(Delivered in Sep & Dec 2021)
Thanks to all of you for inviting me to speak to a new crop of BBA students who are embarking on a journey of learning and discovery. As I see all the enthusiastic and energetic faces here, I am reminded of the time when i was sat where you are presently. That was an era where your only source of information was the morning newspapers, a time where speaking to friends meant you actually had to meet them in person, where researching about something meant going to the library or locating someone who actually knew about it, booking a ticket to Nagpur where I studied meant standing in the queue at Vijayawada Railway station for two hours and informing my parents that I reached safely involved writing a letter and posting it. We read about computers and Information Revolution in the newspapers but home computing was no where, forget Vijayawada which was a sleepy town, not even in Bangalore was Personal computer anything personal. Humans don't realise history when it’s happening. You were all born 10 to 11 years after I started my college in 1992. And you could have been born on a different planet. Such has been the change in those 10 years and the 10 years after. Amazon is older than you, Google is older than you, you were still in your nappies when Facebook started and by the time you were 10 you broke a few laptops or mobile phones, you were speaking to your uncle or brother or sister over face time whilst they were 10000 kilometres away. Siri, Alexa and Google have helped you find more things more quickly and in all probability a majority of you have never seen the inside of a library…
Change is all around us and is the only constant in our lives. It always challenges and threatens the existing world order. Be it the Potters wheel in early human history, or the printing press of middle ages or internet led fourth industrial revolution. Lets take the Printing press - invented in 1440 by Gutenberg a German goldsmith. Within 40 years 20 million and within 100 years of the invention 200 million books were published. To give you some context, Columbus landed in what he thought was India, but was actually Americas, in 1492 and Vasco Da Gama rediscovered the sea route to India in 1498. Scientific discoveries and inventions spread like wildfire as a consequence of this explosion in printing and dissemination of knowledge. We can almost draw a line of cause and effect from the invention of the printing press to the Industrial revolution. Industrial revolution meant mass production of goods. Mass Production of goods meant two things - 1) demand for raw material needed for manufacturing 2) more people or markets where the finished goods can be sold. This led to Europeans fanning out and colonising the world for raw materials and markets. Ironically and for various reasons Germany where the printing press was invented came late to the imperialist party and the ensuing tensions directly resulted in the First World War. On a separate track the industrial revolution led to urbanisation and workers living in squalid and dirty slums. These conditions led Karl Marx to write his Communist Manifesto and the two tracks collided in the First World War with the communist revolution in Russia. This led to the second War and then the Cold war. Which in turn triggered a technological race between the super powers. The Internet is a direct output of this conflict having originated from DARPA. The Economist magazine has called DARPA- the American agency, which stands for (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) as an organisation "that shaped the modern world," and pointed out that "Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine sits alongside weather satellites, GPS, drones, stealth technology, voice interfaces, the personal computer and the internet on the list of innovations for which DARPA can claim at least partial credit.
And you my friends are in the thick of these changes. What’s the term used to call your generation? - Post millennial, Gen Next, Gen Z. If you even for a second thought that what else could change you couldn't be more mistaken. The driver less car as a concept is out of the labs and in the real world. Imagine a world where cars can communicate with other cars around it to get real time data of the environment, where they can actively detect and react to road signs and traffic lights. Go a step further what if these cars fly and you have a Uber Fly. This is not a flight of fantasy or a Mayabazaar movie. If there is the technology humans will find a way to put it to use. And the technology is already there. The possibilities are limitless. Just over the last few months we have seen 3 private entrepreneurs send people to space. Who knows one of you might be the first person to setup a colony on Mars. We live in truly exciting times. It is natural to be wary of change but we can all ride this change to a better tomorrow.
