Leadership Beyond the Groove or the Grave

Rushdie once humorously said, “Indian Democracy: one man one bribe.” Jokes about corruption regularly do the rounds in Mumbai: A man decides to visit a new anti-corruption officer. On arriving at the government building he meets the officer’s secretary. The man asks to see the anti-corruption officer. “I’m afraid he’s not in today,” the secretary replies. “But I can put the light on inside his office,” the man says. “I may be able to let you see him, if you give me 50 rupees.” The man eventually pays the money and storms into the office: “Did you know that your own secretary is taking bribes?!” The anti-corruption officer opens his hands and says: “What to do? Even I had to pay 50 rupees to get into my office this morning.”

The transformation of any culture, is not merely transformation on a material and structural level (and continuously be revitalised if one’s vision is of democratic country), but an accompanying transformation of the collective psyche. This is of course where leadership of some substance is required. Psychoanalysis gives us valuable insights into what they might look like. Importantly, a leader’s presence, his utterings must primarily contain anxiety in order to lead the community or country through the natural human tensions in the dual desire for both change and for security and predictability. Nelson Mandela is a powerful example of leadership that understood his role in this way, leading South Africa out of a violent state of apartheid. He was visible, articulate, compassionate towards suffering and importantly, absolutely unwilling to shame those who clearly were perpetrators of the former regime.

Psychoanalysis reminds leaders that you cannot be a blank screen on which the community has to second-guess your thoughts, your feelings and intentions. It teaches us that through the strange mechanisms of the unconscious we will either project the worst aspects of ourselves onto you, or those of the most awful authority figures we may encounter in our childhood lives. Hence, why in leadership coaching, we drive home the importance of speech that includes sharing ourselves, personal disclosure, to fill the otherwise blank screen with something closer to the truth about who we are. So, in the absence of vibrant, committed leadership presence, and actual loud silence on important issues, it is easy to draw the conclusion that our leaders simply don’t care. Gandhi walked for miles, barefoot, touching the hearts and souls of the nation, but that now seems to be so distant from the leadership we have now in the country. I am sure this must be partly why Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” is such a highly popular book amongst Mumbai students, in prominent position in virtually every bookstore I’ve visited in the City. This sad turning towards one of the most vicious dictators in history for guidance, for insights into some authority to govern the chaos that is India, (try Google: Mein Kampf+India), a profound hunger for visible, visionary, authoritative leadership of this country, to mobilise the popular imagination. Nelson Mandela’s creative leadership, demonstrated a willingness to commit to transformational processes as he did with the Truth and Reconciliation Process of South Africa. The process was designed to avoid attempts to blindly burying the atrocities of the past, in pretend-play that they somehow hadn’t happened, and instead, as Desmond Tutu put it, “to open up the wounds of hurt, to cleanse them, so that they did not fester”; to draw a line under the past, to make revenge, a sort of “you clobbered me, so I will clobber you” less likely to be in the psyche of the South African citizen and the country as a whole. Some 22,000 statements were submitted and heard in open court. One woman for example, simply spoke from her heart as a mother whose son was shot dead by the South African police and asked very simply to have a small grave to be erected in his memory.

There was, however, one application to the committee described as “intriguing,” from an unnamed Indian woman, describing her “apathy.” She essentially believed she hadn’t done enough towards alleviating the suffering of others. Under the terms of Commission, a person could apply for amnesty on the grounds that they:

“As individuals can and should be held accountable by history for our lack of necessary action in times of crisis…In exercising apathy rather than commitment we allowed others to sacrifice their lives for the sake of our freedom and an increase in our standard of living”.

Although her application fell within the guidelines of an “omission”, amnesty was not granted as it was not deemed politically motivated by any particular organization. The writer Jacqueline Rose, who brought this specific case to world attention with her psychoanalytic lense on world affairs, points out this case addressed “that what you don’t do as a political subject can have effects, and might be important in the transformations of the world as what you do”, yet “only rarely and reluctantly – hence the strangeness of this moment – do people admit to it (apathy), although they are very ready to diagnose it in others.” She goes on to describe that the conditions of the court hearings could not, within it structures, handle a confession of apathy. It would require answering questions such as “What is the time of apathy? How would you date it? What are the means and what the end? Is it in fact an intention at all? Is apathy something communicable, is it something we have a language for talking about? Or does it, more like a disease or shameful secret, rely on doing work invisible in the dark?”

It is grossly neglectful of the responsibilities of leaders not to give thoughtful consideration of the state of the collective psyche by singularly focusing on structural, engineering type transformations alone. Jacqueline Rose refers to an extract of the Commission report which comments that during the apartheid regime, “much of the country’s population went silent through fear, apathy, indifference or genuine lack of information,” in what they described as “diminished affective reactivity”. Many people in India are genuinely afraid to speak out against corruption. In the writings of George Orwell, he warned us that it is not the horse that needs to be whipped that you should worry about, but the horse that automatically obeys without needing to be whipped at all. In his fictional fable, “Animal Farm”, the animals betray their own rebellion against the human masters, as the pigs (now more equal that the other animals) compulsively repeat the same oppressive master-slave relationship. Animal Farm remains banned in China and most Islamic countries. It reminds us, that in overthrowing one form of oppression, perhaps in India’s case the British, one may risk creating an imitation that is just as insidious and divisive. It is this sort of reasoning that led to the transformational efforts at the subjective level in South Africa. Fascism, Orwell foretold, is essentially a belief in inequality and somehow making that inequality normal, invariably by dehumanising others.

There is popular mobilisation against corruption in India. Social campaigns and civic mobilisation are positive in the sense that they can breathe new life into parliamentary democracy, providing of course the governing leadership has the confidence to see it in such a way. Like the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, we don’t know where this will lead, as naturally we cannot, but it forces us to take stock of a moment in time, not only of what is going on around us, but what it evokes inside us. It is often the case that the sense of uncertainty such movements inevitably instil, breed a desire by those in positional power to view such activity purely in terms of a threat to their power.

