XLRI Placements

XLRI Placements

The lives of others | The conversation

“The lives of others” – this year’s Academy award winner for the best foreign language film stands at the curious intersection between art, love, literature, politics, bureaucracy, and history.

The film is set in the erstwhile East Germany at the time when the Stasi (the secret police) placed pretty much every other citizen under surveillance. One such member of the Stasi (Weisler) is asked to monitor the renowned playwright Georg Dreyman who is suspected of having leanings towards the west. Weisler wires Georg’s apartment and then spends his days listening in and preparing daily reports of his suspect’s activities.

The real reason why Weisler is put on this assignment is so that Georg’s western leanings can be proved as basis for his arrest, which would then allow minister Hempf free access to Georg’s lover, the actress Christa-Maria. Once Weisler discovers this, his sympathies gradually shift towards Georg. Weisler finds himself immersing into Georg’s rich literary world of idealism and hope for a better future. Pretty soon Weisler begins to fudge his daily reports to divert suspicion from Georg on a controversial article that he publishes in the West after the death of his theatrical mentor. A man who was once an impassive arm of the state’s machinery now finds himself moved by Georg’s heady world of Brecht, Beethoven, passion, love and intrigue. From here on, the film takes interesting plot turns as Weisler, the neutral observer turns into an eager, yet invisible supporter of Georg’s actions.

It is here that “The lives of others” reminded me of an older Francis Ford Coppola film called ‘The Conversation’ in which Gene Hackman is a surveillance expert who is tapping into conversations between a couple. What begins as an unemotional impassive project turns similarly into one where Gene finds himself getting actively involved in the lives of his ‘targets’. It reaches a point where Gene steps in to avert a potential tragedy that would have occurred as a result of the information he has recorded (though at this point the film takes a completely ironic twist which I wont give away.)

It’s interesting to note that in both films, the surveillance expert begins as an unemotional witness to events but eventually turns into a sympathizer of his targets. Both films explore numerous other issues too, but central to each film is the idea that it is impossible for any human being to be a mere neutral observer of events around him. At some point the desire to influence events, to correct wrongs overcomes even the most stoic, duty-bound automaton type character like Weisler or Gene. Also, both films expose how ideology (political, professional…) need not always assume precedence in our dealings with the world, particularly in the face of raw human emotions that bind people even on opposite sides of the same issue.

Wikipedia articles on both films:
The lives of others
The conversation

How to make wealth.

How to make wealth.

An evolutionary view of leadership

Yesterday, The Hindu Business Line carried my latest column in which I explore the relationship of leadership to various kinds of wages. Link: An evolutionary view of leadership

Full text follows:
A casual perusal of the management section of any bookstore would suggest that ‘leadership’ is the most desirable goal that people have for their lives. This may indeed be true, but evidence in the real world suggests that there is more to leadership than meets the eye.

In the real world, leadership is often bestowed upon an individual who is most likely to work in the interest of the group he leads, even if it means sacrificing his own well-being. While, the first-half of that statement is rather clichéd, the second part is the one that is more interesting. It is our tendency to choose leaders who will not work for their own self-interest that leads most people to actually not want to be leaders themselves. They will gladly be followers and reap the benefits of having a leader who will work to maximise the wellbeing of his constituency, rather than step on the pedestal themselves. This argument is also found in Plato’s Republic.

Plato’s Republic presents this idea through an argument between Socrates and Thrasymachus in the course of which Socrates says: “No one willingly chooses to rule and to take other people’s troubles in their hand and straighten them out, but does ask for wages… In a city of good men, if it came into being, the citizens would fight not to rule. There it would be clear that anyone who is a true leader doesn’t by nature seek his own advantage but that of his subjects. What kind of wages is Socrates referring to? The answer is — money, honour or a penalty if the individual refuses to lead.” (Source: Justice and the Leader, by Plato from Republic Book I – Hackett Publishing, 1992)

Leaders and wages

Now, this seems to suggest that people only become leaders in order to get the above kinds of ‘wages’ and for no other reason. In other words, if there were no ‘wages’, no one would ever want to be a leader. This may be a bit far-fetched. Surely, history has shown us enough examples of ‘wage-less’ leaders such as Gandhi and Mother Teresa. The idea of ‘servant leadership’ developed by Robert Greenleaf suggests that a leader’s role is purely to serve the needs of his constituency and not to increase his personal power or glory. In other words, for such leaders the wages, if any, are purely incidental.

