Seven Dangerous Books Which Transformed My Relationship With Work

So let's get this straight. Books aren't those cutesy things Influencers love to dole out to their legion of influencees looking to ape everything they do under the California Sun.

Books are dangerous. They are heretic dragons with a soft bum. If you dare to be vulnerable, they can strip you of your cherished beliefs. Just when you get comfortable and snuggle in, letting your imprisoned wall of ideas loose, they can pull the rug under your feet and expose the na?veté of your thinking.

Here are seven dangerous books. Don't tell me I didn't warn you beforehand. These bastards can thwack your pet notions about work.

1)Ricardo Semler's Maverick

Whenever I excavate my memories of books which transformed my working life, this is the oldest fossil item I have at hand. Those times were strange. I was sleepwalking through my mechanical Engineering course in one of India's premier Institutes, without any clue why I was doing what I was doing. Only one thing was running in my mind - I need to bear with this for few more years, before I jump onto the exciting world of business. That's my Mecca.

I devoured whatever books I found on business in my Engineering college library - even if they were of the Mills and Boons kind, going all inspiro-mushy with that peculiar "Look-how-modest-I-am" brand of vanity, rah-rahing about how the mythical Leader came out of the shadows at the right time and solved the right business problem waiting to be solved.

This book had those reach-for-the-stars moments of inspiration and more. It gave me a stirring metaphor - still fertile in my imagination after all these years - to think about business and what the way we organise business does to it.

"The pyramid, the chief organisational principle of the modern corporation, turns a business into a traffic jam. A company starts out like eight-lane super highway- the bottom of the pyramid- drops to six lanes, then four, then two, then becomes a country road and eventually a dirt path, before abruptly coming to a stop. "

Isn't that the sad story of almost every large walking-dead corporation ? When are we going to stop giving lame excuses of inevitability of traffic jam and for a change, do something about it?

2) Sex Matters:Sex to Super Consciousness

Have you observed that matters of salary and negotiating the value of your work in monetary terms often get as awkward as discussing about sex with parents when you are a teenager peaking with hormones?

Picture the similarities

Even though you are good friends, you cannot broach this topic with your colleagues openly. It is awkward to ask them upfront. And if you've grown up in Indian middle-class families, the hypocrisy is blatantly obvious. How dare you bargain hard for your needs!

There is a reason why conversations over money and sex sound awkward when they should not.

Both involve naked confrontations with the epicenter of authority. You cannot understand the politics of work without understanding the politics of authority. You cannot understand the politics of authority without understanding the politics of Sex.

There is a reason why religions and other power centers of authority all over the world abhorred talking about something as natural as Sex. How else can they exert their authority over you without repressing your natural, biological urges which brought you to Earth in the first place?

When I discovered Osho's works during my MBA days in Pune, it caused huge tremors of 7+ Richter scale magnitude, in the depths of my Tam-Brahm middle-class upbringing. It challenged everything I held profane and sacred. I had no choice but to press Ctrl + Alt + Del.

More than the English title, the original Hindi title of this books sounds more delicious. "Sambhog Se Samadhi Tak". The journey to mastering the self starts from Sex.

3) One Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka

Even in my wildest dreams, I never imagined that I would discover this humble book, narrating the journey of an agricultural scientist who quit his practice to discover the art of organic farming. His zen journey transformed the lives of several millions who felt deeply inspired by this man's persistence to inquire into understanding what it is to live with nature.

I received this book as a gift from my mentor, an organic farmer, who was so inspired by this book, back in his heydays, that he decided to leave his work in the Artificial Intelligence domain, back in the seventies in the US, and come back to India to buy land and start organic farming. (You can read the story of my relationship with my mentor here)

If you are willing, this book will challenge not just the citadel of scientific method, but everything civilized humans have known about living a life with purpose.

4) Fooled by Randomness and all books by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

When I first read what Taleb wrote about my work, "Consulting, a profession grounded in building narratives and naive rationalisation", I was devastated. I was a rookie consultant, back in those days, excited about bringing my social media expertise to my consulting firm.

As I began to read and understand the depth of Taleb's works, my self-confidence and the neatly arranged powerpoint deck world of consulting began to crumble down. I began a life-long inquiry to probe and discover my mythical journey towards "skin-in-the-game". Thanks to Taleb, I have maintained a healthy skepticism towards questioning the real value I bring in my consulting engagements, and in all these years, it has paid me rich dividends.

5) Small is Beautiful by E.F. Schumacher

This is the last book you can imagine being read by an MBA graduate in his final semester, ready to plunge into the neoliberalist ideology, as he waits in his wings to plunge into the world of large corporations and their ruthless business of life.

Thanks to my stars, I discovered this lovely book of essays written by that crank of an economist, E.F. Schumacher, who was among the earliest pioneers to challenge the orthodoxy of Western Economics and kickstart the environmental movement in the seventies, when the world woke up to the Energy crisis.

Thanks to this book, I am in perpetual conflict with hard questions of what can scale and what cannot. And trust me, that's a good thing.

6) Mahabharata by Vyasa

Although I literally grew up with this book everyday in my cultural milieu, It took me several years to discover this greatest epic of all times, thanks to Raghu Ananthanarayanan.

With more than one hundred thousand sanskrit stanzas in verse, eight times longer than The Iliad and The Odyssey put together, it is the longest composition of the world, narrating the greatest story ever told.

I know this for sure. I can read this epic for the rest of my life and never feel satiated by the ocean of possibilities it offers to inquire into the essential human condition.

Do I hear you asking what is the foremost thing Mahabharata can teach the world of business and work, as if it were anything different from the human condition?

If not for anything else, you will at least understand how much we are conditioned to behave and operate from our subconscious brain. Yes, you heard me right, if you want to find a workable, human solution for fake news, start first by reading the Mahabharata.

7) Freedom from the Known and all of Jiddu Krishnamurti's books

It is impossible to summarise what I discovered through my life-long fascination with Jiddu's works. It has been my limitless fount of learning ever since my teens, when I began to visit his center religiously in Chennai, Vasant Vihar, to inquire and probe into the nature of everything around me, through his Sunday video lectures.

It took me several years of working with his works - both the written word and the videos- and meeting many of those who've spent time with him, to come reasonably close and taste the essence of his inquiry.

Today, if my wiring is such that I share a healthy scepticism towards any method (including the Scientific method) designed to solve problems faced by humans, I know where its origins have come from.

Which books have transformed you ruthlessly? Let's get real and open up our wounds, for a change. No mushy stuff please.