Christopher Bollas, a psychoanalyst has written widely about what he calls the “Fascist state of mind”, as equally threatening one might say, as overt brutality, designed to undermine movements and other challenges to the status quo. What he suggests is that there will be attempts at distorting the views of the people posing a challenge to authority, an extreme form being such as slander, “he’s a fake”, “in fancy dress” and views taken out of context in a form of what he calls “rhetorical violence”. Then comes a caricaturing, a sort of cartooning of the other’s views, identifying them with a particular group, “he’s funded by the IDIOTS party”; an assassination, a sadist sort of gossip by placing fictions of facts in “non-judicial places” where the victim cannot speak for himself. Resorting to a sort of aggregating, by a name “well what do you expect he’s a Muslim”, or “from Bihar” or a "Jew".

The simple reality is that state building involves thinking about what the modern country should look like and how it should be run. For many countries around the world, this is seems like a tug of war between the politicians, who are seen as not being willing to change, are invested in maintain the lucrative status quo and civil society that is keenly driving that change. The question of course in any war against corruption is who will be targeted? One of the key issues of dispute in India, in drawing up the anti-corruption Lokpal agreement, is whether the most senior leaders of the country fall under its purview. If they are not, surely it merely becomes another instrument for manipulating patronage and by extension, an exercise in corruption itself. Loyalties then, continue like anything in a free market village that can be bought and sold in cash payments in convertible currencies, assets sold off at bargain prices and natural resources plundered or licences given to people to do so.

Perhaps there are lessons from the South African process, not so much the characteristics of actual process itself, but its innovativeness in the following ways. First of all, as a general point, laws alone, or redistribution of resources or other structural initiatives do not sufficiently effect lasting change. Subjective and psychic interventions are also required. Mandela understood this. Corruption harms people, it hurts people and it demeans the people of India on a daily basis and those of us who also live here. Yet transformation cannot occur without “buy-in” (to state simple leadership textbook jargon) from those who will be required to think and act differently in the new era, especially those with least to gain. The transformation of South Africa was a partnership of the collective psyche of Mandela, de Klerk and many others. The respective leaders were willing to change (i.e. grow), to exercise the painful and difficult work of working-through the outer and inner realties of their limitations in the best long term interests of the country as a whole, not merely from a perspective of singular self-interest. Let us not forget these were former adversaries (I may refer here to Mandela as a leadership role model, but the same must be said of de Klerk). Without such focus on the subjective level, a joining between adversarial groups, surely it is likely that the anti-corruption initiatives, are built on sand, in which no anti-corruption Bill can possibly stand-up with such inadequate foundations, however well scoped or written. This I think, is what Mumbai friends mean when they say “we have to get to the roots of corruption.”

The second point I want to make is the South African process took its injustices of past history extremely seriously in order to build a better future. If leaders of the country have, as is claimed by the anti-corruption movements, looted the country by approximately 1.3-2 trillion U.S. dollars that could usefully have improved the lives of the poor, they must stand accountable and arguably the funds returned and redistributed. In today’s Times of India, UNICEF suggested that 55 million children, 43% of India's children today, right now, in the India are estimated to be desperately underfed and underweight. Platitudes of “Let’s not look back” or “The past is the past”, quasi sorts of attempts at enforced forgetting on a nation will and always fail. We simply cannot issues commands to the mind in this way and expect them to work in any sustainable, lasting way. They simply don’t, instead becoming toxic cargo in the collective psyche, to explode at any indeterminate moment. Desmond Tutu, during the South African process, quoted the words “Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.” These words are also displayed at the entrance to Dachau, once the former death camp training ground for the S.S.

My third point is that the South African process was transformational in the characteristics of being (1) unexpected, (2) inclusive, (3) creative (4) intimate and (5) transparent. It was not the same old distant and dictatorial leadership the country was accustomed to. A common dissatisfaction in my consulting room is the neglectful distance leaders have from the people in the community they lead, and the tedious predictability of how they will behave. Who in any large organisation hasn’t felt a sense of “here we go again” when a boss sends a cold email issuing a complete change of business strategy, without the sensitivity to show any care of how this might affect individuals or the collective psyche. Do we merely want to be remembered as leaders who conditioned horses that don’t need to be whipped? Gallup estimated that about 40% of people, whilst continuing to sit in their chair in the office have actually psychologically left. They also estimate that about 90% of people who leave their organisations do so because they simply cannot bear to work for their bosses any longer. The South Africa process was profoundly inclusive and intimate in the sense that it said by its actions, to each and every citizen, “What happened to you matters, we will not deny or dismiss what you feel.” It was open to every citizen of the country to be involved and held transparently in open court for the world to see.

Nelson Mandela’s compassion, his dignity, his willingness to take leadership risks - without which no transformation is possible - mobilised the country across the apartheid divide. He had the leadership mentality that was not afraid to invite inquiry and reflection. Mandela's boundless enthusiasm guided the nation through its evolution, taking the imagination of the country by storm and building commitment from every corner of the world. All this, after 27 years in prison, finding the strength to give respect, forgiveness and partnership to the very people who incarcerated him. Of course, leaders like Nelson Mandela or Gandhi both achieved their vast reputations through severe martyrdom and one must question how political leaders might achieve the same repute simply by being good? De Klerk deserved to be honoured in this piece of writing. There is a story that is told by Alastair Sparks, a South African writer, that one day in his place of worship, de Klerk heard a message that said, “New roads must be found, new pathways must be sought. The only difference, between a groove and grave, apart from the spelling, is depth.” De Klerk listened. He found a new way, undoubtedly firstly within himself, within his mind and his whole being. Most of all, he found within himself the leadership substance to actually take reparative action.

If there is one especially important leadership insight here, I think it is that transformation begins with us, ourselves. Any country, corporate or other community transformation will be dictated by a leader’s willingness to take a long hard look at his anxieties, states of fear, resistances, deeper wishes, in all, to take a long look at himself and at the very least, think about what he wants to be remembered for.