Is there any way to reconcile these two schools of thought — one which suggests that all leaders work for tangible or intangible ‘wages’ and the other that suggests that leaders should only serve their followers and have no other goals? It may be instructive to view the concept of leadership as an evolutionary hierarchy. At the lower end of the hierarchy are leaders who are in it for the wages. Needless to say, they too serve their followers, but do so with personal goals in mind. As the leader evolves over time, the marginal utility of wages would decrease and finally reach a point where he demonstrates the qualities of a classic servant leader who is focused on the needs of others.

Servant leaders

Examples of such evolution are easy to find, particularly among business leaders who after many years of building great companies move on to set up charitable foundations that are not profit oriented (the Bill Gates Foundation for instance). In between these two extremes, there could be many other variants with differing ratios of ‘wage’ to ‘wage-less’ orientations.

Viewing leadership in this manner, as an evolutionary ladder, also helps us resolve Plato’s problem of people not wanting to be leaders in the first place. The initial steps of this evolutionary ladder allow and encourage wages, thereby ensuring that people are motivated to take up responsibilities that they would have otherwise shirked, and the higher levels of the ladder are for people who are not in it for themselves.

The key thing then becomes identifying the right kind of leaders for the right kind of roles in society. An example of how things go wrong when there is a mismatch between the role and the wage orientation of leaders in that role is the political leadership in this country which has long been tarnished by cases of corruption by individuals who seek personal ‘wages’ over the larger good . On the other hand, middle managers in most businesses belong to the ‘wage oriented’ category, and they certainly seem to do justice to their roles by both maximising their personal gains as well as achieving organisational goals.

In conclusion, it makes sense to allow and embrace both wage oriented and non-wage oriented leadership, provided that the extent of wage orientation in the individual matches with the leadership role that is on offer.

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Previously published articles:

• Leaderless Groups - a case against hierarchy
• Free riding and social loafing
• Decision making in groups
• The networked marketplace
• The spiritual organization
• Interactive Brands
• The long tail opportunity
  

Obama

This is an extraordinary piece of oratory:

The long tail opportunity

Today, The Hindu Business Line is carrying my latest column in which I explore 'long tail' markets, a concept that was first made popular by Chris Anderson at Wired magazine. Link to the article on the Business line site: The long tail opportunity.

Here's the full text.

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We live in a world of infinite choices. Yet traditionally, mass media and mass marketing have always trained their attention on ‘hits’. The reason why they do this is the prohibitive cost of distribution of goods and services. Thus, an average bookstore owner needs to decide exactly which titles to stock in order to optimally monetise the limited shelf space that he has available. In other words, he needs to clearly identify the ‘hits’ which would s ell enough copies to justify their existence on his shelves.

This notion of ‘hits’ extends to all other types of products — music albums, films, fashion, retail stores and so on. So is there a market beyond these hits? Traditional wisdom would suggest that ‘non-hits’ is not a market worth chasing. The facts, however, prove the opposite.

With the advent of the Internet, limitations such as distribution costs and shelf space have ceased to exist. Thus, an Amazon.com can offer an unlimited choice of books by an unlimited number of authors that traditional bookstores cannot offer because the sales of such books would not make up for the cost of printing and distributing them. In theory, Amazon can make a book available on its Web site even if less than 50 people eventually buy it.

The long tail as a concept was first elucidated by Chris Anderson in his bestselling book by the same name. The long tail refers to the tail of the demand curve where infinite choices exist. The head of the demand curve consists of all the ‘hits’ which are very popular, and the tail extends infinitely to cover infinite ‘non-hits’, i.e. products with niche consumers. Earlier, marketers ignored the tail because they did not have the means to make the products in the tail available to their audiences, but today the Internet enables them to do so profitably. An analysis of Amazon’s sales by Chris Anderson indicated that a large proportion of its income actually came from obscure titles and not bestsellers.