But with so much information out there how do we separate fact from fiction? This has been an age old issue but has been exacerbated with the world becoming so tightly interconnected. It is okay to not know about everything. Critical thinking is not about knowing all the facts, it is about deciding which facts to use for solving a problem or making a decision. In fact when you all become Managers one day you will realise that there is never complete and correct information. The real world is complex and messy. It is not a graph in the class room where there are two parameters and you can plot or predict their values for any unknown. When you look at big data sets you have to consider outliers, wrong values. You have to remember that correlation is not causation. Look at what are the assumptions under pinning the data. Is the sampling only true under particular conditions. If you wait for the perfect data set to make a decision you could be waiting forever or lose valuable time which makes or breaks a project or product. There is no single course or degree which will prepare you for the kind of thinking needed to make decisions under such conditions. We can only keep practising to get better and improve our thinking. At this point I highly recommend you to watch Julia Galef’s TED talk on “Why you think you are right, even if you are wrong?” Julia is a young American philosopher who started the Centre for Applied Rationality. I will repeat the example that she quotes - Lets say you are soldier. Whats your duty? It is to follow orders and do as you are told. It is for you to take the orders as they are and align your views to it and then act on it to make them come true. But armies just don't have soldiers. They also have scouts. A scout is someone who goes ahead of everyone else to gather information about enemy’s position, strengths, weaknesses and movements. He or she is there to absorb and observe the reality of what they are seeing. They don’t bend the reality to suit their needs or beliefs. Julia says we should all develop a scout mindset. ie see facts as they are, not coloured by our preexisting beliefs. We have to accept them even if they are unpleasant and not to our liking.We need to be open, curious and grounded. It is okay to accept that we are wrong when new evidence or facts come to light. There is no pride in sticking to a wrong belief just to satisfy our ego.
Human mind comes with many unconscious biases. By being aware of what they are we can try and minimise their effects. Lets look at some examples.
eg you are shopping for a pair of shoes and see something priced at Rs.10,000. You think dear o dear this is expensive! But if the label had Rs.15,000 which was struck out and after a discount is Rs.10,000, you think ah that's a great price. We see this all the time. This is called Anchoring bias - it causes us to rely heavily on the first piece of information we get. All subsequent data is viewed with that in mind leading to sometimes incorrect conclusions.
Moving on - Am I more likely to be caught up and killed in a terrorist attack or am I more likely to die due to a lightning strike. Any guesses? Most people say they are worried about terrorism. But its four times more likely that you would die of a lightning strike than any attack. This is called an Availability bias. Because there is a lot of news and information about something we ignore all the other pieces of data.
How many of you have done something because your friends or everyone else is doing it? Almost all of us have done that at some point. I recently bought a cryptocurrency because everyone I knew was doing it. This is called a bandwagon effect. I did not do any other research and needless to say I did not come out very well because of this. As soon as i bought the crypto China restricted crypto trading and I lost more than 50% of what i invested.
Anyone watching or playing football or cricket here? Do you ever have an argument with your friends that the referee or umpire’s decisions were biased/partial when they go against your team? When the same happens against the opponent you think the umpire was fair. Noticed that? That is called blind spot bias.
Now lets speak of something interesting. Any of you follow any TV news channels? Why? What do you like in it?...Confirmation bias! This causes huge problems. For one we cherry pick data that we like. Your existing beliefs are clouding your decision making. And our beliefs are not always right.
There are many more of these cognitive biases that inhabit the human mind. Evolutionary biologists and psychologists have explained the reason for these biases in terms of evolution. A common example is stereotyping. On the plains of Africa when early man developed it made sense to think of everything that was round and cylindrical and hanging on the tree as a snake. You are better off thinking of it as a snake rather than a rope. Otherwise you wont survive. That concept of generalising or in fancy words stereotyping is what makes us think of people based on set notions - in America for example the police might think that's a black man with a hoodie and so he must be a criminal.
As they say recognising something is a problem is half the battle won. There is no magic pill that you can swallow that will help you conquer the biases. We can only review our decisions honestly and critique ourselves. The best exercise for critical thinking is to write. When we write we are taking time to form our ideas and think them over. You can start to write about any topic. Look at the topic from different angles, play the devils advocate. Dwell over which facts are important to the argument and which can be discarded. But how to get better at writing and articulating our views? Read! What was the last book each of you read?.......Read as much as you can. It can be your favourite novelist or columnist. But try to incorporate some non-fiction into your reading. It doesn't have to be about business just because you are doing a business degree. It could be history, sociology or science even. And read different kinds of authors and views. And you don't have to read just English books. Please read Telugu or books in your mother tongue as well. మన మాతృ భాష రోజు రోజుకీ అంతరించి పోతోంది. తెలుగు పుస్తకాలు కొనండి, చదవండి. Keep an open mind, listen to music, play music, do something totally different from your day job. This will help you keep yourself fresh, give you new insights and is good for your well being. Schools and colleges tend to make us into similar shaped bricks with all of us thinking alike and having same views and biases. Try to resist that and become like clay which is flexible and can take different shapes based on changing circumstances.
