Conventional Wisdom v/s Peter Drucker - Azara Feroz Sayed

Came across the brilliant article posted below at http://sanjivspace.blogspot.com/2007/07/peter-drucker-management-beliefs-vs.html

Refer earlier related posts 'What makes an effective executive' and 'Rising to the top'

Conventional wisdom (CW) : Executives need to develop the ability to make many decisions rapidly and accurately.
Peter Drucker (PD): The effective decision-maker actually makes very few decisions. This is because he recognises that most problems he faces are generic. They are not unique, one-off events. He, therefore, establishes a rule, a principle or a policy to handle all such situations. He always assumes that the event that clamours for his attention is in reality a symptom. He looks for the true problem. He is not content with just doctoring the symptom. He then makes a decision on principle at the highest possible conceptual level. This does not, as a rule, take longer than a decision on symptoms or expediency. Because the manager solves generic situations through a rule and policy, he can handle most events as cases under the rule; that is, by adaptation. This is why he does not need to make many decisions.

For instance, when Alfred Sloan, Jr, took over General Motors in 1922, he was faced with a company struggling for survival with about half a dozen divisions each headed by capable but almost independent chieftains, all pulling in different directions.
Everyone before Sloan had seen the problem as one of personalities, to be solved through a struggle for power, from which one man would emerge victorious. Sloan saw it as a constitutional problem to be solved through a new structure, that is, decentralisation, which balances local autonomy in operations with central control of direction and policy. Sloan thus identified the generic problem, which was one of organisational structure, and solved it at the highest conceptual level through decentralisation.

CW: It is important for an executive to plan his work.
PD: As Drucker put it, the above advice sounds eminently plausible. The only trouble with it is that it rarely works. The plans always remain on paper, as good intentions. Effective executives, as Drucker observed, do not start with their tasks. They start with their time. And they do not start out with planning their time. They start by finding out where their time already goes (by recording how it is actually spent by keeping a time log). Then they attempt to manage their time and to cut back unproductive demands on their time. Finally, they consolidate their "discretionary" time into the largest possible continuing units. This three-step process -- of recording time, managing time and consolidating time -- is the foundation of executive effectiveness.

CW: When making staffing decisions, a manager must be alert to the weaknesses of a prospective candidate.
PD: The effective executive fills positions and promotes on the basis of what a man can do. He does not make staffing decisions to minimise weaknesses but to maximise strengths. This is because to try to build against weakness frustrates the purpose of organisation. Organisation is a specific instrument to make human strengths redound to performance while human weakness is neutralised and largely rendered harmless.

Drucker quoted the following example to illustrate his point. Abraham Lincoln, when told that General Ulysses S Grant, his new commander-in-chief, was fond of the bottle, said: "If I knew his brand, I'd send a barrel or so to some other generals." After a childhood on the Kentucky and Illinois frontier, Lincoln assuredly knew all about the bottle and its dangers. But of all the Union generals, Grant alone had proven consistently capable of planning and leading winning campaigns. Grant's appointment was the turning point of the Civil War. It was effective because Lincoln chose his general for his tested ability to win battles, and not for his sobriety, that is, for the absence of a weakness.

CW: Executives need to be good problem-solvers.
PD: While problem-solving is an important task, one must always keep in mind that an organisation obtains results by exploiting opportunities, and not by solving problems. All one can hope to get by solving a problem is to restore normality. At best, it can help eliminate a restriction on the capacity of the business to obtain results. The results themselves must come from the exploitation of opportunities.

CW: Entrepreneurs are a breed apart from other people with a different psychology and character traits.
PD: Entrepreneurship is not about character traits. It is not something mysterious -- whether a gift, talent, inspiration, or "flash of genius". Entrepreneurship is a purposeful task that can be organised. It is a question of behaviour, policies and practices rather than personality. It is a discipline that can be learned. What's more, entrepreneurship is part of every executive's job and needs to be mastered by any manager who wishes to be effective.

Blink - Azara Feroz Sayed

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/3110851.cms

The article in timesofindia on intuition refers to the book "blink" (metaphor "a blink of the eye" for intuition) by Malcom Galdwell prompting me to read the book which was also suggested in one of our training sessions.

'blink' is about how experts make better decisions by making "snap judgements" (rather than studying "volumes of analysis") especially when confronted with complex situations or need for decisions under stress.

As per 'blink', it is alright to judge a book by its cover so long as we do so in an intelligent, informed, controlled manner. Decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately.

The power of knowing in the first two seconds (thin slicing),is not a gift given magically to a fortunate few. It is an ability that we can all cultivate for ourselves.

Our unconscious reactions often have to compete with our emotions, our likes, dislikes, prejudices and stereotypes and these emotions can easily corrupt (prime) the ability of our unconscious.

Also there are instances when our intuition betrays us. This failure on part of our unconscious has nothing to do with how much information we can process quickly, but on the few particular details on which we need to focus and manage (mind reading is an example).

As I was reading the book, I was wondering how the results of the numerous studies relating to "thin slicing", "priming", "mind reading" could be be applied to other aspects of our life e.g. customer service, recruitment, relationships apart from using them to manage our unconscious reactions

I have used the review from http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/497 and have added ideas from the book that sounded interesting to me

In the introduction to Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, he tells the story of the J. Paul Getty Museum’s purchase of an ancient kouros dating from the sixth century BC. The museum had scientists perform test after test on the kouros to make sure it was authentic. It was concluded that the statue was most definitely the real thing, being thousands of years old. When art historians, however, took one look at the statue they knew that something was amiss and, sure enough, after a few more tests it was determined that the statue was artificially aged. Gladwell’s book is all about that one look the experts took of the korous to know that it was a fake. Blink is all about the snap judgments we make everyday and how we can use those judgments to make better decisions. This incident also brings an important aspect relating to intuition - the experts from Getty Museum's wanted to own the kourus and hence were blinded to their intution - we sometime ignore our intuition and try to see what we want to see.

Our brain uses two very different strategies to make sense of any situation. The first is the one we are most familiar with. It's the conscious strategy. We think about what we have learned, and eventually we come up with an answer. This strategy is logical and definitive. This takes a long time (study of Iowa gamblers - takes 80 cards for decision). It is slow and needs lots of information. The second strategy operates quicker(study of Iowa gamblers - decision kicks in 10 cards). It operates below the surface of consciousness (a.k.a. adaptive unconscious - not to be confused with the dark unconscious decribed by freud) and provides messages thru indirect channels such as sweat glands in palms of our hands, feeling sommething is amiss, the hunch etc.

Adaptive unconscious is thought of, as a giant computer that quickly and quietky processes a lot of data that we need in order to keep functioning as human beings. The giant computer crunches all the data it can from the experiences we have had, the people we have met, the lessons we have learnt, the people we have met, the books we have read, the movies we have seen and so on and form a opinion When we walk out into the street and suddenly realize that a truck is bearing down on us - do we have time to think through all options - the unconscious makes very quick judgements based on very little information.

Just as a modern jetliner is able to fly on auto-pilot with little or no input from the human, comscious pilot - the adaptive unconscious does an excellent job of sizing up the world, warning people of danger, setting goals and initiating actions in a sophisticated and efficient manner.

Neurologist Antonio Damasio determinded that critical part of the brain, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which lies behind the nose, plays a critical role in decision making. It works out contigencies and relatioships and sorts through mountains of information we get from the outside world, priortitizing it and putting flags on things that demand immediate attention. Damage is ventromedial disconnects between waht you know and what you do like Addicts who can articulate very well the consequences of their behaviour but fail to act accordingly. People with damaged vetromedial were not able to sense the pricking of sweat in their hands or feel something is amiss - the push to make sure they did the right thing is missing in them.

We toggle back and forth between our conscious and unconscious modes of thinking, depending on the situation. When we decision to invite a co-worker over for dinner is a conscious. We think it over. We decide it will be fun. The spontaneous decision to argue with the same co-worker is made unconsciously.

We are innately suspicious of adaptive unconscious, of rapid congnition as we live in a world that assumes that the quality of the a decision is directly related to the time and effort that went into making it. When doctors are faced with a difficult diagnosis, they order more tests and when we are uncertain about what we hear, we ask for second opinion. We are conditioned with 'Haste makes waste', 'Look before you leap', 'Stop and think'. There are moments, particularly in times of stress, when our 'snap judgements' and 'first impressions' can offer a much better means of making sense of the world.

One of the amazing studies comes from a psychologist, John Gottman, at the University of Washington. Gottman brings young couples, who have recently married, to his lab and videotapes them for fifteen minutes. He leaves them alone and has them discuss anything that is a point of conflict within their marriage. Besides the camera, he also hooks the couples up to electrodes, which measure heart rate and how much they sweat, and also attaches a device to their chairs that measures how much they move around. Gottman then goes back and analyses the data and videotapes and is able to determine whether the couple will have a successful marriage. Gottman is a master of facial expressions. He has a numbering system that corresponds to every emotion a couple could possibly express in a conversation. Generally, if the negative emotions in the conversation outweigh the positive or neutral emotions the
success of the marriage does not look good. Although these results may look skeptical at first, Gottman has studied over three thousand couple and by looking at his fifteen minute videos has had a ninety percent success rate for determining whether a couple will still be together in seven years - all based on measiring the positive and negative emotions in 15 minutes of conversation.

Although Gottman’s work is conscious and deliberate, Gladwell notes that much of what he does is part of rapid cognition or what he refers to as “thin-slicing.” Gottman finds patterns(positive and negative emotions) in behavior based on very “thin slices” (15 minutes) of couple's experience rather than analysing individual life and life together over a week or longer. Galdwell ignores all the greater details or irrelevant information and simply focuses on the positive and negative emotions in the 15 minutes of conversation. Our unconscious is really good at this (ignoring irrelevant information and focusing on the thing that matters most) and it is a large part of the snap judgment calls we make everyday.

