How Far Can You Push It?

The snippets of business leaders calling out what they see as inefficiencies, low productivity and abuse of freedom/flexibility have been coming out over the last 6 months — the popular hits being NRN (Infosys), SNS (L&T) and Jamie Dimon (JP Morgan Chase). Not surprisingly most of the reactions published are taking the opposite side of the argument — I don’t however feel this necessarily means that the majority disagree, rather that it could be a combination of news agencies catering to their audience and folks afraid of backlash if they openly support the sentiments expressed as evidenced by how these senior leaders are being pillared. So there is an element of preference falsification in my opinion.

Whether one agrees or not, such reactions do not allow for meaningful or nuanced discussion.I had commented on NRN’s pov here, so this is more of my take on Jamie Dimon’s statements.

In cases like this, I feel it might help to not take the ideas literally but the essence of it and also to see how to modify it to gain value. There is no need to wholly accept or reject, not take it at face value.

There are also multiple ways to interpret it as the way I see it now is also different from how I would have seen this 5, 10, 15 years ago and possibly the same periods in the future. Keeping all of this in mind, here’s possibly a more productive take on this from an individual’s perspective leaving aside specific companies or employee groups en masse.

1. One needs to find something to do that absorbs them fully, ie they can’t help thinking about it — not switch it on and off for 9–10 hrs a day, 5/6 days a week.

2. This also doesn’t mean they’re working 24*7*365, but that they are fully committed not genuinely compliant/hard working.

3. Ikigai then is a must and not a good to have option.

4. The closest analogy is falling in love as cliched as it sounds, so it has to be calling not just a job.

5. This will not make sense to 90% of people and also cannot be enforced / mandated by orgs or anyone else for that matter — its has to be a voluntary opt in.

6. This is hard! Incredibly maybe even unreasonably so, hence #5