With all this there is no guarantee that we will get our decisions right. Inevitably we will make mistakes. We will lose. We will fail. It will look like a big defeat. As if the whole world is conspiring against you to make you lose. Our family, schools, colleges and the society worship success but they don’t teach us how to cope with failure. There is no shame in failure. Silicon valley is a graveyard of entrepreneurs trying to make it big. For every Amazon or Google there will be a 1000 who have tried and failed. But it is okay to fail. In fact there it is seen as a badge of honour. Failure teaches you more lessons than success. In India, we hear very sad stories of people resorting to extreme steps when they fail be it in exams or in their jobs or in their personal lives. We have to lay the blame on this on our parents, educational systems and society. And remember we are all part of the problem. We worship success but actually we have to celebrate or at least understand failure. There is nothing in the world which is more important than your well being and your family’s well being. Sharira madhyam khalu Dharma sadhanam annaru peddalu. You can only do your duty and achieve your goals if you have a sound mind and body. So take care of yourselves in good times and bad times. And there will be bad times. But bear in mind the song from the serial Amrutham. Has anyone seen it here on YouTube? Sirivennela Sitaramasastry penned the lyrics for it. It goes “hello anjaneyulu, aayasa padi poku chalu. manam idedi chamchadu bhavasagaralu..” Ours are only always a spoonful of sorrows. Whatever failure you face remember it could have been far worse. At least we are not suffering like people in Afghanistan or any other war torn countries. We need a sense of perspective when faced with failure. Don’t get me wrong, I am not asking you to wallow in self pity. Work hard for your dreams, pick yourself up after a failure, learn the lessons from it and move on. But keep moving..
నొప్పిలేని నిమిషమేది జననమైన మరణమైన జీవితాన అడుగు అడుగున
నీరసించి నిలిచిపోతె నిమిషమైన నీది కాదు బ్రతుకు అంటె నిత్య ఘర్షణ
దేహముంది ప్రాణముంది నెత్తురుంది సత్తువుంది ఇంతకన్న సైన్యముండునా
ఆశ నీకు అస్త్రమౌను శ్వాస నీకు శస్త్రమౌను దీక్షకన్న సారెదెవరురా
నిరంతరం ప్రయత్నమున్నదా నిరాశకే నిరాశ పుట్టదా
నిన్ను మించి శక్తి ఏది నీకె నువ్వు బాసటయ్యితే
And that brings me to the “Secret of work”. I remember this essay by Swami Vivekananda used to be a lesson in our Intermediate English text book. Whether you run your own business or work as a manager in the future, print a copy of this essay and keep reading it every now and then. Vivekananda quotes Bhagavad Gita and exhorts us to work incessantly/continuously. All work will have consequences good or bad. A person of character is like a tortoise which goes into its shell and doesn't come out unless it wants to. You can try to force it but it wont. Similarly a person of principles will not deviate from their ideals irrespective of the difficulties they face. Vivekananda goes further and says that we should work incessantly but not think about the fruits of the work too much. Remember the dialogue in 3 idiots “you work for excellence and then success will come running behind you”. But if instead when you are working you are bogged down by the results. Will i get a job with the fattest salary. Will I win the rat race. Then your work doesn't give you joy and you will get into a lot of misery when the desired results don't materialise. Did you see the US Open tennis finals recently? Have you seen Novak Djokovic lose. One of the greatest players of all times he got tensed as he was chasing history. When we get ahead of ourselves and think of the results all the time its going to hurt our work and our happiness. Of course all this is easier said than done. But we can all in bits and pieces remind ourselves to enjoy our work and stay a little detached from the results itself. Remember perfection is a direction not a destination. Whatever stage in our careers and lives we are, there is still that extra step we can always take.
I congratulate you all on commencing a new phase in your lives. Make the most of the time in your BBA course. And I don't mean just by reading Managerial Economics or Project Management or looking at balance sheets. The time you spend with your friends and the lessons you learn outside the classes are equally, if not more important. I am sure you will all look back on these years with fond memory long after you have passed out. I will end this by saying unfetter your brain, be open to new ideas, be curious, don't be afraid of failure, work incessantly, enjoy music, spend time in nature, speak Telugu, be happy. Uttistatha, Jagrutha. Arise and Awake. The world belongs to you.