The study for calculating risk by determining which of the physicians covered by the company are more likely to be sued is one more very good example of "thin-slicing". Rather than examining physicians training and credentials and analyzing the records to see how many errors they have made over the past few years. It was found that the easier option was to simply listen to the tone of the voice used by the doctor while talking to the patient for two seconds - to determine the likely hood of the patient sueing the doctor. This 'thin slice" was selected based on the fact that if the doctor treats patients on a personal level - they will never blame the doctor even if the doctor is wrong - rest all of the other information is irrelvant. Isn't that brilliant - wouldn't it be wonderful if we learnt to 'thin slice' and apply it to other aspects of our life to run it more efficiently, apart from knowing that this is what our unconcious uses while making "snap judgements" - by always questioning is this the "thinnest" slice for such a decision that we can use routinely henceforth.

Another example of "thin slicing" is a study done by Nalini Amabdy where the teacher's effectiveness ratings provided by students based on 2 second videotapes of a teacher - with the sound turned off - matched with those provided by students who sat in the teacher's class for an entire semester. The example illustrates the importance of "thin slicing" in decision making i.e. focusing on the relevant information (2 secs video tape) needed to arrive at the decision and ignoring everything else (feedback over one semester).

Feroz uses "thin slicing" all the time with movies, books - he watches a movie for 10 minutes or reads 5 pages of a book and decides if it is worth his time. An example of the ability to extract an enormous amount of meaningful information from the thinnest slice of experience.

The chapter on Kenna's Dilema mentions about 'The Gambler' song by Kenny Roger. Me and Feroz are Kenny Roger fans but Feroz will never get tired of hearing his songs and the CD keeps playing for hours once it goes in.

Since the "snap judgements" are unconscious processes, it can be frustrating that we can not even describe why we feel or act a certain way when prompted by a stimulus. Gladwell believes that it is often detrimental to our judgments if we try to describe what is happening within our unconscious.

Galdwell gives the example of tennis coach Vic Braden. While working with professional athletes, Braden began asking players how and why they play the way they do. In his research, Braden discovered that none of the athletes he talked with were able to give him a consistent answer to his question. Braden then began videotaping star tennis players and digitizing their movements so that he could see, frame for frame, ever move they made, while, say, hitting a forehand. When asking players how they hit a forehand, Braden found that most said something about using their wrist to roll the racket over the ball. The videos, however, show that the wrist almost never moves until long after the ball has been hit. These players were making up stories to explain something that occurred within their unconscious. The results of these stories were coaches teaching faulty advice and beginners walking away with wrist damage.

Gladwell remarks that one of the things humans need to come to terms with is accepting our ignorance in many situations and learning to say “I don’t know.” Many of the outputs of our nervous system result from unconscious inputs, therefore making it often useless to try and explain ourselves.

Adaptive unconscious also involves a process called “priming”. Gladwell mentions the study of two Dutch researchers who had several groups of students each answer forty-two Trivial Pursuit questions. Half were asked to take five minutes to think about
what it would mean to be a professor and write it down, while the other half were asked to do the same with soccer hooligan in place of professor. The students who thought about professors ended up getting 55.6 percent of the questions correct, while the soccer group got 42.6 percent correct. The professor group wasn’t any smarter than the soccer group, but they were put in a “smart” mind frame before answering the questions.

The several studies provided on "priming" are interesting. Priming is the dark side of rapid cognition, a process that goes on within the adaptive unconscious that can change the way we think. Most of the time we are simply operating on auto pilot, and the way we think and act - and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment - are more susceptible to outside influences than we realize. If you were provided lot of info relating to old age - your walking style will be slighlty affected immediately as you get out of the session i.e. you are "primed" with the information - your conscious tells your body - I have picked some clues that we are in an environment that is concerned about old age and lets behave accordingly. There are times when we reach snap jusdgement without ever getting below the surface. The priming (powerful associations with certain words) that causes us to change our behaviour can also be related to people's appearence - their shape, color, sex, size. Warren Harding is considered to be one of the worst presidents of US. Many people who looked at Warren Harding saw how extraordinarily handsome and distinguished-looking he was and jumped to the immediate - and entirely unwarranted - conclusion that he was a man of courage and intelligence and integrity. They didn't dig below the surface. The way he looked carried so many powerful connotations that it stopped the normal process of thinking dead in its tracks. Priming is the root of a good deal of prejudice and discrimination. Knowing the circumstances when rapid cognition can lead us astray is important

When we make a split-second decision, we are really vulnerable to being guided by our stereo types and prejudices, even ones we may not necessarily endorse or believe

The studies on priming are done using Implicit Association Test Tool (IAT - url www.implicit.harvard.edu) based on the fact that we make connections much more quickly between pairs of ideas that are already related in our minds than we do between pairs of ideas that are unrelated to us. The IAT shows that our unconcious attitudes maybe utterly incompatible with our stated conscious values. The IAT is also a predictor of how we act in certain kinds of spontaneous situations. To fix the effect of priming, the something that happens outside of our awareness - we need to consciously change the experiences that formed our first impressions - i.e. treating black people as equals in every way by exposing oursleves to their culture, becoming comfortable with them - taking active steps to manage and control the first impressions

Several of the examples in the study for "priming" relate to the attributes that are associated with blacks (part of Race IAT) and how that "primes" our judgements. Once again, made me thank God for not having to struggle as hard as some of our other fellow beings have to - to achieve anything based on the social "priming". We saw in the post on 'Taming the Gremlin' - how we can shut off the "priming" effect of the unconscious. The scary revealations provided by the IATs can certainly be used in many areas. To ensure the right person is recruited and not necessarily a 'tall leader' as we automatically associate leadership with imposing physical structure. To ensure excellent customer service is provided without judging anyone on the basis of their appearance.

One of the most memorable stories Gladwell tells relates back to the lesson of the korous and trusting gut reactions over vast amounts of empirical evidence. This story involves a man named Paul Van Riper and the Millennium Challenge War Games of 2002. Van Riper, an experienced Marine Corps commander, was appointed head of the Red Team; the enemy team in which Van Riper was a rogue military commander who had broken away from his government located in the Persian Gulf. He was to have a strong following of religious and ethnic loyalties and was harboring four different terrorist organizations (sound familiar?). The Blue Team (the United States) was given millions of dollars worth of high-tech gizmos and hundreds of military analysts, as well as significantly more troops. The Blue Team was given the equipment to know exactly where the Red Team was at all times, and supposedly all the information to know what the Red Team would do before they actually did it. The events of the games, however, did not go exactly as the Blue Team had expected. On the second day of the “war,” Van Riper used motor bikes to exchange messages rather than using satellite etc that the Blue team was expecting them to use. He sent a fleet of small boats into the Gulf to track the ships of the Blue Team. He than attacked them in an assault of missiles, sinking sixteen American ships before the Blue Team had a chance to strike. Being an experienced military man, Van Riper knew what all the analysts and technology whizzes working for the Blue Team could never understand: when making decisions under immense pressure, experts won’t logically and systematically compare all available information. That takes far too long. Experts know to thin-slice the situation based on experience, wisdom, intuition, a rough mental simulation, and react to the best of their ability. Unfortunately, this method did not sit well with the United States Military. Those in charge of the War Games “un-sunk” the lost ship and gave Van Riper a script to act from, in which the Blue Team, of course, won. After hearing this story, is it any surprise that shortly after when the U.S. declared war on Iraq, ensuring a straight-forward and quick victory, that troops are still being sent over and loosing their lives? Van Riper’s story provides a frightening example of what can happen when people in high places venomously ignore their snap judgments.

blink is about making sophisticated decisions at the spur of the moment. Basket ball is an intricate, high speed game filled with split-second spontaneous decisions. But the spontaneity is acheived by hours of practice as sponteneity isn't random. How good people's decisions are under high stress conditions of rapid cognition is a function of training, rules and rehearsal. We need to create conditions for sucessful spontaneity in advance.

A truly sucessful decision making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking. Deliberate thinking is wonderful tool when we have the luxury of time, clearly defined tasks. The fruit of this type of analysis can set the stage for rapid cognition. In good decision making, frugality matters i.e. reducing a complex problem to simplest elements. When we thin-slice, we understand the underlying pattern of the problem unconscioulsy i.e. we 'edit' the problem for frugality. We get in trouble when we are not able to 'edit' the problem. When people were provided choice of 70 jams - they were paralyzed with the choices and were not able to decide. Snap judgements are made in a snap because they are frugal. We need to have steps to get to the frugality of the problem for snap judgements to happen.

The ability to operate without having to explain constantly enables rapid cognition. This is a wonderful thought for managers to keep in mind when working with teams

People's first impressions are wrong as they mis-interpret their own feelings when presented with new and unusual information. It takes time to understand new information and to actually start appreciating it - till the time the information is understood it falls in wierd category. The new model of ergonomic chair was rejected by people in their first impression due to its different look and feel. People didn't have an history with the new model and hence it is difficult for them to imagine a future with it. There was nothing familiar in the ergo chair and hence the work 'ugly' was just a proxy for different. The problem with market research is that often it is simply too blunt an instrument to pick up this distinction between the bad and the merely different. Testing ideas that are truly revolutionary is another matter, and the most successful companies are those that understand that in those cases, the impressions of their consumers need interpretation. Their is a caveat, the first impressions of experts don't fall in this category i.e. experts like different things than most of the people. When we become expert in something, our tastes grow more esoteric and complex. Experts know how to interpret and decode their snap judgements and first impressions.

