I couldn’t agree more and kept thinking about it afterwards. There was no doubt about the fact that happiness is the magic ingredient in any field. Think of all the experts or leaders you admire: The one common factor among all of them is the sheer joy you see on their faces when they are in their professional domain.

And yet, happiness seems so elusive at work, almost like an oxymoron.

Mercer’s What’s Working™ 2011 survey revealed that over half of Britain’s employees are unhappy at work. Sure, you can dismiss this as a sign of the times, but the fact is that this is the moment when we most need the positive energy of our people at work. A general malaise or apathy among the workforce will only dig the hole deeper.

HR experts believe that happiness at work is achieved when you are in the ‘flow’. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is the architect of the notion of ‘flow’. He believes creativity is a central source of meaning in our lives. According to him, “When we are involved in (creativity), we feel we are living more fully than during the rest of life.”

Tony Hseih at Zappos has been using scientific sense, business sense, and human sense to build a business model around a culture of happiness at work. Most people agree that the happiness quotient leads to an incremental increase in productivity. And Tony is living proof of this.

So how do we find this zone of enjoyment, this magic ingredient of happiness at work and in our lives? I believe we can do this by taking charge of our time and therefore, taking charge of our life. In a previous post on this blog, I had mentioned a conversation I had with a very interesting gentleman on a train ride during my days as a student when I was quite a drifter! He told me, think of time as currency. In fact, it is the only currency we are born with. Treat that currency as what you are spending – every second, every minute, every hour and day. You have to think about who decides to spend that currency. When you begin to take responsibility for your time, you start enjoying it more – simply because it is your conscious decision to spend it the way you do. That is the magic ingredient.

So now, let’s go back to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and his thoughts on finding the flow. In his words:  If one prays in order to be holy, or exercises to develop strong pectoral muscles, or learns to be knowledgeable, then a great deal of the benefit is lost. The important thing is to enjoy the activity for its own sake…”

In other words, if you are doing what you choose to do at a particular moment in time, and then focus all your energy on creative execution of the activity you have chosen, you will find yourself in that elusive zone of enjoyment. And when all these joyous moments add up together, isn’t that the very definition of happiness and success at work?

Even as the dazed students were trying to make sense of what had just transpired, Father McGrath rose to his feet and said it was a staged show. “I want you’ll to sit down and write what you have just seen,” said the Irishman.

As it turned out, each student’s version of the events was different. The exercise left an indelible impression on the 21-year-old Vineet Nayar, now the Vice Chairman and CEO of HCL Technologies, who still carries his learnings from the experience. “If you want to say something, say it in the Father Mc-Grath way so that people never forget about it, or don’t say it at all,” he says.

Such a dramatic approach today forms the cornerstone of Nayar’s communication philosophy. Be it the 88,000-odd employees of HCL Technologies, customers, vendors or the public at large, Nayar makes it a point to get his message across with energy and elan.

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Completely engrossed in these captivating stories, I asked my daughter, a high school student, what she thought of the impact that these amazing women had on society. I was caught completely off guard by her reply. She said: Women have always known the powerful impact that they have on society. It is the men that we should focus on instead – their acceptance, or the lack of it, of the role of women in transforming their lives and their world.

It set me thinking. She was so right. The spotlight was on the wrong side. We men are moulded all through our lives by women. In our families for sure, but also across all our points of interaction in society. Women who have had a powerful influence on us and have nurtured us into who we are today. We need to think about and internalize this impact instead.

Without a doubt, it would begin with my mother, a lady whose strength lay less in words than in deed. She gave us our space and allowed each of her children to find their own feet and path in life; but she also knew what she would not allow. Quietly, she instilled values of hard work, discipline and humility without making a big deal about it.

At school, my teacher, a lady who I still hold in high esteem – not just for the knowledge she imparted, but her ability to make us dream big – taught us to look beyond the obvious, to find solutions that were not immediately evident. She taught us to imagine what lay beyond the mountains that rose before us and then equipped us with the skills that would hold us in good stead when we actually ventured out to see what really lay there.

Once I moved out of my parents’ house and got married, my wife became a pillar of support, standing by and supporting me through my errors and follies, with an unwavering confidence in my ability to find my goal. And today, my daughter and her vision of the world, is teaching me to look at life afresh.

But these were just inside the house. Looking around, I can think of innumerable women who have influenced my thinking as well as my professional path. As I set out on the uncharted waters of a career, my journey has been impacted by the admirable confidence of women – seniors, peers, colleagues and clients. In the early days of my professional journey, there were a growing number of women, pioneering their way through emerging fields in business. I recollect this self-assured lady, among the few senior managers in IT those days, who was completely oblivious to the reservations the establishment had about her professional capabilities. She was sharp and meticulous, giving nobody a chance to take her role lightly, just because she was a lady. She truly taught us that we could prove doubting Thomases wrong simply by our achievements rather than any theoretical arguments. This lesson has kept me in good stead as we went through the first round of doubts of our Employee First philosophy in recession.

