Thinking of Thinking

We are in the age of information, this is most easier to teach and test. It did surprise me that much of our education is concerned with information. Education system perhaps neglected that ‘Thinking is no substitute for information but information may be substitute for thinking.’ If we recall we are in the process of knowledge perfection and completion, hence there is no need of further thinking. This leads to routine that require no thinking. If this happens we may be overwhelmed and confused by all the information. We are actually living for unseen future, dealing with the imperfect future needs thinking. Why does one need to think? If one stop thinking (doesn’t mean our brain stop thinking) the same available information might be better used by competitors. The impact is seen on the videocon share market in comparsion to their past market share.

Does all these mean to say one need to trade off amount of time spent on teaching information to teach thinking skills to make the best use of information.

I Am Rich!

A branded expensive ‘Titanic Watches’ (costing $152,435) doesn’t tell any better time than Titan. Is that’s the point? Perhaps no! Why do people expend huge amounts of money and energy on buying branded ones.This is done to send the societal signals, its the benefit driven rather than function driven. It is believed that the person is more likely to influence others by increasing his or her social status or affiliation.People may not be stylish in life (ugly by aesthetic measure), they wear them to affiliate (students wear T-shirts at other well known college fest).

These identity statement have little or nothing to do with the reality of what the signal is supposed to communicate. If we look into the lives and habits of millionare, they perhaps live in a modest house, eat simple food, inexpensive clothing and at times use used cars. In other word, the wealth is built a lot without spending it. To the contrast people wanting to send societal signals spend their money on items that communicate wealth and status. It is likely that these kind of buying are financed with debt. It’s no doubt that, these signals have economic value. These are done to acquire, learn, bond, prove and feel – in other words they convey wealth, attractive, high status, intelligent, confident and interesting. One need to connect to these human core drives via association and this will set other people to desire your offer strongly.

We hope you enjoyed reading this article, we welcome your views and suggestions!

Bystander Effect

Growing up, I remember one of my family members was in RSS and NCC. These bodies have some goals and covers overall development which includes first aids, emergency management to handle uncertain situations. It taught them to take responsibility unless an experienced professional came for rescue, direct the needs to individuals very clearly at a time.

If you see fatal accidents in a crowded street and you yell, someone call 100, it’s likely that no one will actually call, this is because the more the people around you, it’s more likely everyone will assume that someone else is taking the needed action. It would be effective to single out to someone with eye contact and request clearly ‘You call 100’. S/he will.

The relationship between the number of people who could take action and the number of people who actually take action or choose to take act, this implies that the less the people around the quicker the act about the situation. This is true in many gruel some murders across the streets across the globe. People could clearly see what was going on simply walked by the incident.

This also speaks why many committees formed failed many a times. This is true if one has no power over one another. This is possible until and unless one breaks this thought, takes a step up and takes individual responsibility to act and holds accountable for progress. Unfortunate part of committee is that everyone assumes someone else is working on it. This has to overcome by assign tasks to single, clear owners and deadlines. Once individual knows the exact responsibility for and when it must be done, the success rate is higher.

We hope you enjoyed reading this article, we welcome your views and suggestions. Have a great day!

Team or Individual: The ‘D Question’

One of the common question asked in recruitment is, Do you like to work with others or individual? The idea of working with others, why to work with others? Working with others also means to try to control them and get them to do exactly what you want them to do. The concept popularly known as Comparative Advantage mentioned in Dismal Science of economics. It also provided an answer to question of international politics on self sufficient versus specializing in producing certain goods, then trade with one another?

Using The Netherlands and Denmark as examples, if it seen that both countries were capable of producing potatoes and milk, The Netherlands could produce potatoes with less effort, and Denmark was much better at producing milk. This is a good example of trading with each other rather than struggling to do something they weren’t good at. It’s all to do with capitalize on your strengthens than to meddle with weaknesses.

This concept also make sense of working with contractors or to outsource rather try to do everything yourself, it will keep you focused. Doing it yourself is no harm, but it will probably take longer and the results may not be promising one. This concept also explains the need of diverse teams, as it is highly unlikely the team will get stuck or make errors.

Nevertheless self reliance will improves your knowledge and flexibility over time, but too much of it is a mistake. As a saying goes “No man is an island” John Donne. Focus on your strength what you can do well, and work with diverse background people to accomplish the rest.

