Our frozen chi's and the Workfloor

I left home when I was 20. I had studied Physics(Major) and had no idea what to do next. I took to the seas, I think looking back it was more like a refuge, an asylum. Seeking to get away from all that peer pressure, myself and what not.

1991 June 7, around midnight I arrive in Lagos, Nigeria. Company agent ships me to the nearby hotel to wait for my first “boat”. That's the first time in my life I saw a lot of people , a race totally different from ours. I was warned to be careful, protect my wallet, but they came across as just about any other regular folk. That was my “first encounter”.

Funny, since then I have worked with all kinds of nationalities (Japanese, Chinese, Malaysians, Indonesians, Dutch, Scandinavians, Thai, Americans, Spanish, Argentinians,..I can go on and on). What I have learned in all that is that we are all so much alike. But on board a ship it is “really” different. Your job is crucial and you must work together. That makes you accept each other realistically and naturally. The continuity of your job is very crucial to work together and vice versa. Job selection is very strict and repercussions are severe(if you can’t be that crucial process in business continuity due to your reservations—you get fired, you need to go home, that’s as simple as that). So this is actually a perfect example of a totally effective, result oriented team effort. No one’s got time to squander.

Having done my stint at sea, I decided to become a landlubber in 1999. With a bit of VBA experience on the job, No native language skills, new country. It was a major challenge. And exactly that was something which I looked forward to. Long story short. I learnt the language (native =Dutch) at a speeding pace [and was asked to do a little speech in the town hall (request from the Mayor)], got a job and things began to shape up nice. I then took up Oracle and that was the turning point to my career.

I’ve (tried to) come in terms with a totally different kind of work floor here on land(and in vain). Which is TOTALLY HAPHAZARD!!!. The world here in the corporate world runs very differently. There are no dead lines, no sense of responsibility, too much aggression or no (effective) aggression at all. All that “deadly masala” that can make any well planned, organized team rot in no time. I have never been able to understand the idea of letting a “self serving” management using organizations as hopping stones to make their own ends meet. There is too much of the underutilized (if not totally ignored) chi. So much talent and so much waste. Too many opinions and no concrete decisions. Too much talk and no action. Too much retreat and no advance.

I personally think my orientation is thanks to all those people who I never had the time to "scan under my regressive microscope"(read = judge and mis-judge alike) but get up and work together with them. It has been been a "world experience"(as a friend puts it) for me. I propose that we start getting adaptive. Instead of bringing in software which will be “adaptive”, “on demand”, we must start tuning ourselves to dance in that rhythm. Learn to understand that together we have to churn out the goods out of that refinery. Together we need to march and there is NO TIME TO FRET.