What does Money Promise You?

Money doesn’t satisfy us because money doesn’t satisfy small children. This is essentially what Freud believed, that money can be a substitution, but no more than that, a substitution for our original deeper satisfactions, such as being loved, caressed and held.

During a talk I listened to London a few years ago, the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips described the encounter of a child psychotherapist’s first meeting with the father of a child who didn’t speak.  “Ask any price you want”, the father said.  “My son doesn’t talk.  So do whatever you want as long as you make him talk.  And then let’s not talk about it”. What is implicated here is of course an assumption of what money can do and that by applying as much of it as is necessary, the son will be healed. He will speak. One may also read that the father is handing over the responsibility of parenting, to a paid professional who is assumed to have the skills necessary to make the son speak.

If as this father implies, money can make a child speak, and presumably the more of it, the more the child will speak, what else might money do?  What else does money promise by the way of such bribes? Money has a central role in the human game of fantasy and promising futures.  Through money, we make our dreams.  Money lays out before us a tapestry of fantasy lives on offer. Money fills and makes for acceptable conversations with others.  We literally share our dreams.  Yet for many people, financial wealth brings its own problems. It breeds greed, rivalry, envy, competitiveness and often a wrenching sense that there is always someone who has more. The more we have, the more we want.  It is used by psychologically unavailable parents to substitute love and care. It is a cover for childhood wounds, the narcissistic injury of neglect, wrapped in a bandage of accumulated possesses and property, that say “look at me”. It promises that we are invincible, that nothing can hurt us if we have “enough”.  For a moment, that expensive dress makes us feel pretty.  Then within hours a voice in the back of our mind reminds us we have a 40 inch waist. Money promises and often fails.  It creates lonely partitions between what V.S. Naipaul called the traditional “temple-goer” generation in India and their “green card” absent offspring.  Money promises, but without a money-back guarantee. We trade time for money and postpone time now, for future time. With low self-esteem, money is a way of displaying I am winning at the game of life. 

Money may buy us the security of a roof over our heads, food in our bellies, but it is a limited when it comes to a broader definition of wealth. We chase it and defer other things, sometimes to the point where we forget what those other things are. We know that compulsive shopping and high spending is linked with depression. Excessively pursuing money at the expense of other things, hints at low self-esteem and possession by rather than of money.  Privileged children from wealthy families or in cosseted relationships rarely get to test their ability to function successfully and independently in the world.  They wrinkle and age like the rest of us, yet there is a sense that they haven’t got out from underneath something, perhaps their parents. The important human developmental challenges are held at bay, just as Peter Pan’s trajectory of growing up was incomplete.  Well intentioned parents, who say suffered the trauma of Partition, want a better life for their children, fewer challenges, that they don’t suffer the miseries of trying and failing, yet inevitably that often means missing out on the opportunities to test and discover our unique talents.   

The way in which money is played out in India as a ‘symptom’, a disguise for other deeper wish fulfilment, appears to be in the numerous family disputes and contested ownership of property. Undoubtedly, an exquisite aspect of the Indian extended family is the genuine respect for elders.  Indian families don’t generally outsource their elderly as we of the West often do. Yet what is striking, is the real challenges within many of the Bombay families to negotiate their disputes with one another. Every day, it seems there is a familial dispute debated in the press: contested property, fights over land and legacy.  Rarely a day passes in social Mumbai without some reference to someone’s family fight. In place of adult, logical negotiation, there appears to be a shocking willingness to exact revenge within the family and be the “winner”.  The roots of this, is might be envy and rivalry that is set up early-on in a child’s life. Rivalry tolerates no sharing. Children, who in the family system are pitched against one another, as I have heard in the consulting room here in Mumbai, were literally graded as young children as a “B”, compared to the other brother who gets a “C”.  These grades are not for their achievements, but for who they are as children. No doubt these are well intentioned parents hoping to spur their children to higher levels of achievement.  But the competition is externalised in a battle between siblings, rather than a competition with oneself, where the child is encouraged to ask, “Could I do better?”  What this clearly does, is establishes a rivalry and revenge dynamic that without some psychological curiosity, will continue through adulthood and deeper into the law courts.   

The template for what is “normal” sharing and ways of negotiating with others is learned when we are children within the family, particularly with the primary care-giver, the mother.  The mother-child relationship is full of negotiating needs.  The mother wants to sleep the baby wants attention and so on.  According to attachment theory, the most scientific offshoot of psychoanalysis, “The ability to negotiate” is one of the four key components of intimacy (the others are the ability to 2. seek care, 3. give care and 4. be independent & autonomous).  When a child experiences productive negotiations, their right to have wishes and preferences, or not attacked when their wishes are different, the child is likely to develop a sense of security. Sadly, many people negotiate through lawyers or with their fists or by merely shouting and repeating their demands. 

Intimacy is about our deepest, innermost nature. It is about knowing what you are feeling.  The pursuit of money, just like the pursuit of the highest grading in the sibling dynamic for the approval and affection of care-givers, requires wearing a mask in a game of pretend and make-believe in order to gain that childish pleasure of feeling loved and cherished. Only through educating ourselves so that we actually know what we are feeling, can we make money work for us as a positive energy in our lives.  

More money doesn’t equal more life. Better conversations, words and deeds that tickle us, show that we are deeply cared for may just equal richer lives. Certainly, harmonious and intimate family relations are a sign not only of secure character, but of wealth that is childishly abundant. Elizabeth Kubler Ross interviewed 20,000 people in the days and hours before their death.  In her numerous books, she reported that all these dying people want the same thing, intimacy.  She once asked us, “Don’t tell me what you want to do, what money you want, tell me what you ache for.”