Mass customisation

One major advantage of using the long tail benefits of the Internet is that it enables producers — of products, content and so on — to offer truly customised products to their target group. Apple’s iTunes, for instance, can offer songs by totally unknown artists who may not have a market in traditional mass media. YouTube offers small filmmakers the opportunity to showcase their content to the whole world. Self-publishing tools such as blogs allow you to write about extremely esoteric topics and still have a global audience for your offering.

The tail of the demand curve explains why small budget films such as Khosla ka Ghosla and Bheja Fry managed to become ‘hits’ in the face of competition from traditional big budget films. These smaller films managed to find an efficient distribution channel (multiplexes that screen many movies and hence diversify risk) to reach their small target audience (possibly educated urban youth who frequent multiplexes and prefer meaningful cinema to blockbuster entertainers). Such examples also prove that to tap into long tail markets, the Internet need not be the only medium.

The Indian context

Is Indian business geared up to the long tail opportunity? Sadly, the answer seems to be a big no. Not enough companies are actively using the Internet as a significant distribution channel for their products. In a market with about 50 million Internet users that is growing faster than ever before, it is critical for companies to have a significant footprint in the online world too.

Some players use the Internet as an online replica of their offline offerings. Big retail chains have launched such e-commerce portals that mirror their store offerings. A better strategy would be to use the Internet to purely tap into long tail markets. Companies in the financial services space can allow their customers to buy customised products that would otherwise cost a lot to launch due to the prohibitive costs of training intermediaries (this sector is today dependent on intermediaries). Telecom companies could use the Internet to launch a number of niche tariff plans. (I’m imagining a slider-based interface that allows me to precisely set my rental, STD, local calls and SMS tariffs).

The traditional argument against such ideas is that you need a critical mass of customers to launch a product. Yet, the magic of the long tail is precisely the fact that you are targeting customers who are not usually on your radar, but rather the small number of customers (which we could call micro-segments) who buy niche offerings. Multiply an infinite number of such micro-segments with the small volumes associated with each micro-segment and you have potentially huge revenues. The possibilities are endless at the tail of the demand curve and it can no longer be ignored in the midst of the noise generated by ‘hits’. What remains to be seen is how innovative we can get with tapping these micro-segments of the market.

(The writer, an alumnus of XLRI, works with a multinational financial services company.)

Previously published articles:

• Leaderless Groups - a case against hierarchy
• Free riding and social loafing
• Decision making in groups
• The networked marketplace
• The spiritual organization
• Interactive Brands

Social Graphs and Vanilla Networks

Jyri Engestrom has an extremely interesting post on where social networks are headed. In this post, he points out Brad Fitzpatrick's views on how the social graph (the map of how users are connected to each other) should be made universal.

Brad's solution is to create a service where people go to aggregate all their networks into a master network, and then let other services check against that to automate friend discovery. The outcome to the user who signs up to a new service should be "These 8 friends of yours are already users here, would you like to share your books / music / pictures / trips / etc. with them?"

I'm not so convinced due to the following reasons:

1. Firstly, 'friends' is a nebulous concept and it varies from network to network (my Linkedin friends may not be the same as my Orkut friends), thereby making the whole idea of having a universal social graph quite impractical.

2. Secondly, Brad assumes that all the competing services will actually cooperate with each other to share their respective social graphs. I doubt that will happen. If it did, then it would be equivalent to voluntarily reducing exit barriers for its users.

But it looks like the problem that Brad is addressing is one of singular identity (say a Google Account or a Hotmail Passport) that uniquely maps people across applications. That's a separate problem in itself. Anyway, here is what I think will be the future of social graphs and networks.

Where I see this heading
I forsee that in the future there will be two kinds of 'social network' services:
1. A plain vanilla social network with the usual friend of friend and profile features.
2. Satellite social applications like say a photo sharing service, a book sharing service etc.

My guess is that there would be about 3-4 major plain vanilla networks. The satellite services would then sit on top of these networks and share their social graphs. So say I signup on Facebook (the plain vanilla network), and then I feel like signing up at Shelfari.com to share books with friends. I would just activate Shelfari inside Facebook. The Shelfari-Facebook tieup would not be exclusive. Shelfari could go and signup with all the other vanilla providers too. Facebook has already moved in this direction by allowing 'applications' by independent developers to hook into Facebook. The next level is for all these 'applications' to have their separate identity in the world outside Facebook, thereby allowing users of other vanilla networks to use them too. The following image should help clarify what I'm trying to say.