It is not that if we have all the information, we can't lose. In the game of chess we can see the chess board, yet we don't win all the time. Managers try to know more and more about everything and this hinders them from performing optimally.

blink presents ideas relating to our spontaneity in making decisions relating to product. First of all the product is both the product and packing for people to make decision. Also the snap decision about products is a reaction to the evidence of taste buds, eyes, memories and imagination and is not related to one dimension. Hence it is important to service all the dimensions of the product. In the example of coke and pepsi - pepsi was busy working on branding while coke was busy on getting the sip test - it is important to remember that the product decisions are made not only on sip test. The triangle test - identify pepsi from three glasses two of which contain coke and one contains pepsi is a good example of how a good vocabulary of taste is needed to identify the pepsi glass and a shallow knowledge of colas won't do - we need to think about colas and become an expert on cola.

The practice of inferring the motivations and intentions of others is classic thin slicing. It is picking up on sublte, fleeting cues in order to read someone's mind.

Of course, there are cases in which using judgment can backfire. Take the case of the three police officers working in the South Bronx who came upon Amadou Diallo standing outside his apartment building at midnight. The officers immediately assumed that Diallo was a robber or drug-dealer due to the fact that he was out so late and black. When the officers yelled to Diallo to come talk with them he ran into the vestibule of his house trying to open the inside door. The officers say that Diallo began reaching into his pockets, pulling out what appeared to be a gun. The officers fired forty-one shots, mutilating Diallo’s body. When the three officers went up to look at they man they had just killed, it turned out that what had been in his hand was a wallet and not a gun at all. In this case Gladwell believes that the officers experienced a condition he calls “temporary autism,” in which a person under incredibly high stress (heart rate of 175) is unable to interpret facial expressions, or unable to “mind read.” Because of past experiences, when Diallo turned to run they panicked due to the heightened stress of the situations, the police were not able to make clear judgments about the situation, such as reading the fear on Diallo’s face for malice. Mind reading is an ability that increases with practice

We don't have much control over whatever bubbles to the surface from our unconscious. If we can control the environment in which rapid congnition takes place than we can control rapid cognition - we can prevent the people from fighting wars, polices from making mistakes etc

Working Hours - Azara Feroz Sayed

Currently, I am not leading teams and don't work long hours. This was a conscious decision taken - to take more responsibilities at home at the cost of giving up on responsibilities at work. Always keep wondering how could I have kept the balance - do try to lookup for a leader to model (NLP) while I read.

The below site features some of the leaders and how they work long hours which also is a pointer to their strong passion!
http://money.cnn.com/2006/03/02/news/newsmakers/howiwork_fortune_032006/index.htm

One striking point was, most of them have assistants (next level of support) screening emails, documents. This 'next level of support' is a team that these leaders have been working with for, more than 10yrs and are trusted. In IT, these seems next to impossible. The single most thing that would have made my work life easier would have been delegation and 100% trust that the task delegated would be completed without followup. Why is this so difficult? Don't my manager count on me for that?

The IT leaders love their emails - couldn't believe that. I wish, I had the freedom to have a perpetual out-of-office active for my email saying 'There will be delay in responding to emails. If it is urgent please reach out to me or XXX'. I beleive an emergency cannot be resolved in email. Offcourse, at the same time ensuring, every call on the cellphone is a urgent one. Unfortunately, you don't have the luxury in a service industry where the out-of-office message could be going out to your customer and you need to be available to the customer all the time. Some of the managers I worked with - don't read their emails or rather read emails from a select few - I don't think we have that option! We certainly need to prioritize the time to be spent in browsing the content for some mails over time spent in understanding the contents and responding to those appropriately. It is better to let people know you are not reading emails all the time - to ensure nobody is waiting for a response back from you sooner. I wish, I could limit email time to every 5-15 mts break that AG Lafley takes for recharging himself.

Some keypoints I noted
1. From the feature on Hank Palson (the article is outdated - he is now ex Chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs), I could see discipline is one way of controling your work life. Letting everybody know your business hours and sticking to it.
2. The key to controlling Bill Gross's (CIO, Chief Investment Officer - not Chief Information Officer - for Pimco) busy work day is a hour long spent in yoga in the middle of the day to clear the mind
3. For Howard Schultz, Chairman and CEO of Starbucks, it is a long day from 5.00am (catching up with Europe) till late in the night(catching up with Asia) on the day to day stuff. That would be tiring! The passion would be so strong to never feel the long work hours! Interestingly, he doesn't uses emails at all and believes in stayin in touch with people personally - congratulating them for the good work for the day or understanding the challenges. Can't imagine how it would have been for him with the recent 600 store closing for a person who works so closely on day to day operations.
4. Carlos Ghosn, CEO of Renault(France) and CEO of Nissan(Japan). Carlos believes in looking at a problem from a distance helps to create better ideas and recharging (spending time with family) helps to look at the problem from more distance with extra strength and creative ideas
5. AG Lafley, Chairman and CEO of P&G. He believes in recharging himself with 5-15 minutes break to talk to people, managing energy levels by eating small meals 6 times a day and in minimizing information onslaught

Playing it Safe - Azara Feroz Sayed

I could relate to this article in terms of Feroz's and my life.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Lifestyle/Spirituality/Mind_over_Matter/Mind_set_Dont_play_it_safe/articleshow/2223732.cms

I fit in the decription of the "Playing it Safe" person in the article
Most of the world likes to play it safe. They go to their safe jobs, come home to their safe relationships, they drive safe cars, they invest money in safe corporations, they think safe thoughts, and they want nothing more than to feel safe and secure

Feroz fits the description of "Adventurer"
This other group lives for thrills. They don't just occasionally think outside the box, they actually prefer to live outside the box. This is a group who thrives on adventure, change, and newness. They love innovative new ideas, they like to explore new things, and push the envelope beyond its capabilities.

This group often does not feel understood nor supported by the mainstream population. They are not rebels, although they are often accused of being rebellious because they do not embrace the status quo. This group is not anti-anything. They do not require group consensus to be who they are. Young adults often think that by dressing badly or by misbehaving that they are somehow brave and different from whatever it is that they are opposing, but that is not revolutionary and different, that is just anger turned inside out. They are not making a point, they are not changing the world, they are simply behaving in a manner that causes people to shun them. That is not the group I am talking about today.

The aspect that causes anxiety in me due to this difference in us is - the aspect of breaking rules. Having grown up in an environment of accepting rules all the time - it is always difficult for me to even watch Feroz breaking the rules. In his college, Feroz puts in maybe 50% more time in creating course work for students, spending time with the students and that is because he looks at his work as an oppurtunity for creativity but would get himself into trouble over some of the administration rules such as being in college everyday at a certain time or his insistence on using green ink. Questioning Rules and Breaking those that do not make sense is what he believes in.

Could relate very well to the ideas in the post
Those who would keep things safe and comfortable become frightened and angry at these innovative new thinkers. They torment them, threaten them, mistreat them, ostracise them, and create a storm of ugliness to try and stop these people from simply sharing the gifts of their hearts that they were born to share with humanity.

Though the article refers to people who made difference to humanity. In my life, with Feroz, I have learnt that the ability to "not play safe" doesn't needs to be as profound - to create an impact on humanity - as described in the article. It can be done in simple and basic aspects of life - to live our life to the fullest - in our ability to live our passion - by simply saying "NO" to the clutter that stops us from doing it. At this point too, I can claim to be a mere audience to Feroz and have not taken 'The Dip' but can say that the effect of overturning areas where we are rigid in our thinking is not a easy one and needs lot of commitment (faith, courage to overcome fear, persistence). I can relate it to my expereince of being on the dive board for the first time and not jumping. I had all the knowledge about what to do and what not to do, my swimming instructor was there below to help me and I was holding to my Dive Safety Float too - but still took lot of time for me to jump off from the Dive board (and not pushed from the dive board by the instructor). I appreciate Feroz's patience with my feelings of anxiety in implementing the change of 'not playing it safe all the time'. I am taking my first baby step of learning to say "NO" at times, to create oppurtunities, that would help me to live my passion!

The Luck Factor - Azara Feroz Sayed

Luck exerts a dramatic influence over our lives. A few seconds of bad fortune can unravel years of striving, while a moment of good luck can lead to success and happiness. Luck has the power to transform the improbable into the possible; to make the difference between life and death, reward and ruin, happiness and despair.

Read the book "Luck Factor" by Richard Wiseman, head of a psychology research department at the University of Hertfordshire in England. It is an interesting read on the results of Dr. Wiseman's experiments on Luck conducted over 8 years with hundreds of people as part of the Luck project. The Luck Project scientifically explores why some people live such charmed lives, and aims to develop techniques that enable others to enhance their own good fortune. The main findings from the research have been published in the bestselling book 'The Luck Factor'

Lucky people meet their perfect partners, achieve their lifelong ambitions, find fulfilling careers, and live happy and meaningful lives. Their success is not due to them working especially hard, being amazingly talented or exceptionally intelligent. Instead, they simply appear to have an uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right time and enjoy more than their fair share of lucky breaks.

Psychologists have studied how our lives are affected by our intelligence, personality, genes, appearance, and upbringing. Measuring intelligence and categorizing people’s personalities is relatively straightforward, but how do you quantify luck and control chance? Dr Wiseman began by carrying out a survey to discover the percentage of people who considered themselves lucky or unlucky, and whether people’s luck tended to be concentrated in one or two areas of their lives or
spread across many different areas.

The book describes a scientifically proven way of understanding, controlling and increasing our Luck. The exercises in the book provide strategies to improve our Luck Factor.

Over time, Dr. Wiseman built up a database of about 400 people from all over the UK, all walks of life, who considered themselves especially lucky or unlucky. The people in both groups were saying, "I've no idea why this is the case; I'm just lucky" -- or unlucky. Dr Wiseman didn't believe that for a minute. He thought there was something else going on. So in the Luck Project, he've had the volunteers take part in experiments, interviewed them, had them keep diaries -- all sorts of things -- trying to piece together why we have one group of people for whom everything would work out well and another group for whom things would be completely disastrous.