The Cosmopolitan Leader

To be cosmopolitan is to be willing to violate your own understanding. This is of course quite contrary to the civilizing mission of an imperialist version that we witness, say, at the roots of America’s claims of fundamental rights to global leadership.  To be cosmopolitan is not to say I will care for you, show you respect if you in return say become a Christian, or some other fundamentalist  version of “be like me, do as I say, then you will be acceptable”. The cosmopolitan citizen is inclined to be more troubled about themselves:  to ask, “Am I being sufficiently responsible towards the others I share this world with?” and “How can I make judgements about other people’s actions without disturbing and recognising my own cracked lenses and fractured perception of the world?”

I once wore a burka for the day.  It is a memorably sensual day.  To the world, I only revealed my greenish blue eyes and my hands. Everything else was covered. It was an experiment, an attempt at locating a momentary sense of “otherness”.  As I walked around, I realised that hidden, I could perhaps wear anything underneath my cloth screen, and found teasing myself, wondering what that might be. As to anyone who may be given the right to see beneath this veiled me, I imagined a profoundly intimate and sacred encounter,   a potent sense of literally and privately being unveiled.  It was through this experience that I gained a hint of what some Muslim friends feel, that the contemporary Western expectation to be made-up, dressed-up, revealing one’s body, is perhaps no less repressive (dare I say more oppressive?) than the wearing of a burka is so lazily interpreted.

Here in Bombay many faiths and cultures commingle, creating a profoundly secular ambience.  Yet none of us can entirely rid ourselves of dogma, the legacy of childhood injuries, or the influence of a skewed and dogmatic media. When I was looking for an apartment in Bombay, certain buildings were off limits.  “Only Parsi’s in this building”, said the real estate agent, “Sorry we can’t look at this place, it’s no foreigners”.  The intermingling is necessarily and invariably conditional.

As a foreigner, a foreign psychologist here, I am often asked to help build the international capability of leaders.  As one CEO put it, when he asked me to work with one of his senior guys, “He doesn’t travel well, he’s just not cosmopolitan”.  Of course the man he described is well travelled as his wallet bulging with “One World” and “Global Elite Club” airline cards suggests.  He is if you like, cosmopolitan in a banal and parochial sense: his travels in London, in New York, are in the ghetto.  He simply spends all of his time, wherever he is in the world, with other Indian friends from Bombay.  This ghettoising is the greatest challenge to a sense of global citizenship, a retreat into a form of “interior exile” as Salman Rushdie puts it.

As the CEO and I explore what we actually mean by “To be cosmopolitan”, we play with the idea that it is a commitment of intention, to be loyal to a larger sense of “we” than merely one’s nation, one’s neighbourhood, one’s insular mind-set. It begs if you like, for some interior and lived state of global citizenship.  “Do you see any signs that he is curious about other cultures, beyond the banal things like trying pasta?” I ask the CEO.  At the heart of it, as many writers such as Edward Said, Judith Butler, and Homi Bhabha remind us, there is a deeply moral dimension in cosmopolitanism, a moral attitude toward the world. It requires curiosity and the suspension of quick judgments.  “Not really”, replies the CEO.  “What about self-reflection?”  I ask, “Any signs, such as asking you for feedback, or pointing out ways he needs to develop?” Limply, he replies, “No, not really”.

To be cosmopolitan demands the difficult work of self-examination.  It calls for a commitment to distinguishing facts from cultural assumptions.  It asks us to assume friendship with that which may feel deeply foreign, disorientating and to open-up to the ‘other’. It is an orientation towards the world that requires the exhausting effort of thinking, to explore what is, what might be universal, as Mendieta puts it, which must be “rearticulated, defended, expanded and made concrete”.   It suggests the idea of the universal right and wrong, beyond the particular, must always be “held in suspension” to borrow Judith Butler’s words.  It must never be concrete.

In speech, cosmopolitanism requires a framing in language, a disclosure of one’s position, one’s particularist lense on affairs, therefore revealing, owning up to, and giving recognition that my view is not absolute and always conditional. Again, like the last blog, I am making a bid that liberation exists in the language we choose; language that only can only develop and expand through some sort of deep commitment to learning. It speaks of “The way I see it, is”, “From my perspective”, “I notice that I don’t see this in the way you do”. To be cosmopolitan is to use better words, and sentences that open up dialogue rather than shut it down. It is to invite dialogue; to have the self-confidence that one’s own perspective can be interrupted, even expanded in listening to the response of the other.

I have a reflexive aversion to degrading and hostile jokes about any nation.  Since the death of Bin Laden, I have heard insidious jokes in Bombay about people from Pakistan. What I notice, is that they are spewed up on unsuspecting listener like myself (no “would you like to hear a joke?”), by men (always) with the bursting hostility of an adolescent boy struggling with his sexuality.  They are invariably performed by the people who appear to have travelled far from their locality only externally with their “One World” airline card, but clearly without using any miles or effort to travel in the interior world of themselves. They are often accompanied by highly offensive jokes about women as merely body parts. To reiterate the jokes here would be in some sense to collude with degrading others.  They are I sense, noting my reaction, a passive aggressive invitation to a fight. Such jokes, according to Freud satisfy our aggressive impulses and provide the “pleasure of saving” much real thought.  Lazy, non-thought, is the absolute enemy of the cosmopolitan, as is any form of racism whatever shape or form it takes.

I ask the CEO, “How does your guy get along with women?”  “What’s that got to do with him being more cosmopolitan?” he asked.  “Isn’t the first ‘other’ a man encounters a woman?”  He is deafeningly quiet.  After some time he says, “He’s very abrupt, I suppose rude in fact. In fact, every woman in his team has left.   But you know it’s different in India”. “Then best keep him here,” I suggest, “I can’t see him travelling well at all”.    

Creativity & Boredom

Creative states are states of fantasy. We break with the comfortable allure of the tribe; produce mental jumps, reach to a point where rational thinking alone falters; where the brain has to give up a bit and something else, something far more riddle-some enters the essence of our being.