Today, my young women colleagues are weaving their personal and professional lives with élan, without compromising on their goals on either. They are as responsible about their roles are daughter, wives, mothers as they are about their professional commitments as team members, managers or leaders.

Everywhere I look, I see women quietly going about their business, completely sure of the direction they want to take individually and collectively with their organisation and society – leaving the noise about how their role has transformed to the rest of us.

On International Women’s Day, I’d like to say is kudos to these champions who have taught us many a crucial lesson in our lives, and more power to womanhood and its unparalleled ability to transform our world. But I would also like to ask my male colleagues: Think about the role that women have played in your lives. How have they influenced your lives? What lessons have you drawn from them?

It set me thinking. Rather than follow the norm of initiating big changes on New Year’s Day, she had discovered the power of small sustainable change. She represented the potential leaders of tomorrow. Increasingly, young men and woman like her are rejecting “the norm” to embracing behaviour patterns that completely invert conventional wisdom. I decided to explore other such attributes being adopted by them. Character traits that would be considered atypical among leaders today. I found what I believe could be 5 critical attributes of tomorrow’s leaders:

Influencers: First and foremost, these are not “leaders” in the traditional definition of the term. They do not seek authority and do not believe in command and control management. What they do have is a distinct span of influence. They inspire respect. And this spreads out in all directions – amongst peers, juniors, seniors. And interestingly, this is a two way phenomenon. For, they are completely open to being influenced by members of the same circle.

Support players: The captains of the sports teams in our era have usually been the star players. This is accepted as the norm. Be it team leader, political leader, or business leader, we pick them all on the same principle: The star performer. But these young leaders of tomorrow are not aspiring to be among the star players. They are busy building star teams, invisibly supporting and building on the strengths of their team.

 ‘Ristakers’: These young men and women have the courage to make mistakes. I like to call these “ristakes”. These lie at the very root of destructive innovation, the fuel of change. The ristakers believe in the power of change and are willing to take chances to break status quo. We all know that we need radically new solutions for the unprecedented problems we are faced with today. The answer lies in trying new things, without the fear or making a mistake. And that is embodied in the fearlessness of this generation.

Emotional fools: Far from the robotic or cold stereotypes of the workforce, these are emotional, even passionate, individuals for whom being ‘humane’ is very high on the priority list. Their high emotional quotient also feeds into their sense of individual (and thereby collective) social responsibility. They want to make things better – for themselves, their friends, community and the world at large. To them, the office represents far more than a “work”place. It is an extension of life itself. And this is evident in their approach to work and expectation of the workplace.

‘Irrationalists’: Look around. Gone are the days of being ‘practical’. The young emerging leaders do not subscribe to popular notions of “realism.” Their optimism appears irrational in a sea of pessimism. When everyone around them is giving up hope, they continue to believe against all odds. Their sentiment is infectious and has the power of turning the tide.

Looking at them, you cannot help but feel that the future is positive and in safe hands. In fact, at Davos this year, I was truly missing these optimists among the attendees weighed down by the burden of the global economic turmoil. They are the ones who will spot the first rainbow in the sky and it is in our interest to engage them proactively so that they can paint the bleak shades of today with the bright colours of their tomorrow. Don’t you think so?

Let me explain what I mean there – Imagine that you and I were on a ledge of a building that is on fire. I guess we have three options. Call for a fire brigade and hope it comes on time, take a risk and jump to safety or do nothing and simply shout for help in hope that someone will come and save us. As I looked around the attendees at Davos, many were indeed shouting for help, but I was in search for people who were “doing” something to save themselves and the building. Fortunately, I did find them in a good number and was able to see the outlines of a vivid rainbow on the Davos sky.

Talking to Nobel Laureates , CEOs and world leaders, I came back with a firm view that we are in a challenging phase but definitely not at the ‘beginning of the end’ ! The global economy, is still growing, it’s expected to grow 2.2% this year if not more. And most CEOs in Davos believed that the US too may deliver a positive surprise, backed by a 2.8% growth in the last quarter. So how does one explain the noise?

A prominent economist I met at Davos defined it as “solid at the core with turbulence at the edges” . Although there’s a lot of turbulence at the periphery, which is generating a lot of noise, core countries and companies are doing well. For example, while Greece and Italy are experiencing economic turmoil, Germany at the core is growing.

Similarly, good companies are growing, though some companies on the edges who have got their strategy wrong are struggling to remain relevant. Global institutions are largely intact and we are solving more and more problems through conversation and dialogue, not war. The world economy seems to be driven by three factors – fundamentals, policy and confidence . While fundamentals continue to be strong at the core and the right policy frameworks are being debated and decided, the real challenge is around confidence. The consensus at Davos was that if confidence can be restored , an economic resurgence will undoubtedly follow.

