Expressions and Experiences

Last week’s post brought in some interesting observations, experience share and in some cases trace of root cause analysis. But we also got some strong questions for example “What would you do?” And we are glad we got such comments – as posting interesting thoughts and questions is only one half of the game. So here we are with some answers!

We decided to address this in a bigger context – “What can one do?” We look at each of us playing three roles – individual, professional and a societal component. What can we do in each of these perspectives? As to what ichiban does, we have listed few things we do towards the end.

As individuals one thing we should all consider when we interact with children and youngsters – is to allow them to dream, and stop dreaming for them. We should consciously start nurturing in them a sense of curiosity and adventure. We were told when we were young, “you should grow up to be an engineer or doctor”. Now we hear voices telling our children “When you grow up you should become a system analyst at wipro or infy”. If all our children grow to be IT professional, CA or banker then who will be a Professor? A Scientist? An Engine driver? An agriculturalist? An astronomer?

As a professional, one may want to instill in their team members the joy of profession and the experience of learning. We may all benefit if we can as seniors at job take pride in our work and are able to translate this to our team. How many software engineers take pride in their job as much as they pride their societal recognition? If the software engineer understands how his piece of code is creating phenomenal change in his client’s organization, he may begin to love his job for reason other than money and IT will not be plagued by attrition.

 As teachers do we instill the pride of a job done well? Do we nurture ideation? Do we instill thinking out of box? Do we preach spirit of Entrepreneurship? Do we teach our students to take pride in understanding and appreciating individuality? Do we encourage them to be different? – Again more questions than answers!

 As a society do we look at all professions with same respect? Do we encourage commitment and career as against pay and perks? Do we take risks in trusting fresh talent or do we always insist that it is experience that brings value? Unless we give freshers and youth opportunity to experiment – we will always be in want of true spirit of enterprise.

These are few steps we can all take without waiting for others to start.  Few things we have started doing at ichiban long ago are:

• Capitalizing on every opportunity to speak to youngsters where we evangelize spirit of enterprise, perspective of career vs job  trying to make them see the world that is much beyond their span of sight. We enjoy thoroughly our trysts with youngsters at their college, coffee shops, our homes and our office. While few of them are still in touch with us following their hearts, we know most of it is only a one time conversation. But that is not stopping us!!
•  We have begun to reach out to real practitioners of change (both academic and working professionals). We in fact had the opportunity of interacting recently with lecturers from various universities in Andhra Pradesh on the topic of how to create the entrepreneurial spirit in the students – with respect to the role of teachers. It was a rewarding experience and one we would like to do again and again.
•  It is not enough to preach, we also need to participate. As a conscious strategy for growth we have decided to encourage taking in of high spirited youth, where experience is overridden by a strong desire to perform. When we see as we said a spirited youth we leave no stone unturned to create an opportunity for him within ichiban. But the sad part is we have not had many takers 
•  Since the first step to improvement is realization, we have started sharing this thought to as many people as we can. We now have more people reading this blog write ups every week and more comments too. We hope that this can slowly but steadily increase the discussions on improving the quality of our biggest asset in the information age – people!
• We have initiated some changes to our own learning meeting where we ask our associates to discuss issues on “How can we inform more people about self employment, entrepreneurship, research, teaching, professional speaking, news analysts, and number of other non conventional careers?” Many of these were seen as not paying enough (don’t know what is the benchmark?) or too risky. Though in recent times we have seen rise in interest, but depth of desire is still low, attitude towards people taking these up have not changed in proportion. We know we have a long way to go!!

 We firmly believe it is important that we as a society should start making changes to our approach in accepting and allowing people to try and take up non conventional careers. We should encourage the spirit of entrepreneurship by fostering innovative thinking, intelligent risk taking, hard work, keeping a positive mind and the never say die attitude! In fact some of these and more, practiced in pockets, is what has brought India this far and if we can percolate some of this thinking on a larger scale we can see growth happening well beyond our expectations. This will result in a more balanced, positive, growth oriented, and prosperous society – driven by youth power.