Imagine yourself sitting in the back of your car gazing at the passing events through the window. The Banyan tree reminds you of your first girlfriend’s hair. You notice a man arranging flowers on the wooden table of his stall is wearing trousers just like those worn on your graduation day. The three legged stray dogs are playfully fighting near the temple, as a man with a peculiarly large bottom walks his equally obese Labrador. They appear to be unhappy. Somehow you are reminded of your boss and that short English teacher at school and his sadistic cane. You toss away the niggling feeling that you are jealous of stray dogs. Meandering in your thoughts, you are “Free Associating”, to coin a psychoanalytic term, laying down random tracks, not so much, ‘x follows y, follows z’, more a detour that ‘x and y and x and ….’. What do you then do? Pick up your phone and distract yourself, or sit a little longer and get curious about what these creative associations might be hinting at? In short, do you allow yourself to pause?

In “The Interpretation of Dreams”, Freud teases and circles around our “involuntary ideas”, implying creativity as a kind of dream-state, a relaxation of the internal rational censor that controls the imagination. The brilliant psychoanalytic scholar, Jacqueline Rose describes that as a writer, she chooses her themes, from Peter Pan, to the Israel-Palestine conflict, “because I need to understand something and don't. It’s about going to a place of difficulty, feeling one's way around it, seeing if you can survive by creating some sort of order out of it".

Psychoanalysis is itself a form of freedom and creativity. It is a disturbance. It breaks the fixtures and fittings. It legitimizes looking out the window. The consulting room is a space to pause. Through words we represent ourselves and by listening to ourselves, we hear the stories of possibility and limitation we place on ourselves. Creative language - read poetic language - is always musical and rarely conditional. The language we use, our self- medicating stories, are simultaneously inside and outside ourselves. “Daddy, it’s raining up my nose”, says my friend’s daughter after her first taste of fizzy lemonade. Yet we adorn ourselves with ready-to-wear figures of speech, commonsensical platitudes as though obedience to clipped verbal conformity will protect us from something. Boredom comes where we are tired of our own words. We need a new narrative. What is it that is so dangerous if we loosen-up the words that rigidify ourselves? What disturbance may occur if we bring a little jazz into the story, loosen-up the mutterings about ourselves and our world? To be in a creative state is to redirect, to twist, to drift, to meander away from the absolute, the strictures of linguistic certainty.

What then happens if we dare seek out the dissenting voice that hovers in the landscape of inside and outside? Without listening to the hints, what might the three legged dogs be really playing with for example, we risk rigidifying our identity, “I am x but I am not y”, closing off, placing limits on ourselves and writing limited stories on what we experience. It’s a short autobiography that reads “Hindu, male, married, bored in a corporation”. If we dare to experiment with “having a whole wardrobe of identities”, as Amartya Sen puts it, we open possibilities for being less bored and a richer autobiography. A British woman at the Breach Candy Club, a former colonial club that once barred Indians interests me (read doesn’t bore me) with her experimentations in living. It is her second week in Mumbai when she goes to the morgue to see a body burned, “I want to know what I experience, how it affects me. I do all sorts of things to feel alive”. Leadership of our lives, or any endeavor requires creativity: leadership that gives hope, vitality, a sense of belonging and meaning. A half whispered concern I hear is the self-accusation by leaders that “I am a bit boring”. Being boring is living in language that is full of cul-de-sacs, dead ends, the traffic of creative opportunities and new experiences faces a stop sign, a halt. Perhaps it is more apt to say that “I am boring myself, me, with the same words”, representing through my communication, a disregard in commitment to my own happiness, and well-being.

The difficulty I am drawn to, where I am willingly lose my bearings, is Partition; the partition with a capital “P”, that signifies the brutal division of India and the creation of Pakistan. I associate it with the everyday partitions we bear, albeit on an unbearable scale: the painful loses that come with divisions between people; the displacement from village to city that lives on, the odious lines we draw within ourselves between the prohibitive voices that pass for the truth and the daring thoughts that arise in moments of pondering. The partition of words we allow ourselves to use and those we make off-limits and keep us being bored.

How to even think about trauma and legacy of Partition, or to think about anything creatively through language and in language, poses a challenge and a threat. As lethal and transformative this division of a people was, it is profoundly difficult to speak, to write about, without disappearing in reductive and simplistic categories of victim and persecutor. Yet the same can be said of everyday ordinary living. How to speak of ourselves as more than the victimised by some force or other, be it government, the corporate structure of the business or the husband or wife that doesn’t show-up the way we want them too. We use them to stop entering a creative space, to prevent disturbing ourselves and holding the threat of failure at bay.

Opening up our language, noticing how speech distributes power, refusing to resist self-awareness by locking ourselves in corsets of words, contaminated by endless repetition of the same ways of communicating, we find ourselves making the risky manoeuvre of saying “and”, saying “but”. Psychoanalysis is then a maker of new sentences. Freud, of course, from his earliest writings associated creativity with mourning – adjustment to loss – a way of averting sorrows, boredom, and depression in a subtle, yet forceful determination to fight for the vibrancies of living. That is what it means to be creative. But we have to be willing to be disturbed. Surely it can’t be as bad as being bored.

.

   

"It's Good to Talk?"

A professor in a classroom here in Mumbai tells me that he encourages his students to speak up in class. He says that the only way to ensure the students do so is to make speaking in class mandatory. “Once they understand this is the norm you expect, they’ll get used to it,” he says. “But you have to make it clear in India”. On the same day, the Chairman of an engineering company tells me that one of his Managing Directors from overseas has, “Just learned the difficult lessons that Indian employees don’t always tell you when something is going wrong. He’s just found out that saying nothing, means something”.

In Western society, communicating assertively is generally perceived as a sign of a healthy personality and those who are rather silent, tend to be devalued as shy, passive, or lacking independent opinions. Westerners perhaps make the assumption that talking is a positive act, a critical ingredient of independent thinking. By talking, an individual expresses his ideas, his points of view and individuality. Socrates viewed knowledge as existing within people and needing only to be recovered through verbal reasoning. Homer considered one of the most important skills for a man to have to be that of a debater. Freud of course believed that the critical success of any psychoanalysis was the patient’s ability to freely associate verbally his thoughts and feelings, with the voice of the internal critic held in abeyance.

