Sunday Posts

Adam Grant, in his excellent 'Give and Take', shows how Givers, those who seek to create value for others first, win at the modern workplace. His key point, that Giving, seeking to create value first, is a better professional strategy than Taking, seeking value for oneself, or even Matching, giving after norms of reciprocity have been clearly established.  He cites three reasons for the enhanced effectiveness of Giving. First, the essential difference between Giving and Taking may have been the focus on Long Term. Givers thought longer term, and they knew creating value always paid back over time. With accelarated pace of our lives, this long term has become shorter, thereby creating a more immediate payback for giving and making it a better professional approach. Second, the increased prevalence of collaborative work, and relative decline of independent working, has shone the spotlight on the Givers, making them more desired as colleagues. As a member of the team who foc...

I have followed Howard Gardner's work ever since I started studying the science and art of adult learning, because of his intuitive insights and penchant to address issues relevant to modern life and work. These were precisely my expectations when I picked up his latest, The App Generation, co-authored with Katie Davis, and I was not disappointed. The book is an attempt to portray 'Today's Youth' in the context of their digital habits and its implication for life, love and learning. This seeks middle ground between the enthusiasm that Marc Prensky had for 'Digital Natives' and the bleak vision of The Shallows . Putting things in perspective through personal reflections of Professor Gardner, Ms Davis (twenty years his junior) and Ms Davis' sister Molly, another generation apart, this work is an imaginative exploration of technologies shaping consciousness and habits. One of the most entertaining parts of the book is its 'unpacking' of the c...

I am reading DRIVE , Daniel Pink's usually interesting take on motivation and what makes people tick. I have come across the key ideas of this book before, primarily through Pink's presentation at the TED, which I found extremely interesting and put on this blog earlier. [ See it here ] The key idea, to repeat, is that there is a limit to extrinsic, material, incentives for work. Most managers indeed operate with an extreme, behaviourist assumption about why people work. Because they get paid, simple, is an extraordinarily naive but extraordinarily common answer. And, accordingly, they believe that the promise of higher pay, extra pay, incentives, is what makes people go that extra mile sometimes required by the business. WRONG, says Dan Pink, in this book. I completely agree. Psychological theories, elegantly presented in the book, show that extrinsic motivators, like money, does work, but only in a limited context, only for activities which are routine (making 40...

I am supposed to make a presentation on Psychological theories of Adult Development and Learning today. This is a part of the course I am doing at UCL . Though I did not have much time to focus on the subject over last couple of months, coming as it did in the middle of the most dramatic phase in my life, when I finally started working on it, I found the subject immensely interesting. So, a summary for those interested: The first thing to note is that the studies of adult life reveals that it is a period of change and development, much like our other phases of life. So, presupposing that we, as adults, are only supposed to apply skills, attitudes and values learnt in our childhood to tasks of adult life may not be the right thing to do. Not that this case is rested yet, the time-tested views of adulthood as a period of stability do continue to hold, but it is a good point to start with. [ Allman , 1982] Why we need to have a good understanding of adult development process to apply to l...