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INTERVIEW WITH PROF. DEBASHIS CHATTERJEE – DIRECTOR OF IIM KOZHIKODE ON HIS LATEST BOOK ‘THE CLASS ACT’

PART II  OF THE INTERVIEW

(The interview was conducted by Milind Padalkar and Chacko Jacob, Doctoral Students of IIM Kozhikode)

Interviewer: In the book at various places, you allude to the need for the teacher to be quite

Prof. Debashis Chatterjee

intensely contemplative. One could even the say that you are asking the teacher to be a little bit of an isolationist. But the teacher has to live in a community of learners and has to stay connected. So how does a teacher balance having to withdraw and having to immerse?

I had a professor at Harvard, Dr. Ronald Heifetz. He used to say that if you want to adapt to a new reality, you have to be part of the dance floor; and yet see the dance from the balcony to see what the choreography is like. That metaphor sits in my head so powerfully. In order to be active, you have to be contemplative. You have to see how the actions choreograph from a distance; otherwise your own action will be chaotic. Ok, so you need that distance,  you need that perspective. You need the silence and solitude in order to go into the intensity of the action. And while you are in the intensity of the action, the contemplation hasn’t died down. In fact contemplation and action are complementary. You see because your reflective consciousness and your active mind can co-exist. It’s not as though they are two separate things. And so in order for you to be sensitized to your reflective consciousness, you must from time to time, withdraw from action.
But contemplation doesn’t mean sitting and gazing the navel for years. Contemplation means reflecting on your actions because a life without reflection and an action without reflection are meaningless. This reflective capacity tells us which of our actions are appropriate and which are not. If you lose that, you become an automaton. Then anybody can nudge you in any direction. Reflection prevents that kind of life.
That’s why we give two months of sabbatical to our professors here. The idea is that if they go on a reflection break, they can come back with renewed vigor. It means you vacate your mind from the hurly burly of active life, you reflect, and then you come back into the field of action. As you have seen in the middle of Mahabharata, Arjuna is doing just that before he acts. There is just a contemplative discourse of 700 verses, which you call Gita. It is not a philosophy alone, it is an action philosophy, a “philosophy of action”. Arjuna reminds you that it is very important that you have to be reflective so as to become a super star. That is a gentle reminder to our students. Those who don’t self-reflect, self-destruct. It is as simple as that.

Interviewer: There is this aspect of your book that it appears as a discourse first; and then suddenly we find that it is actually a monologue. Which one is it?

No, you see the point is that we are constantly talking to ourselves, whether we realize it or not. Constantly. The upanishads have a beautiful imagery here. One tree has two birds, one bird is eating the fruit and the other bird is just watching. So this observer in you is always in relationship with the actor in you. And this happens in all of us, except that it does not get published. So it is not a monologue, it is kind of internal conversation that is made explicit, so that you can connect with the global audience.
Very interestingly, I got letters from various principals around the world and not just from this country, saying that it connects with what they have been thinking, which they could not put down in words. That’s about it.

 Interviewer:  The other thing about the style one notices is the interesting duality of relationship between what we may call the ‘teacher’ & the ‘learner’. The teacher becomes the learner and then thereby starts on the journey of excellence in teaching. Sort of a duality between the self and what can be said as non-self, i.e. outside of you. That is not an easy lesson. How does one absorb it?

You mean to say its not easy to read the book?

Interviewer: No. It is easy enough to read. It is just that it is not easy to act on what it says. 

Ok. You have to see the action in terms of what? Is it compliance you are talking about? Now this book will not make you compliant. It is not a ‘how to’ manual.
Is it going to make you committed? May be. It may make you committed to something. But more importantly, it will open your consciousness to something that is relatively pure. Because it is important that we also pursue pure knowledge.  You can take a book and say, “I will only take a book which is a ‘how to’ manual”, which means you are looking for equipment; which means you are looking for a tool to with which you can manipulate your world. The instrumentality of knowledge destroys the very source of knowledge.
So this book is a book of understanding. It is not a book of tools. It is not meant to be that. It is meant to open up something in you. You see, Newton’s head receives an apple and then all of a sudden there is an insight. And that  insight gives rise to the theory… and theory gives rise to application of the theory. But if there was no insight, why would there be any theory?
So purity of knowledge is very important. Pure knowledge is very critical in this world and it is missing. Because everybody wants to go to engineering or management or medicine without the purity of perspective. Without knowing the fundamentals. So you know why livelihood is for, but you do not know what life is for. Imagine what hollowness that would be. You can be the president of a country and yet be a completely depraved human being. We have seen such presidents around the world.
This is the whole point. Are we – like Harvard’s first woman president famously said – going to make carpenters out of men;  or are we also going to make men out of carpenters?  We let our jobs as instruments of functionality without understanding why.
Therefore this kind of knowledge is required, and not many people are willing to write such things. If I sat down and wrote a ‘be happy’ manual, it may sell a million copies. But if I created something like this, maybe there will be fewer, but those few are very important for me, and our world.