Dr Wiseman uncovered thar Luck is not a magical ability or gift from the Gods. People are not born lucky or unlucky, but they create much of their own good and bad luck through their thoughts, feelings and actions.

If you are not able to get your hands on the book - the short colorful booklet is must read for getting insights into 'The Luck Factor'. The PDF has good graphics and a color print will make a good read - and easier to pass it on to someone else as a gift http://www.theluckfactor.com/docs/ebooklet.pdf
I have pasted brief of the book at the bottom of the post.

The Q & A session with Dr Wiseman on some of the FAQs on Luck
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/72/realitycheck.html?page=0%2C1

Isn't there a distinction between chance and luck?
There's a big distinction. Chance events are like winning the lottery. They're events over which we have no control, other than buying a ticket. They don't consistently happen to the same person. They may be formative events in people's lives, but they're not frequent. When people say that they consistently experience good fortune, I think that, by definition, it has to be because of something they are doing.

In other words, they make their own luck.
That's right. What I'm arguing is that we have far more control over events than we thought previously. You might say, "Fifty percent of my life is due to chance events." No, it's not. Maybe 10% is. That other 40% that you think you're having no influence over at all is actually defined by the way you think.

What are some of the ways that lucky people think differently from unlucky people?One way is to be open to new experiences. Unlucky people are stuck in routines. When they see something new, they want no part of it. Lucky people always want something new. They're prepared to take risks and relaxed enough to see the opportunities in the first place.

How did you uncover that in your lab?
We did an experiment. We asked subjects to flip through a news-paper that had photographs in it. All they had to do was count the number of photographs. That's it. Luck wasn't on their minds, just some silly task. They'd go through, and after about three pages, there'd be a massive half-page advert saying, STOP COUNTING. THERE ARE 43 PHOTOGRAPHS IN THIS NEWSPAPER. It was next to a photo, so we knew they were looking at that area. A few pages later, there was another massive advert -- I mean, we're talking big -- that said, STOP COUNTING. TELL THE EXPERIMENTER YOU'VE SEEN THIS AND WIN 150 POUNDS [about $235].

For the most part, the unlucky would just flip past these things. Lucky people would flip through and laugh and say, "There are 43 photos. That's what it says. Do you want me to bother counting?" We'd say, "Yeah, carry on." They'd flip some more and say, "Do I get my 150 pounds?" Most of the unlucky people didn't notice.

But the business culture typically worships drive -- setting a goal, single-mindedly pursuing it, and plowing past obstacles. Are you arguing that, to be more lucky, we need to be less focused?
This is one of the most counterintuitive ideas. We are traditionally taught to be really focused, to be really driven, to try really hard at tasks. But in the real world, you've got opportunities all around you. And if you're driven in one direction, you're not going to spot the others. It's about getting people to have various game plans running in their heads. Unlucky people, if they go to a party wanting to meet the love of their life, end up not meeting people who might become close friends or people who might help them in their careers. Being relaxed and open allows lucky people to see what's around them and to maximize what's around them

Much of business is also about rational analysis: pulling up the spreadsheet, running the numbers, looking at the serious facts. Yet you found that lucky people rely heavily on their gut instincts.
Yes. You don't want to broadly say that whenever you get an intuitive feeling, it's right and you should go with it. But you could be missing out on a massive font of knowledge that you've built up over the years. We are amazingly good at detecting patterns. That's what our brains are set up to do.

What are some other ways you found that lucky people's minds operate differently?
They practice "counterfactual thinking." The degree to which you think that something is fortunate or not is the degree to which you generate alternatives that are better or worse.
Unlucky people say, "I can't believe I've been in another car accident." Lucky people go, "Wonderful. Yes, I had a car accident, but I wasn't killed. And I met the guy in the other car, and we got on really well, and there might be a relationship there." What's interesting is that both ways of thinking are unconscious and automatic. It would never occur to the unlucky people to see it a different way.

Isn't there something delusional about that approach -- sort of a modern version of Dr. Pangloss's "All for the best in the best of all possible worlds"? Suppose I said, "I just wrote this article, and the article stinks, and nobody read it. But hey, at least I have two arms."
What's so delusional about that? If it keeps you going in the face of adversity and softens the impact of the fact that no one read your article, and therefore you think, "Well, I can write another article, and I'm going to learn from the mistakes of the past one, and I'm going to keep on going," I think that's fine. It would be delusional if you took it to the extreme -- especially if you weren't learning from your mistakes.

But can we acknowledge that sometimes bad stuff -- car accidents, natural disasters -- just happens? Sometimes it's purely bad, and there's nothing good about it.
I've never heard that from a lucky person.

So if you buy that way of thinking, then there is no bad luck.
That's right. That's what was weird about conducting some of the interviews. Subjects would say, "I'm the luckiest person alive" -- and they'd come up with dreadful stories. They'd have the same life events as the unlucky person, but they'd look at them entirely differently.


The Four Principle for Luck Factor - Dr Richard Wiseman
Principle No.1: Maximise Your Opportunities - Make your luck
The way lucky people think and behave makes them far more likey than others to create, notice, and act upon chance opportunities in their lives. People who tend to think and behave in the same way are said to have the same personality. Dr Wiseman compared the personalities of lucky and unlucky people on 5 dimensions of personality: agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion, neuroticism, and openness.

Agreeableness is a measure of the degree to which someone is sympathetic toward others and willing to help them. Lucky people scored no higher on agreeableness than unlucky people. Conscientiousness is a measure of the degree to which a person is selfdisciplined, strong-willed, and determined. There was very little difference in the conscientiousness scores of lucky and unlucky people. The groups did, however, obtain very different scores on the remaining three personality dimensions – extroversion, neuroticism and openness.

The differences explained why lucky people constantly encounter chance opportunities in their lives while unlucky people do not. Lucky people score much higher than unlucky people on extroversion, and there are three ways in which extroversion significantly increases the likelihood of having a lucky chance encounter – meeting a large number of people, being a “social magnet,” and keeping in contact with people. Lucky people dramatically increase the possibility of a lucky chance encounter by meeting a large number of people in their daily lives. The more people they meet, the greater opportunity they have of running into someone who could have a positive effect on their lives. Social magnets attract others because, without realizing it, they exhibit the types of body language and facial expressions that other people find attractive and inviting. Lucky people exhibit exactly the same pattern of behaviors. Upon reviewing video tapes of interviews with lucky and unlucky people, we found that the lucky people smiled twice as much as the unlucky people, and engaged in far more eye contact. The lucky people also tended to engage in three times as much open body language (point their bodies toward the person they are speaking with, uncross their arms and legs, make gestures that display open palms) as the unlucky people.Lucky people are also effective at building secure and long-lasting attachments with the people they meet. They are easy to get to know and most people like them. They tend to be trusting and form close friendships with others. As a result, they often keep in touch with a much larger number of friends and colleagues than unlucky people. This network of friends helps promote opportunity in their lives. Together, these actions result in a massive “network of luck” and a huge potential for chance opportunities. And it takes only one chance encounter to change a life.

People who obtain a low score on the neuroticism dimension of personality are generally calm and relaxed, and people who obtain a high score are more tense and anxious. Lucky people score much lower on neuroticism than unlucky people, and this makes a big difference. Because lucky people tend to be more relaxed than most, they are more likely to notice chance opportunities. The same principle applies when lucky people meet and chat with other people. They are relaxed and attuned to the opportunities around them. Lucky people see what is there, rather than trying to find what they want to see. As a result, they are far more receptive to any opportunities that arise naturally.

People who obtain a high score on the openness dimension of personality like a great deal of variety and novelty in their lives. They love trying new experiences, new kinds of foods, and new ways of doing things. They tend not to be bound by convention and they like the notion of unpredictability. People who obtain a low score on openness tend to be much more conventional. Lucky people score much higher on openness than unlucky people, and this greater openness can help promote chance opportunities in their lives.

Professor Wiseman provides examples of people whose lives are full of opportunities. He cites, for example, a 40 year old housewife Wendy who wins about 3 competition prizes per week and whose winnings have included major prizes such as significant amounts of cash and holidays. Her secret? – She enters a lot of competitions. Wiseman’s initial point here is that if she didn’t enter any competitions then she would have no chance of winning them.

Lucky people maximise opportunities by
a. building and maintaining a strong network of luck
b. having a relaxed attitude towards life
c. being open to new experiences in their lives

Principle No.2: Lucky people make successful decisions by using their intuition and gut feelings - Your Gut is right

Lucky people consistently place their trust in colleagues and clients who are honest and reliable, and they make sound choices when it comes to their careers and financial matters. Lucky people simply know when a decision is right. In contrast, unlucky people view many of their poor decisions as yet more evidence of how they are always destined to fail. Dr Wiseman found that lucky and unlucky people differed on a rather mysterious aspect of decision making, namely, intuition. Unlucky people often ignore their intuition and regret their decisions.

Wiseman indicates that his research results suggest that a large percentage of lucky people trust their intuitions when making decisions in four important areas of their life – careers, personal relationships, business and finance. He gives many examples, including one from his own life where he felt a gut feeling that something was wrong when being asked to hand over his credit card at a particular hotel for a booking despite having done this many times before. He chose instead to pay by cheque and subsequently discovered that credit card fraud had been committed by one of the hotel employees. He had avoided being one of the victims of this fraud through following his intuition, although he had no obvious reason to suspect the fraud might occur.

Wiseman also suggests that lucky people are more likely than unlucky people to take steps to boost their intuition such as meditating and this feeds into the recommendations he makes later in the book for how you can begin to increase your own chances of being the beneficiary of good luck.

a. Lucky people listen to their gut feelings and hunches
b. Lucky people take steps to boost their intitution

Principle No.3: Expect Good Fortune
Lucky people are certain that the future will be bright. Over time, that expectation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because it helps lucky people persist in the face of failure and positively shapes their interactions with other people.