In the consulting room is a client who is a Managing Director of one of the banks. Instead of hearing him say that rather overused legacy of the British, “I’m fine”, a sign of “Improvement” might be to hear the client verbalise more of the complexities of what is going on in his internal world. Things like, “Well, I’m struggling to maintain my enthusiasm at work, yet at the same time, I seem to be working 12 hours a day and can’t stop”. Narrative complexity as a sign of intelligence is one of the ways Western psychological models rate higher levels leadership consciousness. And of course such models are being imported into India. My culturally specific beliefs and assumption backed of course by evidence from Western psychology, suggests that this client will benefit most by such revelations aloud not only to himself, but with a skilled professional who is interested in him. In this relationship space of two people’s curiosity about the deeper motivations of this man, we hope that new personal awareness arises, and thus a richer picture of how he might live his life and conduct his business. A client may want to explore how he can relate better with his team members, how to energise and motivate staff across many geographies or how to deliver a profoundly moving speech.

But is such talking about such things valued in the context of a developing country like India? There are signs that it is, although perhaps the nature of the development process is not fully understood. This may be partly due to the lack of management education and development that focuses on the critical skills of relating in the workplace. After all, it is our ability to work together effectively and efficiently that gets things done and done well. However, most large Companies here now have 360 degree feedback processes, whereby an individual receives written feedback on the impact his leadership has. Yet judging by some of the reports I read here, they seem rather censored and “Nice”. Shame may also be attached to speaking with someone outside the immediate family, but also a sense of uncertainty of what this sort of relationship entails, and so it is easier to pick up a book on leadership, as though insights transplant themselves magically from the page to the leaders actions.

In the Indian tradition, personal development has historically focused upon meditation; the idea that silence and introspection will be beneficial for higher levels of thinking. In fact from this perspective, perhaps all this thinking and talking may indeed be viewed as the root of the client’s troubles. Talking might therefore be conceived of differently. Eckhart Tolle, known for his book “The Power of Now”, popular here in India as well as overseas, extolls the power of being in the present moment, promoting the importance of meditation, and other forms of contemplative activity. In a recent talk he gave, he rather humorously warned his students, “If you think you are enlightened, go and spend a week living with your relatives and see how reactive you still are”. He was also suggesting that meditation is not something to do to become better meditators, but to enable us to have greater peace and more harmonious relationships with others. He also warned that we babble too much, mindlessly filling up space with words like the ramblings of the disoriented madman we might see on the street. We say what we don’t mean, and we keep hidden what we really feel. And we say a lot, not only in speech, but critically in how we say things. Some evidence suggests that the greatest distortions in our communication are in the sound, the music of what we say, and the dance of how we use our bodies. If I verbally try to tell you I value you, whilst at the same time, using the tone of a depressed bureaucrat, with my arms folded as I gaze at the ceiling, you will get a very clear message from me. When we are unsure about someone’s intentions in their communication, we draw only 5% on the words, some 38% on the sound, and a massive 55% on body language. One of the most common criticisms of Indian leaders is their harshness with staff. This is often justified to me with comments like “it’s the only way to get them to do anything”. Yet as an outsider looking in, it seems to me that at times, rather sadist leadership virtually immobilises staff in a vicious circle of freeze and fear. One writer in response to the previous blog on cricket and coaching suggested to me that this harshness is developed in the Indian household, as the child observes his mother berating servants. Whatever the roots might be, it important that Indian leaders with aspirations to work in the International context understand there are much more rigorous expectations of their conduct.

All these ideas of “East” vs. “West” are of course a rather common post-colonial polarity. It is likely that the business man in India has far more in common with the business man in New York than the villagers in rural India. In fact internationally, all the leaders who have been measured and rated as having a higher level of leadership consciousness, report having both a regular practice such as mediation and being involved in some sort of dialogue with others as a means of their growth. The international evidence however, on influential communication, reminds us very clearly that if a leader wants his staff to speak out, he must role-model that behaviour himself. So, for example, if he wants his staff to be open about production or trading problems, whatever the issue might be, they will need to have witnessed their leader disclose his own personal challenges during his career. Of course, in order for someone to talk, there must be a listener. How good most leaders are at listening is questionable. Professor Richard Hackman from Harvard University, found that in his research on black-box data from flight crashes, that almost without exception, there was a dissenting voice saying early on there was a problem with the plane. Yet in each case, no one listened. The voice was too junior, too small to be taken seriously. Listening involves stepping into the agenda and perspective of another. One suspends one’s own greedy needs to say this or that, and let go of control of a conversation. Only those with solid enough self-esteem are good listeners.

No matter who we are, or where we are from, whatever unknown cultural codes are embedded in our being, we all share in common the never-ending decision-making about what to say and what not to say. When the veil between the conscious and the unconscious mind is thin, we will be verbally reactive, or blocked like cement so that we cannot find the flexibility to utter even one word.

I think it is fairly culturally safe to say that we are all on some level, longing for real human contact. The workplace is of course the site of our attachments with others. For many, it is not only a source of identity, of self-esteem it is also a place of belonging. Our leaders just like the teacher at the beginning of this piece signify what is expected, what is permissible and what degree of depth in relating to one another is “normal”. Leaders of course do this, not only by what they say, and whether they have the confidence to be good listeners, but in what they do.

As Gandhi put it, “My life is my message”.

"What Do You Expect?"

As international citizens, thinking people, whatever national identity we wear, however tightly fitting it might be, we choose how we engage with matters of the world at large.  Just as the bureaucrats, police and politicians can decide their particular ethical brand and style of participation in political processes, equally each one of us decides the degree to which we attempt to participate in developing a democratic and fair world.

