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.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

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...
111 comments
Read more

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...
6 comments
Read more

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...
Post a Comment
Read more