Re-Imagining the Default. And YOUR role in it.

Now THIS is disruption. The real kind. 

I pinch myself several times a day to check if I am in the middle of a bad apocalyptic dream where my best laid plans have been washed away abruptly . In a few broad strokes . In a few uneasy weeks. Maybe you are doing the same. Pinching. And as you know – the pinch hurts. So it’s not a dream. This is actually happening. Suddenly you & I & the entire human race are locked in a fierce existential battle for our place on this planet, the abode we thought we ruled. Plans ? What plans, huh ?

Professionally, I am staring at a washed out quarter. Personally, my new book ( eerily carrying the tagline ‘ Work as usual, life as unusual’) needs to be pushed from its planned March release. And then, there are other priorities threatened with re-calibration or outright scrapping . You know, those important things every middle class family worries about. The ailing parent’s surgery. The graduating kid’s future. The diminishing future value of today’s money. So on.

The static world outside my window stares sullenly back at me . Suddenly there is no rush hour honking on the streets. Or peak hour queues at eateries. Suddenly there are no handshakes. No face to face meetings. Suddenly the office commute hour has been handed back to us . And we are seeing family more than what we have in years. New phrases have hijacked our daily vocabulary – social distancing, self-quarantine, flattening of curves & other epidemiological terms we never used before. Suddenly all that we find in our newspapers is statistics – new infections, new deaths, new spikes and new epicenters.

We’ve all been taken unawares & taken captive. Into a bubble of super-connected solitude. Inside our own homes.

Yes, these are tough times. But then, that’s what we signed up for in the first place as leaders, didn’t we ? When times are easy, any kid can run the show . That’s default. It takes people like you and me to step in when the default needs to be challenged. And re-imagined. No other options mate !

For starters, so much of conventional working is wasteful, as you would have realized by now. Those lost hours in traffic. That cafeteria gossip. The cosmetic HR fads pretending to be employee engagement activities. The criminal waste of energy by all that centralized air-conditioning and lighting. Yes, the last two weeks had some awkward settling-in pain. But by and large, the work is getting done. And it will get better as we go along. For a change, Mother Nature is breathing freely again, thanks to the drastic drop in pollution levels.

Constraints make us resilient. And creative. Ask yourself honestly – how many new hacks did you discover while trying to deliver under captivity ? I am sure that for every problem you had, you would have probably laid out a Plan B. Maybe even a Plan C ! That’s the power of the discomfort zone. It stretches you. Makes you lean.

Yes, businesses are down. But that’s more due to an initial shock. A human reaction. Look around and you will see people picking up the pieces again. The world is getting back on its feet, finding new ways to keep trade going. At dramatically reduced overheads. Suddenly no exorbitant travel expenses are hitting your bottom line – superfluous expenditure by pot-bellied executives who would hop into an airplane at the slightest provocation to jet-set across continents for simple client meetings that could have been done for free over Zoom or Skype. Personally I am okay with this reset . Unnecessary business travel has always irked me. Especially when they are designed by people to accrue travel miles and hotel loyalty points. Imagine a typical day in the new world – you can start your day with Australia and end it with the US, & also do 3-4 face to face video interfaces with clients in different countries. All for free ! Add to this all those cancelled 'Staff Conferences' at exotic locations that are a regular feature in most large organizations when they burn a few million dollars of good money in Q1 and later try to recover it through stupid measures like layoffs and travel bans ( even essential travel) in Q3 and Q4.

Can you beat this kind of ROI ?

More on meetings. Digital meetings will unleash a whole new brand of conversations because of the sheer scale they bring. Something unimaginable in the analog world where one pampered executive wastes almost a whole work week and a few thousand dollars of company money, to explore a ‘suspect’ that has a <5 % probability of getting converted into business. The same pampered executive would quickly find his next meeting excuse when questioned why the first one vanished from his list. And hop into another plane. More flying miles. More loyalty points. More inches at the waist. This executive is going to go extinct in no time in the new world where accountability will be redefined and separated from attendance. So will all those 'leaders' who think they add a lot of value by floating around and descending on their regional offices ( traveling first class, if not in private jets) , where they deliver impassioned leadership talks to ‘inspire’ a few hundred people sitting inside a large banquet hall of a 5-star hotel. Then, some media. Then, a dinner with customized customers handpicked by the local team. And yes, photo-sessions at every step, documenting his trip to the minutest details, which will then be fed into the company blog and circulated by the communications leader . Smiling faces of employees, coordinated to display diversity of ethnicity and age. All that is history. At least for now.

With the changing landscape of accountability, there will be an entire re-structuring of power dynamics in large organizations. In a digital work space, Position Power ( the band, the title, the cabin size, the flaunting of staff strength) will rapidly get diluted and eclipsed by Personal Power. A new kind of leadership will emerge – proactive, human leadership that stands on courage, candor, ownership & results, and not on a mere title. As someone said – a sense of ownership always pays for itself. Watch out for a new breed of super heroes who will emerge in the new normal.

And competition ? Of course there will be competition ! Fierce and new kind of competition who will bring new rules to the game . I find that encouraging. True competition is a signal that you are not stupid. People think of you as worthy. They will find new ways to beat you. And you will find new ways to beat them.

Yes I know these are trying times. At the time of writing this, the world has seen 536K cases & 24K deaths. It is a grim situation. There are no second thoughts on it. But we also have super smart scientists and doctors who are working round the clock and who will help us beat this, hopefully sooner than later. As professionals, you and I have a role to play in this too. We need to follow rules by staying at home and helping in containing the spread. We also have to make sure the economy doesn’t tank because billions of people are now working out of eyesight, without supervision. As is said – panic loves company. It is our responsibility to deny that company to panic and stop it from becoming a show stopper for industry.

Like Seth says – Life is an essay and not a series of responses to someone else’s agenda. This is the moment in our life to write that essay. To re-imagine the default.

( My new book, as above. I hope I can get it out next month !)

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