Thus, the vanilla networks would serve the purpose of being repositories of social graphs that independent developers of services can tap into.




An arrangement like this would be very useful for all web applications with a social dimension to them. The major vanilla networks house the social graphs, and the independent guys hook in as satellites and share revenues with the parent network.

Business Today's idiotic b-school rankings

Business Today's annual practical joke entitled 'India's best b-schools' is out. The preliminary evidence is as follows:

SIBM is India's number 4 business school

MBA wannabes prefer ICFAI to FMS Delhi

Welingkar Institute of Management is India's number 3 b-school under the parameter 'Functional Head'. Under the same head SIMSREE Mumbai and ABS Noida are amongst the country's top10

Recruiters voted Welingkar as India's number 5 b-school

'Young Executives' ranked SIMSREE and Welingkar at joint number 3. If this is any consolation, these two b-schools managed to beat IIMC.

Without going into the merits and demerits of the aforementioned schools (I'm sure they are reasonably good places), let us now examine the methodology adopted by Business Today and AC Neilson that enables reality to be twisted and turned in any manner deemed fit by the editors of the magazine. The BT ranking claims to be based on the winning brands model i.e. it asks 'consumers' about their preferences with regard to certain brands (in this case b-schools) on certain pre-defined attributes with pre-defined weightages. Hang on. Winning brands? Do prospective MBA students pick their b-schools based on brands as opposed to facts? If that were the case, these applicants would surely flunk the Marketing Research course when they join b-school.

Imagine you have applied for a job, and the interviewer calls up 30 of your friends to find out their 'perception' of your academic performance, intelligence etc instead of objectively measuring it by asking you what your marks were, and verifying supporting documents. Such an interview would be a waste of time to attend - after all the interviewer is not interested in that trivial thing called facts. He is more interested in the feelings that your friends have about you! Your friend Mr.A might 'perceive' you as being a poor student, but 'facts' may indicate that you actually scored 95% in your boards. This is precisely the model that BT has used to rank business schools. They asked random respondents about what they 'felt' about the b-schools in question, and completely disregarded facts - facts such as average salaries, faculty count, published papers produced by the b-schools, infrastructure, exchange programs, international placements etc. Facts that are easily measurable if you get out of your Mumbai office and conduct a survey by actually talking to b-schools as opposed to conducting an inane perception survey with whoever you found at the water cooler. George Bush would love to commission a survey by BT-AC Nielson on the Iraq war - because like him, the BT-AC Nielson guys too hate facts - the prefer feelings.

I could go on and on, but some reputed bloggers have already trashed this survey in some detail. Do check them out.

Rashmi Bansal: This year, last year

Prof. Madhukar Shukla on last year's rankings:
http://alternativeperspective.blogspot.com/2006/07/b-school-ranking-survey-gets-f-grade.html

Outlook has chosen a fact based approach to rank b-schools. They seem to have done a good enough job for both Rediff and Mint to syndicate their content. Here is the link.

Private Equity Jobs

No, you wont find any of those here. But here's an interesting take on the PE phenomenon by Slate.

Dear Diary:

Whatever possessed me to go into private equity? I was so naive. I thought it was just about financial engineering. That certainly is the impression they give you in the media. But turns out that it's actually about hard work! Who'd a thunk it? Here we are in the last week of summer, and everybody is in the Hamptons or in some villa in Tuscany. Everyone, that is, except for me, Private-Equity Man.

More here

Bonus Link: How to make a powerpoint chart, by Seth Godin, easily the best marketing focussed blogger out there.

Pursuit of happiness

Studies by economists show that money is directly related to happiness until it leads people out of abject poverty. Beyond that point, the marginal utility of money (towards increasing happiness) keeps decreasing. The happiness level of someone making $1 million versus $5million is not too different. This however does not stop people from mistakenly viewing money as a source of happiness, and wasting their lives in it's pursuit, but as Will Smith speculated in the film 'The pursuit of happyness', maybe the whole point of that phrase is that happiness is something to be pursued and never attained?

