Skip to main content

Fake Guru

 The author of this highly pointless article calls himself "the office whisperer". What he calls the trend of the future was available quite ubiquitously even twenty years ago. The right to work from home (telecommute) part-time or even full-time as reward for strong performance was common in mundane organizations like banks and health insurance companies. Even as a consultant, I got to enjoy those privileges, the full-time employees had a much better deal and rightly so. The closing of this writing so clueless that I have to wonder if the wisdom that author is spewing out sprung from the trusty ChatGPT

By anchoring flexibility as a merit-based privilege, you invite a culture of self-motivation and responsibility–one that values results over routine, innovation over presence, and autonomy over micromanagement. It’s a cultural shift that can redefine what it means to be productive in the modern world.

People had reasonable expectation of quality and originality if stuff was published in Fortune magazine. That was before people started to call themselves whisperers of various sorts. Such a tragedy that this stuff gets written and promoted all around as some kind of genius revelation. I wish I had the contact information of N so I could send this this piece of nonsense to her. She could opine based on her direct experience. 

This woman made dozens of telecommute decisions for her staff every year at performance review time. She was tough but fair, close to retirement age and this was already a couple of decades ago. It had been the norm in this health insurance company for a while - a system that worked well and people liked. Underperformers felt like they were being named and shamed because they had to badge in everyday, supervised more heavily than the stars. But it gave them a tangible goal to work towards for the whole year and develop the work ethic that automatically qualified them for remote work.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Changing Pace

This blog has been a big part of my life for the last five years. Besides giving me the opportunity to connect with a number of interesting people and share my thoughts and ideas with them, it has been a form of daily meditation for me. No matter what the day threw my way, I made a very deliberate effort to find a little quiet time to write.The process of thinking about what to write and then the act of writing itself worked as an antidote to aggravations big and small. Five and half years ago, when I started Heartcrossings both my personal and professional lives left a lot to be desired for. The only real happiness I had was in being J's mother. While that was often enough to make me forget what I did not have, I sorely needed a third place to call my own and shape in the likeness of my dreams. This blog has been where there were no limits or constraints and that was absolutely exhilarating - it is the reason I have been able to nurture it for as long and as much as I have. A lot ...