The Human Vulture - The Impatient Bird

At 2.46 pm on 11th March, mother earth stretched out lazily, triggering off the worst deep sea earth quake that Japan has experienced in the last 100 years.  Measuring 8.9 on the Richter Scale she triggered off a tsunami with waves measuring 33 feet in height and traveling at a speed of 500 miles per hour.  She smashed in to the port city Sendai and shut down Japan's largest nuclear power stations' cooling systems.  This forced Japan to shut down 7 nuclear power reactors and release nuclear vapour in to the atmosphere. These vapours are causing radiation levels to be 1000 times the normal levels.   US Jets are bringing in chemicals to Japan to handle the heightened radiation levels. People living within a radius of 10 kilometers of the Fukushima Nuclear Plant are being evacuated.  Japan's Prime Minister, Naoto Kan, was pleading to his people to calm down and was personally visiting the Fukushima Nuclear Plant. Thousands of houses have collapsed, cars, boats and farm equipment have been thrown miles away by these giant waves.  Hundreds of fires have been set off.  Thousands are dead and 80,000 people are missing. The whole country is in a state of emergency.  Clearly, the scale of the disaster was sinking in and only a massive international effort can help Japan now. 

Amidst all this chaos, a business television news channel was interviewing a trader as to why the Japanese Yen had gained against the dollar. Clearly, there is a disaster in Japan and its currency is gaining strength instead of weakening.  This was not making sense. The trader said that Japanese Insurance Companies were unwinding their assets in the US and purchasing yen so that they could keep money ready to handle the claims that will hit them.  A tsunami was being set off in the financial markets of the world. 

The trader then said something that made me feel absolutely sick in the stomach (despite being a seasoned banker myself).  He said that this strengthening of the yen was a temporary phenomenon and that in the short and medium terms, the yen would weaken dramatically.  So, he was going to "short the yen" i.e. short sell the yen.  As the trader spoke of shorting the yen, the visuals that were being shown were those of the giant waves swallowing up the port city of Sendai, thousands of cars and boats being tossed around, firemen fighting the fires, chaos all around... lives being lost...and all that this trader could think off was how he could make money out of this disaster.

James Hadley Chase wrote a lovely book called "The Vulture is a Patient Bird".  The duty of the vulture is to help clean up the earth off carrion.  It is a very patient bird.  It preys on the dead.  Here, I was watching this trader prey on a country that was reeling under one of the worst natural disasters.  And worse, he had a smile..and as they continued to speak, I couldn't help but think, this human vulture preys on the living. It is not patient. To it, the lives of these millions of people on the other side of the earth did not mean anything so long as it got what it wanted.  Degeneration of the worst kind?

Gautam Buddha called this Greed. He said greed is one of the reasons for unhappiness in our world.  He said this almost 3000 years ago and his words hold true till date.  Greed for power, greed for wealth, greed for position, greed for dominance has today resulted in unhappiness right across the world. Look at what is happening in the middle east, in Europe, in many parts of Asia and the US.  People are unable to manage their wants and needs. This has triggered off different issues across the world causing untold misery.

I read an interesting article on the 2008 Global Financial Crisis being triggered off because of greed.  We don't seem to learn. Somehow this comes through as "who cares?".

Naoto san and the millions of Japanese impacted by this disaster are not worried as to where the Japanese Yen is in the currency market today.  As the hearts of millions of others across the world reach out to the families that are in the midst of this disaster, the human vultures continue to prey.  I only hope the television channels decide to report from the "heart" rather than from the "head".

Time out

In most of the games that we play, we have a concept of time out.  This is a time that is called out by the coach or the captain and the team takes few minutes out of the game they are playing, re-assesses the situation, thinks through what is happening to them at that point in time and decides what is their next course of action.  Have you been timed out in your work life? If you are beyond 35 years of age, most likely you would have been.  Most of us go through life without recognizing this and the question, "What am I doing with my life?" keeps coming up and we struggle to find answers.

While most of us get timed out in life, few of us understand it as such.  This is more prevalent when you are a high performer.  Till you are 35, you are managing smaller teams or an individual contributor. Your performance is driven purely by your actions. You either make it or don't.  And if you are a high performer, then, you have made it.  The organization is happy, your manager is very happy and so are you.  You are a manager or a senior manager and aspiring to become that executive - what they call as Director or Vice President.  A year goes by and your manager tells you that you need to wait a bit longer before you can become an executive like him/her.  Another year goes by and nothing happens and you are wondering, what this is all about.  Your manager is giving you the same excuse on having to wait.  Suddenly, you are wondering...is this all about merit or do they just want grey hair to appear all of a sudden.  Few more years go by and nothing really happens. You are frustrated, you have changed jobs few times, your salary has increased but that elusive Executive position just isn't turning up.  Life has timed you out!!!

The move up from being an individual contributor to a first time manager is probably one of the most complex and, most of the time, the most under-estimated step up.  From just managing your own outcomes, you are now managing the outcomes of few others.  If you are leading a team of 20, you are managing 20 different mindsets.  You must first assess if you have life experiences to manage different mindsets.  It has been one of the most difficult challenges for leaders to understand the readiness of such first time managers and set them up for success.

The move up from being a manager to an executive or a leader is again one of the most difficult jumps to make.  All of a sudden you are managing senior managers like yourself and so, while all the technical skill sets are needed, the ability to manage senior people needs a completely different mindset and a lot of maturity that comes with age and the life experiences.  Further, if you are working for a global organization, the complexity goes up multi fold because you are dealing with global teams, different points of views coming in from different countries and cultures, having to run at different speeds, having to operate at the 40,000 feet in one moment and come down to Ground Zero the next, having to accommodate the conflicting priorities of different teams and people, ability to manage effectively upwards, downwards and sidewards.  And the list goes on...

The organization, in all its wisdom, looks at a high performer like you and decides whether you have stepped up to become that executive or not and in majority of the cases, this step up happens only after you cross the magical age of 40 unless you are in a specialist function.  So, what do you do then? If life has timed you out, how should you react?

Organizations expect that people should have worked across regions, owned a P&L, done roles in functions like Finance/Risk/Operations/HR, led large cross-functional teams, worked in global teams,  worked across different customer segments and across different industries before considering the person for very senior general management roles or executive roles.  All this takes time and effort and each one of us should be willing to put in that effort over a sustained period of time.  Life experiences are so complicated that there will never be enough of them.  Every one of them is a learning experience and so senior leaders, being humans that they are, will make those mistakes even after years of experience.  However, the chances of these mistakes being really very expensive are lower than if they were asked to take these decisions when they were much younger.

Ask yourself the question - Do you deal with a given situation different now than how you would have dealt with it 5 or 10 years before?  In most cases, the answer will be yes.  The decision may be the same but the way we dealt with the situation will be different in most cases.  This is what life experience is and is probably the best teacher.

So, the next time you are feeling frustrated that you have stagnated, understand that this could be a timeout situation.  Pull yourself together, talk to your mentor and others in your organization, sketch out a plan for yourself, rotate around in different roles within the organization, be ready to travel and work in other regions, be ready to move out of your comfort zone and work in other functions - be that sales or a support function like Finance or HR.  Keep on re-skilling yourself.  Organizations are looking for well-rounded leaders - not in shape, but in mindset!!!