More on leaderless groups

Forrest Christian has an interesting response to my earlier post on leaderless groups. Do check it out here.

I particularly agree with his views on the 'Big man' school of management that involves people bowing to ONE supreme leader in whom we place our faith to lead us. Such structures may have worked well in colonial times, but certainly have no place in the modern workplace, and indeed society. In this context it is interesting that elections in the US tend to surround the 'Big Man' i.e the presidential candidate, whereas elections in India tend to focus more on political parties and their ideologies. I remember reading somewhere that on 'Individualism', Americans score much higher than Indians. I suspect that the Big Man school of management has it's foundations in individualism.

Personal Leadership

Leadership by its very definition seems to assume the presence of a follower who needs to be lead. However, this follower may not always be another person. One form of leadership that I believe in is Personal Leadership - the ability to lead yourself from your current circumstances or situation to a better future. In other words Personal Leadership means taking charge of your own life or situation before taking charge of other people.

Leaderless groups - a case against hierarchy

My latest article in The Hindu Business Line - Leaderless groups - a case against hierarchy. Full text follows:

In his treatise Dastambu, Mirza Ghalib documents the events in Delhi at the time the revolt of 1857 broke out. He writes: "Band upon band of soldiers and peasants had become as one, and far and near, one and all, without even speaking or conferring together, girded their loins to their single aim... City after city lies open, without protectors, filled with men who have none to watch over them, like gardens bereft of their gardeners studded with trees stripped bare of leaves and fruit." (Ghalib - Life, Letters and Ghazals; Ralph Russell; Oxford University Press 2003)

While Ghalib's political leanings are not the subject of this article, what is interesting is his view that the men behind the mutiny were leaderless and hence not worthy of being taken seriously.

Are there any examples to prove that a leaderless group can actually lead to efficient outcomes? Can independently-deciding individuals help a group achieve its goal?

History suggests that in certain situations leaderless groups can indeed achieve a stated objective. Leaderless resistance movements such as guerrilla warfare are a good example of this. Terrorists too tend to operate in independent cells (and not hierarchies). This probably explains why they manage to escape from beneath the eyes of hierarchical intelligence agencies.

Key advantages of a leaderless group include the fact that there is no centralised command and control system, which is vulnerable to attack. Each small group or individual behaves independently based on some shared values. This means that the group is not burdened by traditional hierarchical chains of command, bureaucracy and red-tape in its decision-making. Additionally, affinity of group members towards the cause is likely to be much higher since there is no central authority who forces membership and neither are there any negative consequences of giving up membership. In other words, only truly passionate individuals would aggregate in such a group.

Clearly, leaderless groups are structurally efficient. Are they functionally effective too? In the best-selling book The Wisdom of Crowds, James Suroweicki argues that large, independent groups of people are smarter than an elite few (leaders/ experts). For instance, on Who wants to be a millionaire, audience polls got the correct answer 91 per cent of the time, while the `phone a friend' experts got it right only 65 per cent of the time. He identifies four prerequisites for a `wise' crowd — diversity of opinion, independence, decentralisation and aggregation. There must be a diversity of opinion within the group, which is independent of the views of other members. The group must not have any central chain of command and there must be some way of aggregating various individuals' viewpoints.

The Wikipedia model

Wikipedia (a freely editable online encyclopaedia) is a good example of tapping into the wisdom of crowds. Individuals across the world collectively edit articles to produce content that is by and large of very high quality. There is, of course, the stray incident involving a writer editing an article to depict a deliberately biased point of view. However, Wikipedia does have a core team of editors who scan content for such anomalies. Thus, in effect, the people who contribute to the Wikipedia project are like a leaderless group, which is loosely monitored by a core team of editors.

An interesting thought experiment to conduct would be to evaluate whether such a model can be extended to other kinds of organisations. How could one structure an organisation to tap into the wisdom of crowds? Needless to say, leaderless groups are not suitable for certain kinds of organisations — for instance, a manufacturing organisation would clearly need a highly supervised environment. However, for organisations whose main output is knowledge (software, media) a leaderless approach does seem to be an interesting alternative. Open source software movements clearly show that people don't have any hassles creating intellectual property free of cost — with little or no supervision — if they believe in the larger cause.

