He took driving directions and later he was there at 7 sharp. He made a quick assessment, called up his assistant to bring an appropriate cart, weighed it then and there, gave a category-wise quotation and made an offer. He also gave insights into how the industry works and the various levels of scrap retailing, which understandably, was to talk us into the rates he was offering. After the deal was struck, he made his assistant load the stuff and reached, you know what!, to the nearest ICICI Bank ATM and withdrew money to pay us. Quite filmy, I thought, and now I knew where he picks up these cute English phrases on customer service. My prediction is the guy will go places, what say ? Glory to the great indian middle-class entrepreneur!

Till the blogging guidelines are relaxed, here is a quantitative rating of the various servicewallahs, to avoid verbose ranting. It's not fair to compare private and public institutions so I will give a percentage ranking keeping Kotak MF and BoB as benchmarks.

Kotak Mutual Fund 100%
ICICI Direct 95%
ABN Amro Cards 90%
Standard Chartered Bank 90%
Airtel 90%
ICICI Bank 85%
ICICI Cards 80%
TVS Dealer Lotus 75%
United India Insurance 65%
ICICI Loans 65%
Citi Cards 60%
Royal Sundaram Insurance 60%
TTK Healthcare 60%
New India Assurance 60%
ICICI Lombard 55%
Medi Assist 50%


Bank of Baroda 100%
Indian Overseas Bank 95%
Office of the Superintendent of Police 90%
LIC 90%
Central Bank of India 85%
Bharat Gas Agency 80%
BPCL Office 75%
Income Tax Office 60%
RTO 50%
BSNL 50%
Police station 35%
Government Medical College Hospital 5%

The 24 x 7 Scrap Dealer 100%