Interviewer: The other reflection one gets from this work is that it is actually quite intensely spiritual. It doesn’t go away from the matters of the mind. Is it influenced by any particular school of thought such as “Advaita” or “Vedanta”?

You see the school of life has to incorporate many schools of thought. We learn from three places, from books, from nature or from life. I respect J. Krishnamurthy because he was an extra-ordinary teacher. He followed no tradition, yet he created the paths to truth without having to go into this cult or that cult. So I recognize his immense contribution to the body of truth;  I hold him as a great teacher. And I have been deeply influenced by many people, including my own teachers. Perhaps nobody will recognize their names, but I thought their ideas should have a chance to survive. I have also learned from my students immensely. I have quoted at least two of them here. Beyond a point, teaching-learning is no longer a personal property. It is not real estate, that somebody owns it. Teaching-learning  universal. Sometimes a student can be your teacher, and you can learn from him. Because he has a perspective that you did not have.
So to answer your question, all of us are spiritual. Beyond this material construct called the body, beyond this mechanical movement called the mind, there is always the essence of you which tells you that you are. You are this, or you are that: that is a secondary thing. You simply are.
Spirituality is not something esoteric. It’s closer to us than we can ever think. Hence when you write something that purports to be pure knowledge, then you have to go into the essence. There is no other way. If you don’t even know who you are, and then you claim you are this or you are that, then you are basing you claims on very false foundations. And I have been on this journey. I don’t claim any great realization or anything. It is only a journey.

Interviewer: There is one interesting comment you make about the need for integrating solutions based on rational logical school of thought or doctrine from the west, and the intuitive imaginative doctrines of the east. In most of the approaches to work that we see, these two doctrines appear in a conflicting light. They are offered as “either/or” choices. Question is how do you convert an either/or to an inclusive “and”?

It is again about how today’s education is oriented. It places a large amount of emphasis is on the calculating

verbal rational brain, i.e. the rational aspect of our mind at the neglect of the intuitive part. So if you are asked a question, “in any point in time, at any place, how many crows would there be?” Now it does not depend on any rational analysis because you don’t have any data. How would you create or construct a scenario without data? This will make demands on your intuitive imaginative self. Many of the real-world questions today are like that.
In order to face challenges of life, you need both. Intellect is given to you and you need the intellect. So is an imagination given to you and you need it too. But our education in the intuitive imaginative aspect of life has been minimal. The ability to evoke the unstructured in our lives is very minimal in our education system. We have lost the ”interiority” of our culture, where this was in operation. Our life in joint families was where all this synthesizing aspect of our lives happened. The ability to live together and to imagine the world around us was what happened in our structure of living. What is happening now is that we are going to more and more nuclearization of everything. Everything is getting smaller. Therefore it has to be brought back.
Most of education, the global education, is actually western education. All our schools really based on western education system, which emphasizes the rational and the analytical. Although it is important to be rational analytical in today’s world, you need to imaginatively construct the future as the world gets more uncertain. You need to tell stories. Because stories capture the imagination more meaningfully than other crafts. If they are not present in the system, they have to be brought back. There is no other way.

Interviewer: So does the journey begin with a different curriculum or a structure?

The journey begins with a teacher. A different kind of a teacher. Between curriculum and the brain state of the learner, I prefer to look at the brain state of the learner. Curriculum is important but before you design the curriculum, where is this whole person? Every Alexander needs a Socrates..Every Chandragupta needs a Chanakya. Why? Because we all need our complementarities. When you are immature, you want maturity to be by your side. When you are too mature, you need somebody adventurous and young to be with you. When you have an Arjuna, you need a Krishna. And when you have a Krishna, you need an Arjuna to carry out the wisdom. So these complementarities have to coexist. A teacher can bring that complementarity.
So more than the curriculum, you need holistic teachers. You need teachers who have a sense of the large picture, who embody some of the qualities that you have been missing. Nobody reputes a teacher today for being kind. But being kind is very critical for learning. You see this all the time. We don’t learn anything from a teacher who is cruel and harsh. With such a teacher, our learning gets impaired. All these are critical virtues, which we have to somehow focus our attention.