Good luck and bad luck, it seems, can sometimes become a self fulfilling prophecy. If you expect good luck, the suggestion is, you are more likely to receive good luck and if you expect bad luck you are more likely to receive bad luck. Wiseman also gives some examples of psychological experiments which indicate that people’s perceptions of their abilities can influence their capacities – for instance, in one experiment he alludes to, two groups of people were asked to press a switch the moment a light came on. The second group, but not the first, were told to imagine they were fighter pilots with very fast reactions. Remarkably the second group responded much faster than the first – they expected to do well and therefore performed better.

a. Lucky people expect their good luck to continue in the future
b. Lucky people attempt to achieve their goals, even if their chance of success seems slim, and perservere in the face of failure
c. Lucky people expect their interactions with others to be lucky and successful

Principle No. 4: Turn Your Bad Luck Into Good
Lucky people employ various psychological techniques to cope with, and even thrive upon, the ill fortune that comes their way. For example, they spontaneously imagine how things could have been worse, they don't dwell on the ill fortune, and they take control of the situation.

In this section, Wiseman argues forcefully for a positive attitude towards difficulties and bad luck that besets you. He suggests that if you can adopt the belief that any ill fortune that besets you will in the long run work out for the best, then cultivating this positive attitude will help you to move forward and create a luckier future for yourself. In talking about this he seems to be highlighting a kind of resilience, resourcefulness and determination alongside positive belief which can help you. He gives a number of illuminating examples including one from his own life where, in his past career as a musician, his case with all his magic tricks was stolen when he was distracted in a restaurant. Instead of bemoaning his bad luck, he used the opportunity to work through the night to create new magic tricks, with the result that is performance was much better than it would have been and his new tricks later received awards.

a. Lucky people see the positive side of their bad luck
b. Lucky people are convinced that any ill fortune in their lives will, in the long run, work out for the best
c. Lucky people do not dwellon their ill fortune
d. Lucky people take constructive steps to prevent more bad luck in the future

Asking Questions - Azara Feroz Sayed

Came accross this article on 'Why Brainstorming is weak' bringing out the flaws in modern brainstorming. http://www.directedcreativity.com/pages/BrainstormWeak.html

Brainstorming is by far the most widely used tool for creative thinking. It was developed in the 1940s and 1950s by advertising executive Alex Osborn, who developed a crisp list of four basic rules for generating creative ideas:
* Criticism is ruled out. Adverse judgment of ideas must be withheld until later.
* "Free-wheeling" is welcomed. The wilder the idea, the better; it is easier to tame down than to think up.
* Quantity is wanted. The greater the number of ideas, the more the likelihood of winners.
* Combination and improvement are sought. In addition to contributing ideas of their own, participants should suggest how ideas of others can be turned into better ideas; or how two or more ideas can be joined into still another idea

The flaws in modern brianstorming are
* Lack of skills for brainstorming and thinking creatively in participants - No training for creating novel ideas. The assumption is that the creative ideas are there already, locked in the mind; we just need to let them out
* Lack of preparation - flaw in assuming that brilliant, never-before-thought-of ideas will suddenly burst forth from a group of people assembled to brainstorm for an hour
* No harvesting of ideas - Those ideas that don't make out of the idea filtering process are not harvested further - they are lost


This reminded me of the 'Six Thinking Hats' brainstorming session I attended for problem solving. The 'Six Thinking Hat' tool by Bono is not only used for idea generation (brainstorming) but also is used for Idea Elimination or Filtering like the Pareto Chart. Click on the picture to read the text.



During this session each of the participant was provided with a cardboard cap (The ones we make for the kids, a square paper folded diagonally and the ends stapled together - there were more than one blue, green etc i.e. there was a blue group, green group etc). A picture was taken of the group wearing the hats before the session, giving sufficient time for the participants to start thinking Yellow, Red etc. This was followed by an hour long brain storming session where the participants spent most of the time asking questions under the influence of their imposed thinking style. Everyone in the group found it a very enlightening experience and agreed that all problems could be resolved if we simply spent time in asking Questions - The new info presented/reviewed with new Questions helps to create new neuro pathways!

When we think in the normal way, we try to do too much at once. We may be looking at the information, forming ideas, and judging someone else's ideas all at the same time. The Six Hats method allows us to unbundle thinking. Instead of trying to do everything at once, we separate out the different aspects of thinking. This way we can pay full attention to each aspect in turn. Think of fullcolor printing, where the basic color separations are made and then each basic color is printed separately onto the same sheet to give full-color printing. In the same way, we separate the modes of thinking and then apply each mode to the same subject in order to end up with full-color thinking on the subject. There is a suggestion that the chemical setting in the brain (neurotransmitters, etc.) may be different when we are being positive from when we are being negative and from when we are being creative. If this proves to be so, then there is an absolute need to separate out the different components of thinking in order to do each properly. It would be impossible to have one brain setting that was ideal for all sorts of thinking. Traditional argument is totally useless for designing new possibilities. Instead, we need Parallel Thinking, where each thinker puts forward his or her thoughts in parallel with the thoughts of others-not attacking the thoughts of others. The Six Thinking Hats method is a practical way of carrying out Parallel Thinking. The Six Hats system is not just another gimmick. This system provides an alternative to that most basic of thinking procedures: the argument. In traditional adversarial thinking, A and B are in conflict. Each side seeks to criticize the other point of view. The Six Hats method allows Parallel Thinking. Both A and B wear each hat together as they explore all sides of an issue. Adversarial confrontation is replaced by a cooperative exploration of the subject. Brainstorming (a parallel thinking process) is a good tool when we are looking for ideas - possibilities - thinking about a problem from various aspects in contrast with the the Argumentive or Critical Thinking process (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle developed the argumentive technique) which is a good tool for arguing between claims.

Asking Qs remains the basic requirement for Critical Thinking too - asking questions to understand the problem, isolating the fact, feelings (refer to the list of the many fallacies in logical thinking - http://onegoodmove.org/fallacy/toc.htm). The importance of asking questions to gain information is reduced as we go about problem solving and decision making in a highly process oriented world, that we work in today!

Feroz never makes decisions for me - He advices me to ask Qs - What is the worst that can happen? What is the best that can happen? Are there any areas of strength in the situation? How can the area of strength be used to your benefit?
I am sure Feroz's students would also agree to this as they look for his advice - he provides pointers to arrive at the decision but doesn't makes the decision. Feroz is endeared for 'teaching us to fish rather than fishing for us'.

Some of the ideas from Tony Robbins about the importance of asking Questions. Though my notes below may sound related to Qs leading to personal success - they are applicable to all areas of life - they way all the great explorers and leaders did to think about the possibility!
* Ask new Qs - as asking the same Qs will not help us get to a new solution
* Asking the right set of questions can help us to learn more about ourselves. Questions help us to provide a new understanding of the problem, they help to focus on the solution instead of the problem, moves us to action and provides other possible options.
* Questions focus thought like a lens condenses sunlight.
* Asking the right question at the right time turns confusion into clarity, and frustration into satisfaction e.g. what else does it mean? what is the one thing that is working/good? what is the experience/learning from the result (sucess/failure)?
* Asking right Qs is important - if you ask empowering Qs you will get empowering answers. If you ask disempowering Qs like - why can I not do this - you will hear reasons why you can't do it. If you ask empowering Qs - what do I need to make it happen - you will hear answers that you can work on to make it happen. How can I turn this around is another empowering Q. e.g. of a jewish holocaust survivor - he simply kept asking himself the Q - what do I need to do to stay alive today. Difference in quality of life is baded on if you ask empowering or disempowering Qs -Seek and you will get it!
* Asking empowering Qs provides us
- Access to new resources that we had missed on earlier
- Provide momentum
- Help us focus on solutions instead of problems
- Understand deeper meaning of life
- Learning from situation
- Makes us feel empowered, responsible for the change
* Disempowering Qs
- Make the problem bigger
- Gets you into Why me god state
- Gets you into a stuck state
- Gets you into a loop
* All successful people asked profound Qs making people think - JFK's Q - Ask what not what the country...made people think. Einstein was bored in a calculus class and kept asking several "What If Qs" to himself about speed of light while looking at his watch which eventually culminated into theory of relativity. Wright brothers must have asked how can we fly? "What If" is a great way to create possibilities - We can ask similar Qs and become as successful!
* Funny people keep asking a question all the time - How can I make it funny - this makes them be funny all the time
* We must discipline ourselves to regularly STOP, ASK Qs and Anwser them - to change how we feel
* Change Qs to change focus - to change state of mind - ask Qs to direct the mind
* If we are looking at living a better quality of life we need to ask better Qs
* If we are looking for unique experience we need to ask unique Qs
* For creating possibilities - ask possibility Qs - What could I learn, What is life, What do I really want, How can I give up my addiction and enjoy the process of giving it up, Who do I love and who loves me, What am I grateful for, What is great in my life, What am I really capable of more than before, What must I do to create new results, How can I become financial secure, What is one thing that I change, What is the one thing I need to do solve the problem, What is the one action I need to take to turn this around, What else could this mean,
* One of the pain area we have is managing difficult people - When someone is rude - ask - What is that is causing the person to be rude - How can I do to help this person treat me well - Qsking these Qs will make us have control rather than someone else taking control of our life - being leader of life - having control of our life
* Life is defined by our beliefs and convications - Asking "WHO I AM" is the most profound question - Taking time to write down the answer to this Q will help us determine our current beliefs and convictions and the need to change them - to achieve the things we desire
* Thinking is the process of asking possibility Qs to take dreams to reality. A simple tool to improve our capacity to enjoy life by asking Qs.
* After every action - take time to ask - How far away we are from our intention? What did we learn? What do we need to differently next to get to our intention?
* How do you feel when you are happy?
* What is your passion? What is your belief?

