The ‘HOLI’ Business

Holi is the Hindu festival that welcomes the Spring and celebrates the new life and energy of the season. ... Holi is also called 'The Festival of Colours', and people celebrate the festival by smearing each other with paint, and throwing coloured powder and dye around in an atmosphere of great good humour.

The science of using natural colours like turmeric is to cleanse the body and remove unwanted accumulation on the skin. Holi ka Dahan, on the other hand, is performed to burn all that is dry and dirty to pave the way for new life in the spring.

Holi signifies the triumph of good over evil. It's the day to forgive and make peace with everyone around us. Holi is also a harvest festival and marks the arrival of spring and the end of winter.

The above information is courtesy Google, but the lessons for us in Business has been an amazing revelation of emotions and experiences that have weathered many storms over the last 15 months. There has not been one individual, or community or company in any country or even the continent that has been spared from the ‘Covid19 lessons’.

We have another opportunity to celebrate and bring back the ‘colourful life into business’ around us. The opportunity to clean the lingering ‘unwanted and outdated’ processes, thinking, philosophies has been rapidly and consistently taking shape over these past months. We have emerged out of the woods with a significant impact on relationships (many strengthened and a few gone sour), an impact on exploring newer ways to connect with our customers and employees (time to moderate the digital onslaught), an unbelievable dogma of compassion displayed by many known and even a larger group of unknown people who helped our steely resolve and build our resilience (honestly, we all tried) and a novel way to experience work-life integration like never before.

We suddenly became aware of the ecosystem around us while doing business. I am not referring to the markets, customers, industries or even competitors; but to the pressure cooker whistles, kids video bombing our calls, living rooms converted into board rooms, conference halls, study rooms and even family time rooms (at times all these together ??), new hobbies sprung up and in fact became a prominent part of our daily lives and dropping internet networks (some dropped by design if we didn’t like the meeting ?). Yes, we survived these or rather learnt to take it in our stride and likely might need to resort to this partially for a longer time. Our ‘in-person’ office time suddenly gained extreme significance after a multitude of ‘virtual office’ hours spent. We agreed to the dictum of ‘office work’ was likely best ‘in office’ in many cases. The WFH community may agree to disagree.

Coming back to HOLI, a festival beautifully explained at the beginning of this article in this year is being celebrated in a subdued manner like most other festivals, but it strategically comes at a time when we end the Financial year of 2020-21. As we set up ourselves to enter the next year - the opportunity to cleanse the old, ring in the new, spread cheer to all our stakeholders, let us smear each other with hope, trust, compassion and mark the arrival of good from the evil (Covid impact).

Wishing everyone a healthier, successful and even more stronger 12 months ahead with the certain hope of being able to throw colours of celebration during Holi 2022.

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This is Prashant Menon, Founder Director at Workplace Dynamics – A Management Consulting & Leadership Development Company; Co-Founder and Executive Leadership & Team Coach at The Bento Coach; Visiting Faculty; Strategy & Leadership Speaker

Visit us at www.workplacedynamics.in for details and exploring ways to help us partner your growth.