We hope you enjoyed reading this article, we welcome your views and suggestion. Happy festive season!

Gangs of College Days – Dynamics

Let me take you back to your first day of school or college, you discovered each other earlier than expected, hostilities started immediately. As soon as you found that your friend liked other friend or close to other group circle, your group rallied together in preparation and defense. Perhaps it is human naturally tend to form distinct groups, a process called ‘Clanning.’ Your group perhaps had names like ‘Royal Mech’ or something like that. You and your group also created an image of themselves as bad or good guys or anger young boys or angels of so and so.

There is absolute nothing wrong with clanning, but it leads to provocations, stealing, and disaster for working together. One need’s to work a way to resolve the conflicts. One possible good way to introduce challenges and goals that required both groups to work together, this will help to subsidies conflicts.

Clanning is natural human tendency; we automatically and profoundly influenced because of similar interest people around us. Its default that we start identifying ourselves as part of particular group and distinguish from others, this is also a reason why many issues remained unsolved, for example partition of Andhra Pradesh (A.P.).

Think of India and Pakistan cricket fans. The players, team coaches and fans change so often it’s difficult to gaze what exactly the fans are cheering for – fans life might remain unchanged if some other country win or lose. While that might not be the case for Indian or Pakistani fans if the match is between these countries. If one of the countries wins, the fans feel like winners too. If you look at this situation from a distance or from non-attached background, it’s absolutely silly. Groups naturally form around important positions, issues, or events. It is greater uphill tasks to understand group dynamic, or you are likely to be caught up in it.

Images taken from bing.com

Intuition – Is it the Missing?

I love the line from Matthew 7:7, ‘Seek, and you shall find.’ Identification of passion itself is a challenge. Have you ever wondered that during your childhood days you were interested to become a software engineer? Then you grew to see that there every household has an engineer and the universe is loaded with engineers. That’s not true and the universe is not playing any tricks on you. Engineers were always there; you perhaps didn’t notice them before. It is default that you were interested in a software engineering, it is possible that your brain filtered that option out of your awareness and you opted to be design engineer.

Similar thing can be noticed in business, when I started a Finishing School, however, my brain stopped filtering out that information because of passion, and started noticing each and every competitor that I came across. The brain gets programmed to notice that has to do everything with Finishing School in the given environment. As I discussed in one of the previous article on pattern matching by the brain, we are in constantly scanning the environment for useful information. You will need to tell your mind what you want to find, it will alert you whenever your senses notice it. You need to take few moments to consciously decide what you are interested in and what is you looking for, this will help in identifying the relevant information. Some people call this an intuition.

In my session I make people to realize the purpose of attending this session (Reading Comprehension Techniques, Aptitude, Mathematics and others) – setting expectations and providing with needed concepts and or theory and or hypothesis. This process only takes few minutes, but the impact it has be appreciable. You will need to notice important concepts; you will be work through all sessions or learning. This is achievable by allowing your brain automatically filters out unimportant things. One needs to prim mind to set Goal. Goal setting is important because it will help the mind to look for things that will help you get what you want. My goal is deliver the best session always, I would like to look into many materials, get concerns and meet people to see the reactions before actually deliver. On the contrary if I have to just deliver a session for free, I would probably filter all the steps and there is no strong reason to pay attention.

Hence it is important that one takes time to prime the brain to give priority on what’s important and unimportant.

Is Multi-tasking a Myth?

While you attend interview, a default factor is considered that you need to be good at multitasking. What does the hiring manager or employers’ means by this? Does it mean that, one is expected to do more things at the same time? I see that this assumption will bring the productivity lower and make people less efficient. The reason being is every task or project takes a certain amount of attention, focus and energy to do it or get it done.

Many neurologists believe that, it is impossible for brain to multitask. I experimented this on self and in some sessions with students by giving them multiple tasks to complete in a given period of time. These were the following observations and outcome-
1. Students found it difficult to do parallel processing – they found it extremely difficult to switch attention from one thing to another.
2. One of the tasks were hardly initiated or remained incomplete. Many found it is impossible to switch back to the previous task.
3. More than 50 percent of students gave up after the first task and 10 percent of students group could just complete less than 10 percent of task among the tasks.

These are strong indicators that productive multitasking is a myth. It was clearly visible that the more things (tasks) were asked to pay attention, the performance, motivation and productivity suffers. This I have seen in one of previous organization, it didn’t perform as expected because the synergy from the management was low, because of personal and professional multitasking at the same time.
This hypothesis can be correlated to talking over phone while driving or crossing the road – by trying to focus on two things at once, can cause fatal loss.