The Secret - Azara Feroz Sayed

'The Secret' is the book and DVD by Rhonda Byrne on "Law of Attraction" - which was sold by the millions after it was featured on Oprah.

It was sold on Oprah as an easy pill for acheiving whatever one wanted - Dream, Think, Focus on what you want and you get it! Ask. Believe. Receive is the mantra of the 'The Secret'.

Q about "Law of Attraction" is one of the popular Qs on "Ask Stephen" http://www.stephencovey.com/blog/?cat=1

View http://watchtvsitcoms.com/Movies/The%20Secret.php to know more

Oprah infact had to go back on the views aired on her show saying that "Law of Attraction" is one thing that will help achieve success - Hard work, talent, education are important and yes Luck too! How else could we explain the miserable life of those affected by natural disasters? And yes we all know ACTION is what makes everything happen! Action to do whatever we can - to change our situation. Oprah's Mom was a pregnant at thirteen with physical, sexual abuse. Oprah too was pregnant at thirteen. With such a background, it is the actions that Oprah took to change her situation that made the difference.

The 'Law of Attraction", which has been vouched for by many of the self-help gurus like Jack Canfield, John Gray etc, is based on power of visualization - power of our thoughts - we define what we get by our thoughts i.e. if we think about +ve stuff - we will get it - so is true for the -ve stuff - if we focus more on the -ve stuff - we will get it too.

As per the 'Law of Attraction', we should be informed about the -ve stuff but not focus on it as it will happen in our life e.g. focus on peace and not anti-war.

I interpreted the "The Secret" as a tool that every successful person has talked about - power of visualization! About defining and visualizing how success would be everyday. The action part of - visualizing and work towards it is what is missing in 'The Secret'

Miracle Man (Morris Goodman - http://www.articlealley.com/article_164239_51.html) featured in 'The Secret', was introduced to us in one of the training programs to drive the importance of power of visualization. Goodman visualized walking out of the hospital on XMas and worked towards it.

Though I never thought about 'Law of Attraction' or 'Power of Visualization' but some how it worked for me - Feroz is the embodiment of all that I would have wished for in the 'man of my life'. Even the slightest details that I would have mentioned 'that is nice' in my mind! So it did work for me!

Abundance is one other thing that is mentioned i.e. there is enough in the universe for everyone to enjoy - isn't Steven Covey talks to us about working from a frame of abundance to create win-win situations

I could relate to what Jack Canfield mentioned in Alladdin Factor (we discussed this in my earlier post - ASK) - Ask the Universe! 'The Secret' refers to the universe working on putting together stuff for us. Isn't the universe, the creative life force - that we refer to as God too.

Our prayers comprise about praising God and asking for help to acheive our dreams. I never thought about how our prayers also act as tools for 'Power of Visualization'.

In Islam, if I need something badly I would be praying 5+ times a day and each of my supplication (the things I desire - I have to precisely define the details of everything that I desire in my supplications as I don't want to miss on anything - at the same time I would keep it brief too as I don't want to repeat so many times the unimportant details) has to be repeated three times. Imagine picturing success in your mind 15 times a day!

I think all our scriptures, encourage us to ask God for fulfilling our dreams. I am sure most of the prayers do get answered as otherwise so many people wouldn't have been praying! Also all scriptures, talk about Action along with Prayers which is something 'The Secret' clearly missed on.

'The Secret' doesn't talks about how you can make other people's life better. I am told, if we pray for others - the angels say 'and bless you with the same!' - Isn't it an motivation to pray for others!

Recently, I was told to read the second chapter of Quran (Surah-Bakrah) for 40 days as it helps fulfill your wishes. My sis-in-law was checking with me if there is anything specific in Surah-Bakrah relating to fulfilling dreams. I said, it is about all aspects of life except for a few verses which mention "When my servants ask you concerning Me, I am indeed close (to them). I listen to the prayer of every supplicant when he calls on Me. . .", there is nothing specific to fulfilling our wishes. I think the fact that person would be spending few hours of his day reading the chapter of Quran indicates how badly the person desires something and the universe works on fulfilling the wishes. I visualize the day when my wish would be fulfilled and live as if it has!

Ordinary People - Azara Feroz Sayed

Found the contents of one of the forward mails to be so true. Don't we think so about our dear ones.

Pray, I am reminded of these lines, to be respectful to people I meet on my way, as the person I might be hurting, means "the world" to someone.

My world revolves around Feroz and I pray others too are reminded about these lines as they interact with Feroz!

Ordinary People
Walking on the road, you pass so many people.
Some look confident, purposeful, well-dressed, well-maintained.
But the majority appear so ordinary, wear ill-fitting clothes, unfashionable footwear, have too much fat or too little, nothing remarkable about them, nothing attractive.

But yet someone somewhere eagerly waits for this unimpressive man to come home every evening.
Someone's entire world turns around the strength of this frail-looking woman.
Someone's very purpose in life hinges on this brash youngster cutting through traffic.
Someone knows only the shelter of these old arms each time their world begins to crumble.
Someone will count hours, minutes, and weep like a child when this pock-marked face alights from a long-distance train.

Someone will cave in, crack up, and never be the same again if this one person disappears from the face of the world.

There are no ordinary people… No one…!!!

UPW - Azara Feroz Sayed

Unleash Power Within (UPW) is the title of Anthony Robbins seminars where participants are made to walk on fire. The 'walking on fire' exercise is to demonstrate the kind of incredible things that we can do with the power within us - to use this experience and confidence to make changes in our lives that we would have thought impossible

The 'walking on fire' exercise and NLP got me interested to read more on Anthony Robbins. You would be able to read a lot about it on the net. I have pasted one site
http://www.onehandedblogger.com/2006/06/unleashing_the_.html
While you read or hear his programs - one thing is sure - you will be filled with passion - tapping your feet, singing, ready to fly - ready for action!

My notes are below

Few things that make incredible difference in our lives
* Communication - The quality of our life is the quality of our communication - our self communication and communication with others. What happens to us doesn't makes the difference in the quality of the life but what we do with what happens that makes the difference. Our communication with our selves define what we do with what happens to us.
* Skill - The skill or ability to define specifically what we want and the skill or the ability to define what others want - so we are able to fulfill them quickly and elegantly
* Personal Power - The ability to take action. We should keep trying and not give-up. Like kids learning to walk. Do we tell them not to try walking? Imagine if we would have given up on learning to walk. How much of intelligence or knowledge we have doesn't matters. What we do with that knowledge or intelligence is what matters. Affirmation without discpline creates delusion. Affirmation with discipline creates action.
* Modelling - It is important to remember that talents are developed. A few are born with outstanding talents. Others develop their talents. In modelling, we duplicate the belief system, mental syntax and physiology of successful people to develop our talents
- Duplicating the belief systems of sucessful people. Our beliefs turn-on or shut-off the possibilities for us to perform
- Duplicating mental syntax of sucessful people. This is acheived by changing the order and sequence of using the five senses to generate results. Some people work well when they "See" and "Say" - some people work well when they "Say" and "See". These are like combination locks - Each sequence causing a different vault to open. Using NLP, we can to know mental syntax of sucessful people i.e. when we are visualizing, constructing, accessing etc - the respective eye movements indicate the actions done by the brain. We can study those to understand the mental syntax of sucessful people.
- Duplicating physiology of sucessful people. Physiology is posture, breathing pattern, tonality, facial expressions, muscular tensions etc. Knowing their physiology would help us know how these people use their brain


Disciplines to success
1. Act from personal power - This is the ability to take action. Fear of failure is what prevents people of taking action. There are no failures. There are only outcomes. There are only results. We always succeed in producing results. The results may not be the one we intended but they help us to make subtle changes to get to the intended results.
2. Responsibility - We are totally responsible for our world. We create our world by taking charge of our life. Physical and Mental actions define our world. We need to refer our beliefs as lie as they are our own and to help us remember that they are is just beliefs and not necessarily true and they can change as we get more information. Referreing beliefs as "lies" helps us to give beliefs the necessary attention i.e. knowing that we have the power to change them. This will help us change our self-limiting beliefs
3. Stretching - Most of us perform best when we are put on the line i.e. we work best on deadlines. Stretching helps us to discover things that we didn't believe we could do - the limits are our beliefs (lie) and defined by our thinking. Stretching can be achieved by
- Making a commitment to ourselves to do something that is beyond our current ability.
- Making a public commitment.
- Modelling someone who is always producing beyond our current ability.
4. Committing to unconcious competency rather than cognitive understanding. Unconcious competency is the ability to perform tasks without thinking or knowing its working or details e.g. Most of us don't understand how electricity works still we switch on without thinking about the working of electricity. This is about picking the fruits for the immediate and studying the roots later. Similarly, We don't have to spend time to understand how NLP works - we can start using the the techniques
5. Meaning of communication is the response you get from others. We would have to change our approach to match physiology, tonality of the person we are trying to communicate. As the intention of the communication means nothing, results of the communication means everything
6. WEIT - Do "What Ever It Takes" to succeed

Character traits of successful people have in common
1. Passion - They have passion, purpose which makes them to get up in morning and not to go to bed. Passion causes action
2. Belief - They have belief in their ability to achieve and they also know that beliefs can be changed
3. Strategy - They organize the way they do things to acheive results
4. Values - They knowing what values are most important in life. Also to ensure that avoid conflicting values i.e. all values are working together rather than fighting against each other
5. Energy Level - They have high energy levels. Most of the energy is spent in digestion. Check your diet, exercise to manage energy levels
6. Bonding - stay connected with others
7. Developing communication skills - how we communicate with self and others on what has happened is what makes the difference

