Serendipity and Learning

 As a trainer, one of the ways I build the audience connect with metaphors and examples. For instance, in India if you used Sachin Tendulkar and Vinod Kambli as an analogy - everybody who was more than 5 years old in the 90s gets it.  Similary, there were cult movies and dialogues and statements and events people are familiar with. Sometimes when you want to drive home a point, these analogies come in handy.  According to me, this is one of the toughest leaps in training people who are from a different culture.  But now, over the last few years, with the fragmentation of content and the things people watch and relate to and recollect, this corpus is shrinking. There are audiences who swear by GoT while there are others that GoT even exists. Ditto for comics, bollywood, hollywood, classical music, sports, fitness and hobbies. There is almost no "mainstream culture".  Of course there is,  it is just tough to define it in a way that everybody in the room relates to it.  And as w

 Many of us have an aspersion to networking and networkers. As do I. Some years ago, in one of my conversations while taking over a new role, I was asked to network. Given my reluctance to network, I redefined it in my head. I redefined networking as "meeting for work" or "create work and a necessity to meet". Networking (or the lack of it) continued to haunt me when I was working a consultant. Until I came upon the Giver/Taker/Matcher framework of Adam Grant. The motto of networking is to network without networking. Or in other words, networking without expectation of anything. Or in other words, be a giver to your network and watch it grow.  Over the last few months, I have given my time for coaching, brainstorming discussions, reading articles or CVs, connecting job seekers to companies (and vice versa), made a course for an educational institution, engaged on panel discussions with students, worked on organizing an event. And within the company, worked on projec

 Many years back I was (as usual) breathlessly presenting an idea to a colleague. I was relatively new in the firm and I thought I had found something interesting. The colleague listened to it calmly and said, "This is such a great idea, but hey, I have just submitted a proposal for exactly this to the boss." I was disheartened and stopped working on the idea.  Time passed and every time I spoke to the colleague about the idea - it was always round the corner. In fact it was round the corner till the time I quit. That was when I read the story of cookie-licking . This is a slightly old blog - it is all of 13 odd years old, but give it a read.  So, this colleague was indulging in cookie-licking by preventing my team from working on this idea. And as time passed, I discovered that the said colleague had many licked cookies and yet, no cookie was ever eaten.  Thoughts as I learnt that one of those initiatives was still "just around the corner"