What actually happens during switch of the focus on your attention? In order to switch your attention, your brain is forced to spend time and effort thrashing, loading and re-loading contexts over and over again. It is commonly seen at times you spend entire day multitasking, get nothing done, and feel tired and exhausted at the end. Similar observations were seen among group of students, as they burnt most of energy in switching tasks instead of making progress.

What does one do to avoid unproductive context switching? Stay tuned to more about this research. We hope you enjoyed reading this article; we welcome your views and suggestions. God Bless You and Good day!

(Images taken from bing.com)

I Need Love and Caring Person In My Life

Did you ever ask this to yourself or someone that, s/he is not friendly, the person meets or talks to you for just materialist need? This is quite often seen, heard or experienced in personal life. I did some research on this area and found good amount of information.

Have you ever realized that when you walk through busy places such as Times Square in London or New York or tourist places, you will feel that most of people are moving towards you, I am a object? All people seems running over you.

In the similar way, any person (how ever intelligent) has an upper bound on the amount of information to process, store and respond to. Over and above this, it might get stored as abstract. To explain this, one can keep track of stable social relationships around 150 close personal connections, also known as Dunbar’s number (Robin D, British Anthropologist). It is seen that beyond this number, one treats other as more like objects. This also explains why you are not in touch with many school or college mates during professional life – because you are too busy maintaining ties to people who are in your immediate social circle compared to past.

This hypothesis can be explained further with example of various earth quakes that take place unfortunately often in Japan. When ever such a disaster takes place, we may feel bad, but we may not feel as bad as if disaster strike to our loved ones.

It is estimated that over 364,000 people pass through Time Square New York every day, it certainly difficult for human mind to hand such a large information at once. Because of so much goes on in those busy area, that you are treated as object inspite knowing that you are a human being. Perhaps we all try to simplify the reality to compensate the overwhelmed mind. This also happens at work place, the senior management (CEO or V.P. and others) rationally expected to be responsible for hundreds to thousands of employees, shareholders (millions or so), they tend to hurt lot of employee without realizing it. Reactions of employee during layoff about the management is certain, but the CEO or Managers scope and scale of managing is too complex to handle, its quite certain that their decision are abstract instead of viscerally.

Do you think personalizing an decision and issue will help to hack this limitation?

We wish you to maintain your social circle healthy and grow this circle beyond the limits. We wish you ‘Happy Friendship Day’. We thank you all for associating with us!

Seen-Unseen Loss V/s See-Unseen Deal

Recently one of my friend found a mobile phone of a stranger in the bus, rationally it didn’t belong to my friend and it shouldn’t have been big deal – it belonged to someone else. Emotionally, however, my friend felt like there was lose of a mobile phone, even though it wasn’t really belongs to my friend at all.

I term it as ‘Seen-Unseen Loss’, is the idea that most (all) hate to lose things more than they like to gain them. It is similarly seen in Businesses or Corporates or Relationships that psychology is able to quantify, but this is one of them:people react twice as strongly to potential loss as they do the opportunity of equivalent or more gain. Feeling of good and horrible is part of the human mind.

‘Seen-Unseen Loss’ explains why people take threats more important over opportunities when it comes to Motivation. People think they need immediate attention, this adds another dimension of loss. If you look back into the action taken for the predicted loss is more than potential losses, but human minds still give them automatic priority.

This also tells us why that 80-90 percent of adult think it would be great idea to own their own business and work for themselves. The ‘Seen-Unseen Loss’ keeps them from acting: the threat to constant steady income, benefits and comfort zone. The best way to overcome ‘Seen-Unseen Loss’ is to ‘See-Unseen Deal’ i.e., treat it as no big deal. If have seen or heard about ‘Horse Racing’ or ‘Gambling’ is such a big deal of loss, how do think they still encourage people to play?

These win by abstracting loss, the valuables are converted into chips or coins, they are seen as less valuable. If one start seeing loss, these places provide with rewards like free drinks, upgrades in visit benefits and others. This makes the player to feel loosing is not a big deal.

How do we ensure to generate more business then? Stay tuned to know more about in one of the future article, this will be absolutely free tips!We hope you enjoyed reading this article, we welcome your views and suggestions.