Purely from a human psychology perspective, a group with a `leader' necessarily means that one individual becomes bigger than both the cause as well as the other individuals in the group. While this is good in a political cause (like apartheid) where it is important to truly inspire people, it may not be particularly useful in a more everyday cause, like a company that makes a product or service. In the latter, having overarching leaders can lead to harmful political behaviour and other efficiency-dissipating activities that can lead to drop in motivation levels. On the other hand, people are happiest when they work for causes (not people) much larger than their individual selves. In fact, offering work as a service to the Lord, without worrying about one's ego or the end result, finds support in the Bhagvad Gita too. Maybe, it's time organisations experimented more with leaderless set-ups (perhaps within individual divisions if not entirely). History certainly shows that it can work well in a number of contexts.

(The writer, an alumnus of XLRI, works with a multinational financial services company.)

Previously published articles of mine:

• Free riding and social loafing
• Decision making in groups
• The networked marketplace
• The spiritual organization
• Interactive Brands

Google's Adsense Income - Is there a conspiracy?

Google Adsense follows a policy of making payouts only when a user's earnings reach $100. Now, assume that Adsense (like everything else) follows a 80-20 rule i.e 20% of users make 80% of the revenue.

In other words, 80% of Adsense users would be making close to nothing. Assume that the average earnings of these users is about $50. Assume that Adsense has 10 million users.

Adsense users = 10 Million
80% of that = 8 Million
Average earnings of these 8 Million = $50
Total unpaid earnings = $400 Million (!!!)

Lets do some conservative math now
Adsense has 5 million users : $200 Million in unpaid revenues
Adsense has 1 million users: $40 Million unpaid
Adsense has only 500000 users: $20 Million unpaid
These are still large enough numbers to make us want to question what is going on.

Thus, Google could potentially be holding about $400 Million in cash that they probably never will payout because 80% of its users (like me) will never get enough hits to make $100 any time in the near future. Is this a deliberate strategy? Wonder if Google's earnings statements reflect these numbers, but I'm too lazy to check that out!

The least Google should do is to at least payout interest income to these users in addition to what they have already earned.

Technorati Tags: Google, Adsense

Spiderman could be 2007's biggest hit

Rediff reports.



Interesting piece of news this, particularly because the regional language dubs of Spidey 3 (Tamil, Bhojpuri etc) are doing really well.Dubbed movies seem to be a good substitute for poor quality local movies.



While I'm no fan of dubbed movies, Spiderman is certainly the type of movie that wouldn't suffer artistically no matter which language it is dubbed into!



If Bollywood movies were dubbed into English, would they be able to attract a global audience? Of course the plots would still be hackneyed, but for all you know the western audience may lap it up with India being the flavour of the season. I doubt if these dubs would be any worse than those oriental Kung fu action flicks.

Interesting

The Internet is playing a much more important role than anyone ever imagined. Brands are going to be made and destroyed on the Internet, and there’s a whole set of new marketing rules for it. One cardinal rule is trust and respect.

Read more

That's a quote from Keith Pardy, Nokia's senior vice-president of strategic marketing, which appeared in Mint recently.

Reminded me of what I had written for The Hindu Business Line many months back.

All kinds of organisations need to embrace the power of the Internet as the new global market place where brands will be created and destroyed ... Brands would need to be `humble' and not mighty; brands will have to understand, rather than be understood; brands will have to listen and not talk.

Notice the similarity!

Structured Procrastination

This is a very interesting article on procrastination that I found in my inbox. It's apparently written by a Harvard Professor. Presenting it in full below.

Structured Procrastination
by John Perry
Version of April 25, 1995
I have been intending to write this essay for months. Why am I finally doing it? Because I finally found some uncommitted time? Wrong. I have papers to grade, textbook orders to fill out, an NSF proposal to referee, dissertation drafts to read. I am working on this essay as a way of not doing all of those things. This is the essence of what I call structured procrastination, an amazing strategy I have discovered that converts procrastinators into effective human beings, respected and admired for all that they can accomplish and the good use they make of time. All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this bad trait work for you. The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing. Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, like gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they get around to it. Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because they are a way of
not doing something more important. If all the procrastinator had left to do was to sharpen some pencils, no force on earth could get him do it. However, the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.