India right now, is abuzz with social activism as a citizen movement led by Anna Hazare demands the right to a corrupt-free India. Hazares “Fast unto Death” pledge has created a renewed sense of hope and vitality that there is huge commitment and citizenship willing to show-up and be involved in shaping the evolution of the country.  In a similar vein to the trajectory of Nelson Mandela, who virtually became President of South Africa from his prison cell, it appears Anna Hazare is rapidly becoming the moral commander of India. Along with him, countless Indians took a pledge to fast, whilst 100,000s protested across the country. Those who were fasting, including Hazare are eating once again, thanks to political pledges to design an adequate anti-corruption Jan Lokpal Agreement.  But it’s clear that Hazare will be back on his “Fast unto Death”, and no doubt thousands of others will join him if his expectations are not met. His passion, his commitment is rooted very firmly in the plight of the poor of India, who after all, suffer most at the hands of corruption.

The very moment expectations of incorruptibility falls, evolutionary pressure bears down and we start to experience shifts. Evolutionary pressure to be better depends on expectations of standards regarding honesty or corrupt practices, which the drafting of the Jan Lokpal Bill seeks to address.  If the public has low expectations, they will end up confirming them.  In turn, this leads to further citizen apathy.  Apathy is understandable, given the anti-corruption bill has been presented eight times since 1968 to no avail.

Despite the country’s population of over a billion people, the average number of whistle-blowers complaints of corruption through the Central Vigilance Commission, between 2005 and 2009, was a paltry annual average of 346.  This cannot possibly be apathy alone, but a process that doesn’t work. System blockages, lack of flow, a sense there is no one to turn to, leaves any community constipated by its problems. When bureaucrats around the world evade their ethical responsibilities by hiding in procedural and plumbing excuses, it saps the human spirit.  It erodes a dignified sense of empowerment. It also tells us of the low level of leadership development, known in psychological circles as the “Expert” level of leadership we are dealing with. In psychological terms, it is the tyranny of “Schizoid” functioning.  This is a clinical term to describe a constellation of lack of affect, of emotional deadness, a cold, indifference towards others, often accompanied by insidious smirks and other odd physical characteristics. A constipated culture blocks our energy so much so, that for many, it appears they exist under a veil of depression.  Yet escaping to complacency and apathy, as I am clearly hinting at here, maybe a disease more virulent than at least attempting to shape our global evolution, even if we fail.

What is powerful here in India, unlike say the social activism of Egypt, is that the youth of India have the stately leadership figure of Anna Hazare, whose commitment to the people of India is dignified and impressive. Unlike India, other social movements have faced the tyranny of insidious press silence, no access to the internet or telephones.   In the minds of many here, perhaps assisted by the articulations of the press, the spirit of Gandhi has returned, as has a degree of faith in leadership and decency.  Once again, this “Second Freedom Struggle” as the press are coining it, arises from a base of personal, rather than positional power.

Great expectations energise the bureaucrats and politicians against corruption and keep the fire of political and social activism burning. While power corrupts and corruption undermines the legitimacy of power, the prospects for social and economic development crucially depends on the evolution of a web of expectations. Your expectations, my expectations.  All expectations begin in the mind, with a simple self-reflection, of “How do I expect to be treated?” Higher levels of consciousness ask, “How do we expect our children to be treated?” Higher levels again, ask “What should all our children’s children have a right expect?”  

“Will this movement fizzle out?” some ask. I doubt it. There’s too much (1) vision for a corruption-free India, too much traction of real (2) dissatisfaction and too much solid thinking concerning (3) implementation. These are the three ingredients required for deep change to occur.  Time will tell no-doubt.  Nevertheless, within two days of Anna Hazare ending his fast, the Finance Minister announced that India will be ratifying the United Nations convention on corruption “Soon”.   This will mean that it is much easier to reclaim corruption money in tax havens overseas, that official will be expected to comply with codes of conduct, and disclose financial assets.  As the UN literature states, "offences committed in support of corruption, including money-laundering and obstructing justice, are also dealt with."   

The day I write this, a friend of mine is angry and despairing of the corruption dilemma he faces.  There are consequences if he accedes to paying a bribe and there are consequences if he doesn’t.   My only advice to him is to “Imagine you are ninety years old, looking back on your life, what you want to see that you did today?” Sadly, whether in a country or a corporation, the human citizen is often feels left with merely one final recourse of action.  I will give you my feedback about this country, about this corporation by leaving.  Talent walks out the door, and takes a plane somewhere else.  This beautiful country called India will potentially lose a critical mass of talent if basic expectations of decency are not met. When leaders don’t listen fully and act expediently what else can they expect? The significant factor distinguishing those of higher levels of leadership is timely action.   “Soon” cannot be soon enough.

"India's Cricket Lessons"

This is a tribute to Gary Kirsten the coach to the India Cricket team. What a fantastic result Team India. It feels a huge honour to be living in the City of Mumbai, home to the match, probably the most exhilarating place in the world on the winning Saturday night. The whole City came to a celebratory standstill, as people face-painted with the red, green and white of the Indian flag danced on top of their cars along Marine Drive and the sky lit up with fireworks in all directions within seconds of the match win.

Coach Gary, a former South African cricketer’s favourite motto is: “There is no greater waste of a resource than that of unrealised talent”, (the words of the former U.S. president Roosevelt). Talent development is all about reducing the gap – the gap between current performance and desired performance. When you are on your knees utterly empty of any belief in yourself, the coach lends you their relentless confidence in you, “I was thankful to him for keeping his faith in me when I was going through a tough phase,” says player Suresh Raina. When the comfort of laziness creeps in, the coach, in as aggressive or warms a manner as is required, reminds the player to step-up and be all he can be.

As a coach he helped the players identify both their individual areas for growth and blind-spots in performance, as well as, in their strengths and weaknesses in the team functioning. He motivated them to believe in themselves, to believe in each other, that they could pull-off this outstanding result for their country. He worked with the team to develop their emotional as well as physical fitness, as well as their game-strategy.

