How do you contribute to the nation/society?

This is a question that has been baffling me and I assume a number of people through decades.

Last year, Abhishek Gupta, my friend from college who studied at Upenn afterwards, posed this question to P Chidambram after the Wharton lecture. Chidambram asked him to join politics. He rationalised that Indian politics needs good and educated people like him. He said Abhishek should see that all is not wrong with politics and educated and clean people like Mr. Chidambram himself are able to get better of the dirty politics. I must definitely say that this did enthuse us to look at politics as a long term career but didnt really convince us.

Over the time now I realise that Mr. Chidambram gave a very narrow way to go about contributing to the nation. It is simply not possible that everyone has the same aptitude to go out and play the dirty game. Moreover, the way to contribute should be broad enough and inclusive. Restricting it to joining politics is bound to keep a lot of people away. There should be room for everyone to contribute.

JRD Tata once said that he wanted to join politics after hearing speeches of Nehru at Bombay but decided not to as it was not he could be good at. He wanted to contribute where he could make a difference rather than joining the agitrators in jail. The key lies right there.

It is in pursuing excellence throughout your life. It should be simply excelling and being the best at your chosen profession.

One cannot think of a situation where JRD Tata, Narayan Murthy would have not been involved in their profession. These people contributed immensely to the nation by excelling in their chosen fields. Same goes for many people from different fields – Dr. Trehan, Vinod Dham, Amartya Sen, Rajat Gupta, Satyajit Ray, Raj Kapoor, and so on.

The best part is that now is an age where intellect and capacity to excel is being given a lot of premium. Mr. Chidambram himself is a distinguished lawyer and has realised the fruit of convergence. So has his colleagues Mr. Tharoor and Mr. Sibal. But the top most honours definitely go Nandan Nilenkani to go straight from being the Chairman of Infosys to being a cabinet minister in the union govt. This trend is going to continue as people want to see progress and are looking for leaders who can manage the show and understand the nuances rather than simply agitating on streets.

Life altering indeed .

A Personal Growth Indicator

Everyday you are bombarded with various indicators that give you health of economy from various angles. Each of these claim to be the right indicator for predicting the health of the economy. The underlying idea is that if something can be measured and tracked it can be improved upon. The indicators can also measure things non quantifiable;for example Bhutan has a very novel index of measuring its health – Gross National Happiness Index.

The concept I think is excellent – One has to just find out the right set of indicators that give a snapshot of the status/growth of any parameter. This concept can also be applied to measure personal growth as well. Every individual can have multiple set of indicators depending on his priority to measure and track the growth in the priority areas. For example, professionally I would like to grow in certain aspects on a daily basis to reach my life long goals and thus need to design an indicator comprising of various parameters to track it.

The idea is to keep it simple as the more complex it becomes, the difficult it is to track it.

For myself – working in the knowlede industry, I devised a 4 step concept to measure my growth professionally. I would like to measure my growth on these parameters on a daily and periodic basis to ascertain the contribution of my profession in my growth as a professional.
1. Industry Knowledge
2. Strategy Formulation Skills
3. Project Management and Execution Skills
4. Leadership

These are things that will also allow me to contribute significantly to my organisation as I upgrade my skills. The fact that I am tracking them will allow me to measure the growth, priortise the opportunities that I get during the work and to allow me to extract learnings and apply them during my daily work. One of the advantages of having goals and indicators to track the distance travelled allows you to understand when you are not being in sync with the organisation and if you are acting as a burden/liability. It is sad that a lot of good talent in organisation is usually not aware that they need to move on and that their past performance is keeping them there.