Structured procrastination means shaping the structure of the tasks one has to do in a way that exploits this fact. The list of tasks one has in mind will be ordered by importance. Tasks that seem most urgent and important are on top. But there are also worthwhile tasks to perform lower down on the list. Doing these tasks becomes a way of not doing the things higher up on the list. With this sort of appropriate task structure, the procrastinator becomes a useful citizen. Indeed, the procrastinator can even acquire, as I have, a reputation for getting a lot done.

The most perfect situation for structured procrastination that I ever had was when my wife and I served as Resident Fellows in Soto House, a Stanford dormitory. In the evening, faced with papers to grade, lectures to prepare, committee work to be done, I would leave our cottage next to the dorm and go over to the lounge and play ping-pong with the residents, or talk over things with them in their rooms, or just sit there and read the paper. I got a reputation for being a terrific Resident Fellow, and one of the rare profs on campus who spent time with undergraduates and got to know them. What a set up: play ping pong as a way of not doing more important things, and get a reputation as Mr. Chips.

Procrastinators often follow exactly the wrong tack. They try to minimize their commitments, assuming that if they have only a few things to do, they will quit procrastinating and get them done. But this goes contrary to the basic nature of the procrastinator and destroys his most important source of motivation. The few tasks on his list will be by definition the most important, and the only way to avoid doing them will be to do nothing. This is a way to become a couch potato, not an effective human being.

At this point you may be asking, "How about the important tasks at the top of the list, that one never does?" Admittedly, there is a potential problem here.

The trick is to pick the right sorts of projects for the top of the list. The ideal sorts of things have two characteristics, First, they seem to have clear deadlines (but really don't). Second, they seem awfully important (but really aren't). Luckily, life abounds with such tasks. In universities the vast majority of tasks fall into this category, and I'm sure the same is true for most other large institutions. Take for example the item right at the top of my list right now. This is finishing an essay for a volume in the philosophy of language. It was supposed to be done eleven months ago. I have accomplished an enormous number of important things as a way of not working on it. A couple of months ago, bothered by guilt, I wrote a letter to the editor saying how sorry I was to be so late and expressing my good intentions to get to work. Writing the letter was, of course, a way of not working on the article. It turned out that I really wasn't much further behind schedule than anyone else. And how important is this article anyway? Not so important that at some point something that seems more important won't come along. Then I'll get to work on it.

Another example is book order forms. I write this in June. In October, I will teach a class on Epistemology. The book order forms are already overdue at the book store. It is easy to take this as an important task with a pressing deadline (for you non-procrastinators, I will observe that deadlines really start to press a week or two after they pass.) I get almost daily reminders from the department secretary, students sometimes ask me what we will be reading, and the unfilled order form sits right in the middle of my desk, right under the wrapping from the sandwich I ate last Wednesday. This task is near the top of my list; it bothers me, and motivates me to do other useful but superficially less important things. But in fact, the book store is plenty busy with forms already filed by non-procrastinators. I can get mine in mid-Summer and things will be fine. I just need to order popular well-known books from efficient publishers. I will accept some other, apparently more important, task sometime between now and, say, August 1st. Then my psyche will feel comfortable about filling out the order forms as a way of not doing this new task.

The observant reader may feel at this point that structured procrastination requires a certain amount of self-deception, since one is in effect constantly perpetrating a pyramid scheme on oneself. Exactly. One needs to be able to recognize and commit oneself to tasks with inflated importance and unreal deadlines, while making oneself feel that they are important and urgent. This is not a problem, because virtually all procrastinators have excellent self-deceptive skills also. And what could be more noble than using one character flaw to offset the bad effects of another?

Update: This is the source

New look

To make up for the fact that my posting has been erratic, I have changed the template of this blog. Same old content. New look!

On a serious note, I've got to get back to regular posting.

Also, if you wish to bring management related posts to my attention, do mail me and I will feature your post on this blog.

The PS3 Song - a Web 2.0 rant

Interesting Web 2.0 approach to telling a brand that it sucks. Check it out!

Pearls before breakfast

Read this.

Go ahead, everything else can wait.