I note down ideas such as those mentioned below to talk with Feroz, in the hope that they would add to the strong communication that he relies on in his training programs - my little contribution!
Miscellaneous ideas
- Success is having total sense of freedom - to do what we want, when we want as much as we want
- For things to change - we would have to change - changing the employer is not going to solve the problem unless we changed
- Commitment is the glue that holds everything together. Commitment to practice. Commitment to walk the talk.
- Difference in people is the difference in people who are commited and who are interested. We need to move from interest to commitment
- If we don't know what to do - then we need to ask - what we would do if we didn't know what to do. This takes out the limiting beliefs to access the resources that we don't utilize
- No matter how thin the slice there are two sides
- The quality of life is the quality of our communication
- Nothing has any meaning except the meaning we give it - Meaning of life, happiness etc is what we define
- We use two types of communication
* Internal communication-how we picture, say, and feel within ourselves
* External communication-words, tonalities, facial expressions, body postures and physical actions
- Our job is similar to a film director's job-we need to manipulate what we see and hear (the way you communicate to yourself) to acheive the effect we desire


Came across the below gems (as the post refers to them) http://kerijam.blogspot.com/2007/11/some-gems-from-tony-robbins-unleash.html

*Whatever you focus on, you will feel
*When you say something repeatedly, you hypnotize yourself into believing that it is true and the brain creates a blindspot, where you can't see what is actually there
*Listen and learn as if you were going to teach what you learned to someone else
*To say you don't have a special purpose is to slap the face of your Creator
*Most people are unhappy because they are dabblers; going deep makes us feel alive
*We are the accumulation of our communication
*God's delays are not God's denials
*Fear is your imagination and so is faith;except fear is undirected, while faith is directed
*Success leaves clues - model someone outstanding
*Pain is a signal to change the strategy
*Normal is the lowest common denominator in a culture
*What got you where you are, won't get you to the next level (the highest level)
*All progress comes from breaking patterns
*Change is never a matter of ability, it is always a matter of motivation
*Who you spend time with is who you become
*People's lives are a direct reflection of the expectations of their peer group
*Find a team to challenge you, not just support you

Employees are Employees, Not Friends - Azara Feroz Sayed

I had promised about posting this in an earlier post while talking about it in "What is our Brand" post

Their is one more aspect about personal branding that would need a separate post in itself and it is about team relationships. All the training programs that we attend talk about having fun with the team, being one with them and having no barriers with team members. Feroz would talks to me against it. He believes it is important to ensure the manager relationship doesn't deteriotes. I would argue with Feroz on this till I read article by Marc Crammer (Wharton Professor) who writes weekly in Bulletin (philadelphia newspaper). Does familiarity with Feroz (refer once again the parent v/s child post) gets in the way of me accepting Feroz's ideas without arguing while readily accepting the ones posted on the net!!

Feroz thoughts on Employee/Manager relationships are more in the light of the thoughts mentioned in "Parent v/s Child" post about building perspective - "We wouldn't expect a client or fellow-worker to respect our opinion if we presented it in our nightgown" - to be impersonal - to retain the respect!

Below is Marc's post on Employee Relationship
http://www.thebulletin.us/site/news.cfm?newsid=18864595&BRD=2737&PAG=461&dept_id=577676&rfi=6

All too often the line between an employee and employer or a manager and a subordinate can become blurred. For many people, there is no controlling the heart when they allow their emotions to hijack their good sense. Yet it is hard for people in the working world not to seek friendships in the workplace because we all spend more time at the office than we do with family and friends outside the office.
Over the first 10 years I was in business, I have stepped over the line between boss and employee numerous times, only to regret it. Here are 10 areas I have learned to avoid so as not to cross the line.
1. Birthday parties: I have been invited to employee birthday parties and weddings. I politely decline and send a gift.
2. Sporting events: The only times I go with employees to games is if we are buying group tickets as a way to reward employees or we are taking out clients.
3. Dinner: I will have lunch with an employee to discuss a business matter, but I won't have lunch just to socialize. I never do dinner unless it is with a client or prospective client.
4. Personal problems: I am not a social worker and I am not their parents. A big problem with handling personal problems is that you become too involved. The employee calls your home and shows up late, thinking you will understand. Eventually, other employees resent your preferential treatment with no appreciation for the good deed you are trying to do.
5. Sports activities: Golfing, jogging, tennis and biking are very personal activities. Bonds are developed. Personal thoughts and problems are shared.
6. Loaning money: I once loaned money to a janitor who worked for me, a good guy who was down on his luck. Unfortunately, he thought I was his personal piggy bank.
7. Driving together: A client of mine gave one of her employees a ride for one month because their car was in an accident. The employee got so used to being picked up that when my client couldn't pick up the employee, she got upset. My client should have suggested the employee rent a car or get a friend, relative or fellow employee to drive them.
8. Gifts: Never give a personal gift. It's one thing to give a book related to business; it's another to give a personal gift.
9. Drinking: Going to a bar for a drink after a hard day is a very bad idea. People sometimes lose their professional demeanor.
10. Vacationing: I have actually had a business associate tell me he went on a vacation with an employee because they had grown so close. A couple of years went by and the employee started a competing business and used what he knew about his employer/friend to go into business. Eventually the employee put the employer out of the business.
You can be friendly, share a joke and talk about how the local sports teams are doing, but keep it light and impersonal, or there could be consequences.

Intuition - Azara Feroz Sayed

Came across the below article on the need for flexing our sixth sense

Rumi's words from earlier post
Love is the ark appointed for the righteous,
Which annuls the danger and provides a way of escape.
Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.
Cleverness is mere opinion, bewilderment intuition

The dictionary definition of intution is "quick and ready insight;" and "the act or process of coming to direct knowledge without reasoning or inferring." It is derived from the Latin word "intueri" which means "to see within." It is a way of knowing, of sensing the truth without explanations

Listening to our intuition is the essence of art and creativity and soulful living. Intuition is what we use to find the purpose of our life and our place in the world. Even Einstein said that most of his innovation was actually just good guessing. A talent is something that some people are born with while others have to work at it. The greatest artists usually study and imitate the techniques of the ones who came before them. In fact a museum had exactly that as its original purpose. It was intended as a place to learn techniques, inspiration, and intuition.

The below article was the motivation for this post
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Lifestyle/Spirituality/Mind_over_Matter/Mind_Set_Go_by_your_intuition/articleshow/3052636.cms

As we go through the decisions that we make in your daily life how much do we rely on our intuition? Do we feel focused and strong in the choices that we make? Or do we feel that we have to deliberate, analyse, weigh out pros and cons, get lots of opinions from friends or family and scare yourself into a decision?

We all have had our rounds of confusion and analysis paralysis. The one conclusion is that logic alone does not work. And the answer is to learn how to use a tool that we were actually born with. That tool is our intuition!

We hear the words ‘surrender’, ‘trust’ and ‘let go’ all the time. But what does that really mean? And what are we surrendering to? Our logic tells us this is dangerous. So our best attempts to let go last a few minutes and then we are back to trying to figure it all out!

Our intuition is comprised of the energetic senses that we were born with to assist us in staying connected to our higher or inner self. We can refer to that self as a number of names, Divine Guidance, God, The Universe, Spirit etc. We are always connected to that power greater than our physical selves and that connection is our intuition.

So here are five key points to consider that will hopefully help us get a better handle on the most powerful sense that we have.
1. Our intuition is our direct and absolute link to communication with our spirit.
2. Our intuitive senses lay over our physical senses. We get energetic or intuitive feelings through energetic sight (like deja vu), energetic hearing (we hear a small voice that gives us a warning or feels like a hunch to follow), energetic feeling (a gut feeling in your stomach that feels like butterflies or goose bumps) and energetic knowing (feeling like we just know how to do something or how a situation will turn out without learning or cause).
3. Everyone is born with intuition and has the ability to develop it to be strong and reliable.
4. Intuition is always the most efficient and accurate advice that we can get about any issue, concern or desire.
5. Our society encourages us to ignore our intuition and focus strictly on logic. We disengage from our energetic senses and end up feeling very confused, anxious and taking a very long slow road to happiness. Our intuition is always working whether we focus on it or not! When we harness the power of our intuition we are able to fully access our personal power. Not using our intuition is like having eyes and ears and ignoring or fighting their functions. Our eyes and ears are on our head and whether we are concentrating on using them or not they are always working. They become very powerful tools when we deliberately focus our sight or hearing! Think of how hard it would be to watch a wonderful movie or listen to a beautiful symphony without our ears or eyes! Unwavering trust begins with knowing our intuition and how to use it!

Real trust comes from having a direct communication with Spirit yourself through understanding, recognising and knowing how to use and rely on our intuition!

We need to take responsibility for ourselves and use our intuition in combination with creative problem solving tools like logic to decide what to do next. When we ignore our intuition we feel anxious, confused and uneasy. We may feel intellectually that it is the right decision but something still doesn't feel certain.

When we use our intuition it may seem illogical but our decision feels right. It feels like a sense of knowing or certainty that we may not be able to describe. And our actions feel inspired. We feel led as opposed to running after an outcome. We feel guided to take inspired action and our hunch feels like a knowing instead of a reckless risk. It’s time to empower ourself by harnessing our own intuition! When we take the time to learn about, understand and tap into our intuition, we will find that your decisions and actions are so much easier to make!

We will live so much more powerfully and efficiently. Our tasks will be done in a fraction of the time because we will be working from certainty instead of fear! We may consider the opinions of others for a perspective but we will know that our intuition has the final say! Too many bits of information can in fact confuse the mind and lead to wrong decisions. As Hamlet said, "For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." The trick is to be able to zero in on the one bit of information that matters the most.

http://healing.about.com/cs/selfactualization/ht/How_intuition.htm
Maybe we feel listening to your intuition is easier said than done. But the truth is that most of us make listening to our inner guidance out to be harder than it actually is.