Coaching business leaders has everything in common with coaching sports players and teams. In fact, several years ago, I worked with an Investment Bank, alongside Clive Woodward who at the time was successfully coaching the England Rugby team. The critical ingredient, despite immense talent, was that this global team had a crippling sense that they could not win accolades like Euromoney because a competitor institution was in their group mind “better, more talented”. They weren’t. The other team just had more belief in themselves. Through a series of leadership and coaching strategies we created a winner.

When the coach sits in front of a guy who he or she knows can reach higher and higher levels in his performance, the coach is looking at two things. Firstly, is the guy motivated to excel, to be the best he can be? What degree of skills-gap are we looking at here? A good coach is essentially an artist. An artist works creatively to get under the skin of another human being. Sometimes deliberately making them angry to evoke change, other times nurturing that tender spot in the psyche that has produced a highly critical voice inside the person that impairs their performance. It’s mind-training, it’s strategy-building and it’s behavioural training. We coaches end up loving those we nurture, especially the ones that fight with their hearts and souls to bring out the best in themselves and offer the gift of their talents to the world. Knowing you matter to the coach is highly critical for the relationship to work, “Gary treated us like family”, as player Sehwag put it.

Whether cricket, business or Bollywood, the person you want to coach is the one who wants to live his or her life asking “How can I do better”, “How can I show-up more”, rather than merely point the finger at others and say “But I couldn’t do it, because, because, because”. They are the curious souls who want to make sense of themselves, of why they do this, and why they don’t do that. For us coaches, they are treasured people who live in our hearts and minds, who keep us awake at night when they are in the throes of transformation, and remain with us, often many years after their physical presence has left our lives.

I don’t know who you are reader. If you’re a cricket fan, you can pretty much rest assured that Gary Kirsten gave everything of himself to coach that team. And he will have given up a lot in his own life to do this, especially his family. That’s what we do. We turn ourselves inside out to make growth and transformation possible, because it’s often what makes us feel happiest and most purposeful in our lives.

But something puzzles me about India. We have these incredible cricket guys, who clearly are entrepreneurs of their own growth and development. These players made a proactive decision to work with someone who can help them grow individually and collectively. Of course they may have been defensive and didn’t like the feedback at times. That’s natural because change is difficult. Yet, are business leaders in India as committed entrepreneurs to their own growth as these players? It seems to me that many business leaders in India tend to leave their growth utterly to chance or pay minimal lip-service to it.

Whether you are a cricket player or a leader, the only way towards higher level performance is through feedback. Feedback maybe about the way you relate on the pitch or in the corporate boardroom, feedback concerning how you manage your emotions and your energy when you perform. A good coach (read good leader) tells you, “I love the way you do x”, “I don’t like the way you do y”, and “What I want you to do is z”. One of the leaders as coach I worked with would be saying this sort of coaching language 30-40 times a day to her team members.

Discussing this over dinner, Indian friends tell me that I underestimate the way many business men and women in Mumbai dislike criticism. I try to explain that feedback highlights strengths, highlights areas for development. That feedback is not about who you are. It’s about ways to improve your behaviour. It’s the exciting fact that as we achieve one stage of potential, yet another emerges. What you do, when you start to interrogate yourself, with someone else, when you start to question your tacit assumptions about yourself about other people, you start to wake up. You also then start to be a different kind of person. One man, in his early forties tells me that few of his colleagues are prepared for even thinking about themselves, because their mothers have been telling them they are perfect, just because they are boys, since the day they were born. I respond that this doesn’t explain the profound commitment of the India Cricket team, who were also boys once, to their growth and development, which after all, led to a profoundly exhilarating ‘win’ for the whole country.

Perhaps there is something yet to evolve more fully in India, in terms of education concerning what personal and professional development is; particularly concerning emotions, communication and relationships.  Personally, I celebrate the courage of the India cricket team as role models of commitment to growth, to endeavouring to look in the mirror and ask “How can I improve” and having the courage to get expert help to make those changes real.

Perhaps this is the deeper, more profound lesson that Indian cricket offers. The true nature of winning is in overcoming ourselves.  It is also an enormous tribute to the likes of Sachin Tendulkar, confident enough to graciously acknowledge Gary in today’s Asian Age with the words “I want to thank Gary. He has to be given credit as he instilled a bit more self-belief in us. We have been very consistent during the last two years and this is a result of that. I have really enjoyed my game under him.”

I want to end this blog with the words from a speech in the film “Any Given Sunday”. My appreciation and tribute to the exceptional Team India, a part of which was Coach Gary Kirsten. In the film, Al Pacino plays the coach to a soccer team (I’ve changed the word soccer to cricket for fun). It is a profoundly moving speech in the film, just before the team is about to go into the game like Sri Lanka vs. India, the game of their lives:

“I made every mistake a middle-aged man can make – I threw away all my money, I chased off anyone who’s ever loved me and lately I don’t even like the face in the mirror. You know, when you get old in life, things get taken from you. That’s part of life. You find out that life’s a game of inches and so’s cricket – because in either game, life or cricket, the margin for error is so small, I mean half a step too late or too early, you don’t quite make it. One half second too slow too fast you don’t quite catch it. The inches are everywhere around us, in every break of the game every minute every second.

On this team we fight for that inch. On this team we tear ourselves and everyone around us to pieces for that inch. We claw with our fingernails for that inch, because we know that when we add up all those inches, that’s gonna make the fxxking difference between winning and losing. Between living and dying. I’ll tell you this – in any fight it’s the guy who’s willing to die for that inch. And I know if I’m going to have any more life in me, it’s because I am willing to die and fight for that inch. Because that’s what living is, the six inches in front of your face. Now I can’t make you do it. You’ve got a look at the guy next to you and you’ll see a guy who will sacrifice himself for this team, because he knows when it comes down to it, you’ll do the same thing for you. That’s a team gentlemen. And either we heal now as a team, or we will die as individuals.

That’s cricket guys. That’s all it is.”