This call for optimism was also writ large in the Forum’s agenda this year, which sought to find solutions for fixing economic disparity that is threatening social unrest . The solution, most people felt, was not to kill capitalism , which has brought us to our steadily improving world, but to adapt it to changing times. Another hope that ran adjacent was the increasing clout of the emerging markets . Interestingly , this acknowledgment of a shift in economic power toward emerging economies was accompanied by a ‘softening’ of the problem definition. Sessions mulling on ‘value context’ , ‘wise leadership’ and ‘ethical dilemmas’ were full to their seams. And for the first time ever I noticed that the Davos vocabulary, which used to have a strongly economic cast, today includes terms like ‘moral compass’!

I would like to believe that this “spiritualization of Davos” brought in a well-meaning determination in most dialogues. In the cross-industry CEO meeting on job creation , for example, it was clear to me that most companies both planned to hire more people and build new pools of workforce. There was a sense of urgent commitment in the room, a collective ownership of the problem and a collective resolve to solve it.

What more can one expect ? Rome was not built in a day and neither can we hope to solve all the global problems in one shot or at one place. There are many issues indeed that need to be resolved today, but their number or scale is not any less than what it was a decade ago or will be in the one ahead. Human evolution is always accompanied by new challenges; the important point is not to be overwhelmed by them. At Davos I saw tremendous resolve on the faces of some of the brightest brains in the world to solve the problems in front of us. I believe that is enough reason for us to be pragmatic if not optimistic and more importantly to keep the faith. If we could only lift our eyes and look up…there is a rainbow on the horizon and it’s only getting brighter by the day.

Originally published in Times of India. You can read the article here

Being stuck on the ground, waiting in an airport for a delayed flight to take off, often provides me with a surprisingly eye-opening and high-level perspective on the world. As an antidote to the boredom, I’ll scan the waiting area and imagine how the worldview of someone in the room differs from mine.

Sitting in the New Delhi international terminal as I made my way to the World Economic Forum summit in Davos, I noticed a young man who was dressed in the counter-cultural style of his generation. I wondered what he might say if I told him where I was going — that is, to join a discussion among political, business, and cultural leaders about the problems facing our uncertain world.

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It was a great trip and we came back completely rejuvenated. But, on our return, we heard  stories from acquaintances who had got stuck on the very same route that weekend. Looking back, I am amazed at the management mantras we could draw from our experience. I’d like to share these deceptively simple rules of the road with you.

The right vehicle for the terrain: Picking the right vehicle for the journey seems such an obvious decision: An SUV for better maneuverability on hilly terrain, a van for lots of space with kids. But when we put together a team on a new project, do we pay the same obvious attention to creating the right blend of expertise and experience or do we bow to other constraints, such as available time and bandwidth? The importance of this exercise cannot be underplayed – as it excruciatingly evident in adverse situations.

Check traffic and weather: That’s hygiene before setting out on the road, right? But at work, it might be worthwhile to check: Having put together a team, do we jump right into the nitty gritty of the business challenge, or do we step back for a moment to study the external environment impacting the client?

Chalk the right route: Sometimes, it is better to select driving directions to make the shortest time rather than the shortest distance. The optimal route would be based on a combination of the first two points and the specifics of the project. Consequently, the right path to get from Point A to Point B – from the business challenge to the solution – may not necessarily be direct or the shortest distance, but the most effective path to success.

Fuel up: Besides filling the tank before a road trip, you probably also check the oil and coolant levels, as well as the air pressure in the four wheels and the spare tire. In addition, you might carry along some supplies like water, snacks, and perhaps a first aid kit. Similarly, at work, having decided the route and before taking a deep dive, the next step would be to gather the necessary resources to maximize efficiency.

Set your pace: It’s time to set out on your journey. Yet as you do, you pace yourself based on the distance to be covered, time in hand as well as the speed limit. In other words, you find a balance between short term profitability and sustainability. You navigate the traffic, negotiate bends, and take advantage of clear patches to maximize the opportunities along the way.

Timely servicing: Having experienced the joy of a road trip, you return to send your car off to the auto shop for a quick servicing. You heed the mechanics advice on the need to replace or repair any wear and tear along the way. Do we also pay the same attention to a periodic skills review so as to upgrade our own competencies as and when required?

It all seems so obvious and systematic on a road trip, doesn’t it? But at work as in life, some of these steps merge into each other and others are skipped due to various compulsions along the way. And these are the very gaps that cause unforeseen problems.

How can we learn from these simple lessons from the road to make ourselves more effective at work? Would you like to add a few of your own experiences here so we can put together a collective compilation of management mantras from the road?

Business Today Q&A with Vineet Nayar on ‘Employees First, Customers Second’.

Click here to download pdf (part 1)
Click here to download pdf (part 2)