Here are some simples ways we can tune into our inner dialogs. Using our sixth sense is just like working a muscle. It will get stronger the more we use it.
1. Turn off that car radio. Giving our physical hearing a rest can expand your inner ear.
2. At home, turn off the computer, the television, and the stereo. Spend a half hour or so in quiet meditation or solace.
3. Spend some quiet time alone in nature.
4. Pay attention to energy shifts in your physical body. Pain is telling you something is wrong.
5. Keep a dream journal.
6. Take moments in each day to clear mind of distractions. Visualizing a chalkboard being erased often helps with this exercise.
7. On way home tune in to see if you can "guess" how many pieces of mail are waiting for you in your mailbox. Isn't it amazing how accurate we are at this over time.
8. Keep a synchronicity notebook to write down all so called "coincidences."
9. Follow hunches. Prepare to be amazed where they lead.
10.Notice scents around. What emotions or memories do they stir up?
11.Start noticing "markers" or "signs" that bring about particular sensations in the gut
By following through on our everyday hunches, we are actually taking test drives, virtually honing in on our listening skills. Learning to listen to our inner dialog tones and strengthens this muscle. The more we use our intuition the better we get at it. When we choose to ignore our gut instincts, we are only hurting ourselves.

Thinking - Azara Feroz Sayed

I came across quotes on 'Thinking' from the former Indian President Abdul Kalam at http://www.abdulkalam.nic.in/ and couldn't help thinking how my life has changed over the years with Feroz, for whom 'Thinking', is the most important aspect of living.

While in school and college, I studied for my teachers - to impress them - so it was a education of mugging-up without thinking about its application. While working too, it was about picking up new technology and using it - to brag friends about it! There was always a rush to impress!

In contrast, Feroz's learning has been with an emphasis on learning with understanding and thinking about its application - not for impressing anyone.

Being with Feroz, I have learnt the things that are said so beautifully in these quotes from Kalam
"Thinking should become your capital asset, no matter whatever ups and downs you come across in your life."

"Thinking is progress. Non-thinking is stagnation of the individual, organisation and the country. Thinking leads to action. Knowledge without action is useless and irrelevant. Knowledge with action, converts adversity into prosperity."

"What actions are most excellent? To gladden the heart of a human being, to feed the hungry, to help the afflicted, to lighten the sorrow of the sorrowful and to remove the wrongs of injured..."

"I will not be presumptuous enough to say that my life can be a role model for anybody; but some poor child living in an obscure place in an underprivileged social setting may find a little solace in the way my destiny has been shaped. It could perhaps help such children liberate themselves from the bondage of their illusory backwardness and hopelessness?.."

I received the below article as a speech from Kalam and went on to Kalam's site to check the authenticity of the article - couldn't confirm - I will let you read the thoughts below as from anonymous rather than quoting them to be from Kalam - to ensure I am not contributing to the propoganda - in the name of Kalam.

Importance of civic sense is something I learnt being with Feroz too. I guess most of the stuff mentioned in the speech below is, due to we not giving a thought to our actions. One such incident I can talk about, I would sweep our veranda - without giving much thought to the routine activity - that I was pushing some of the dust to our neighbours. Once Feroz saw me doing that was upset about it! I learnt to thank and salute the military men whenever I saw them. We have never missed talking about their motivation levels, everytime we saw a man in uniform. Feroz surprises the cops by stopping and thanking them - for working on holidays at public places, to help all of us enjoy the festivities with our families.

I have learnt to live the words from Quran, "Give in the name of Allah, When ye yourselves would not receive those except with closed eyes" by Feroz's many demonstrations. At my Mom's place, we would give stale food which we are not able to eat to the beggars. Feroz corrected me on that and I now talk to my Mom on right aspect of Charity in Islam. My parents have to bear my bragging about Feroz all the time!

The definition of Charity as per Hadith (Collection of Prophet Mohammed (PBUH)'s preachings, conduct) "Indeed the gates to goodness are many: glorifying God, praising Him, magnifying Him, saying 'There is no god but Allah', enjoining the good and forbidding the wrong, removing any source of harm from the road, listening to the aggrieved, guiding the blind, showing the seeker his need, striving as far as your two legs could carry you and with deep concern to give succour to him who asks, carrying with the strength of your arms (the burdens of) the weak. All these are (acts of) charity which are an obligation on you. And your smiling in the face of your brother is charity, your removing of stones and thorns from people's paths is charity, and your guiding a man gone astray in the world is charity for you."

The article that set me off on this post
10 Minutes
I have three visions for India. In 3000 years of our history , people form all over the world have come and invaded us , captured our lands , conquered our minds. From Alexander onwards, The Greeks, the Turks, the Moguls, the Portuguese, the British, all of them came and looted us, took over what were ours. yet we have not done this to any other nation. we have not conquered anyone. we have not grabbed their land, their culture, their history and tried to enforce our way of life on them. Why? Because we respect the freedom of others. That is why my first vision is that of freedom. I believe that India got its first vision in 1857, when we started the war of independence .It is this freedom that we must protect and nurture and build on. If we are not free, no one will respect us.

My second vision for India is DEVELPOMENT. For fifty years we have been a developing nation. It is time we see ourselves as a developed nation. we are among top five nations of the world in terms of GDP. We have 10 percent growth rate in most areas. Our poverty levels are falling. Our achievements are being globally recognized today. Yet we lack the self confidence to see ourselves as a developed nation, self reliant and self assured .It isn’t this incorrect?

I have a third vision. India must stand up to the world. because I believe that unless India stands up to the worlds, no one will respect us. Only STRENGTH respects strength. we must be strong not only as a military power but also as an economic power. both must go hand in hand.

Why is the media here so negative? Why are we in India so embarrassed to recognize our own strengths,our achievements? We are such a great nation. We have so many amazing success stories but we refuse to acknowledge them. Why? We are the first in milk production. We are the number one in remote sensing satellites. We are the second largest producer of wheat and rice.There are millions of such achievements but our media is only obsessed in bad news and failuires and disasters. In India we only read about death, bombrdment, terrorism, crime. Why are we so NEGATIVE?

Why are we as a nation so obsessed with foreign things? We want foreign shirts, tecnology. Why this obsession with everything imported. Do we not realize that self respect comes with self reliance?

Do you have 10 minutes? Allow me to come back with a vengence. Got 10 minutes for your country? If yes,then read; otherwise, choise is yours.

YOU say that your government is inefficient.
YOU say that the phone’s don’t work, the railways is a joke and our airlines are the worst in the whole world, mails never reach their destination.
YOU say,say and say.
What do you do about it?

Take a person on his way to Singapore. Give him a name - YOURS.
Give him a face – YOURS.
You walk out of the airport and you are at your international best.
In Singapore you don’t throw cigratte butts on the road or eat in the stores.
You are as proud of their Underground links as they are.
You pay $5 to drive through Orchard Road.
You came back to the parking lot to punch your parking ticket if you have overs stayed in a restaurant or a shopping mall irrespective of your status or identity.
In Singapore you don’t say anything, DO YOU?

YOU wouldn’t dare to eat in public Ramadan,in Dubia.
YOU would not dare to go without your head covered in Jeddah.
YOU would not dare to buy an of the telephone exchange in London at 10
pounds a month to “see to it that my STD and ISD calls are billed to someone else.” YOU would not to speed beyound the speed limit in Washinton and then tell the traffic cop,”jaanta hai main kaun hoon(do you know who I am?).I am so and so’s son. Take your two bucks and get lost.”
YOU wouldn’t chuck an empty coconut shell anywhere another than the garbage pail on the beaches in Australia and New Zealand.
Why don’t YOU spit pan on the streets of Tokyo?
Why don’t YOU see examination jockey or buy fake certificates in Boston?

We are still talking of the same YOU.
YOU who can respect and conform to a foreign system in other countries but cannot in your own.
YOU who will throw papers and cigarettes on the road the moment you touch Indian ground.
If you can be involved and appreciate citizen in an alien country, why cannot you be the same here in India?

Once in an interview, the famous Ex- municipal commissioner of Bombay, Mr. Tinaikar, had a point to make, ”Rich People’s dogs are walked to the streets to leave their affluent droppings all over the place,” he said, “and then the same people turn around to criticize and blame the authorities for inefficiency and dirty pavements. What do they expect the officer’s to do? Go down with a broom every time their dogs feel the pressure in their bowels? In America every dog owner has to clean up after his pet has done the job. Same in Japan. Will in India citizen do that ?”, he is right.

We go to polls to choose a government and after that forfeit all responsibility .We sit back wanting to be pampered and expect the government to do everything for us whilst our contribution is totally negative. We expect the government to clean up but we are not going to stop chucking garbage all over the place nor are we going to stop to pick up a stray piece of paper and throw it in the bin. We expect the railways to provide clean bathrooms but we are not going to learn the proper use of bathrooms. We want Indian Airlines to provide the best of food but we are not going to stop pilfering at least opportunity. This applies even to staff who is known not to pass on the service to the public. When it comes to burning social issues like dowry we make loud drawing room protestations and continue to do the reverse at home. Our excuses? ”It is the whole system which has to change, how will it matter if I alone forego my sons’ rights to a dowry.” So who’s going to change the system? What does the system consist of? Very conveniently for us it consists of our neighbors, other households, other cities, other communities and the government . But definetly not me and families into a safe coccon and look into the distance at countries far away and wait for a Mr. Clean to come along and work miracles for us with a majestic sweep of his hand or we leave the country and run away. Like lazy cowards hounded by our fears we run to America to bask in their glory and praise their system. When New York becomes insecure we run to England. When England experiences unemployment, we take the next flight to the Gulf. When the Gulf is war struck, we demand to be rescued and brought home by the Indian Government. Everybody is out to abuse and rape the country. Nobody thinks of feeding the system. Our conscience is mortgaged to money.