Interviewer: Is there anything that the book wants to say but hasn’t said it yet?

Yes, it is a work-in-progress. There will always be something unsaid. But it will be bigger than the current size and I would add a lot more to it.
For instance, I would want to say something about the relationship between the freedom and the structure. I have been to some schools where they a priori start with freedom and not the structure. They start with the freedom of enquiry and then bring in the structure later. There is a foundational school that I remember going to. The kindergarten kids when they come out of the buses are not asked to go to their classrooms. They go anywhere they want in the whole school. Some may go to the football field. Some may go to the swimming pool, somebody may climb a tree. Then the teacher will setup a tent on the football field because the kid is comfortable at the football field. So what this is saying is that when we want to learn, only then we learn. Learning cannot be a coercive activity. Training can be coercive, but learning has to happen in an atmosphere that is completely free of fear. If your learning is based on rote memory and examination pressures, that learning will be compromised. Because you will only be teaching to a test and students will only be learning to a test. That sort of learning will actually close the brains’ capacity. So such relationship between structure and freedom is what I wanted to talk about.
As I said, this is just an internal conversation that has gone external. But it is just a work-in-progress. My hope is that I will get some feedback from people. Like I am conversing with people like you, so the refinement in my internal conversation starts happening. I am not done yet, and therefore we have not formally released this book through any other channel. We thought of it as a little gift of conversation that I thought I will send to some of my friends and students. And see what happens.

Interviewer: Since it is a work-in-progress, I will withhold my last question.

Go ahead and ask. It doesn’t matter.

Interviewer: Thank you. My last question concerns today’s sound-bite world, which loves one, or two-statement summaries. So if there is such a thing about this book that could be said in a few sentences, what would that be?

I have learn as long as I live but do I know how to? See, the very process of living and evolving requires learning. But do I know how to?
We know what to learn but do we know how to? This book is not a ‘what-to’ book but a ‘how-to’ and a ‘why-to’.
Hence that’s the way I look at it. If you want to call it a summary, then that’s it. I hope it’s useful.

Interviewer: That is very well said, Sir. Thank you for a wonderful session. 

Thank you. We will see how this plays out.
(Interview concluded with Part II)

DO WE NEED TO EMPHASIZE GENDER IN RESEARCH STUDIES?

By Prof. Anindita Paul

A lot is being spoken about on the need for representation of women in parliament, company boards, management and now lot more controversies surrounding women and her freedom not only on the streets but in buildings, elevators and in her own home, in general women in society. Adding to the hullah-bullah, a recent incident where the Indian actress Mallika Sherawat seems to have raised a storm over her comment about the state of affairs of women in India. All of a sudden it seems the topic on Indian women has caught a lot of attention in the news media. A parallel emergent theme about research covering different aspects of women and culture seem to be catching up as well and I acknowledge the need for the same. Indian society has changed in multiple ways. Amongst all the other changes a major change has been brought about by the information age and its related paraphernalia. “Information” through the news media, internet, social-media and the accompanying free flow of information through different sources combined has the power unleashed like never before. The enormous power of information has its multiple receptacles spread through the different dimensions of society and has proven repercussions on culture, tradition, politics, sports, medicine, technology, business etc. I am hinting at research studies involving women. There is a need to understand the women’s perspectives of things. And I say this with the hope that their perspectives have not yet been overpowered by the dominant perspective of our patriarchal society. There is a need to look at women and their needs that extend beyond that of jewelry, skin care, cooking and maybe other household care products. It is well known how traditionally women have been confined to a limited space, both physically and mentally. But the time has come to accept that they hold unique perspectives that have grown over time shaped by their thoughts, perceptions and intellect. By this, I don’t mean to fuel the stereotypical image of the different faculties of the mind but am suggesting the intangibles emerging out of the mind of humans who look different than the physically strong humans of earth, have been treated differently historically in most cases unjustifiably, have been seen as different beings when they grow up, are made to think they are inferior and are trained to be restricted in more than one ways. How do such beings think? Incidentally, these beings are called women and so the collective women seem to create a collective effect that cannot be ignored. The research cohort has a lot to study and understand. 

At the same time, as is in most research areas, one cannot steer clear of the important question about the methodologies to be used to study culture, behaviorisms, and affect on technology. Is there a right methodology to study women in any aspect? I don’t know. As we all know there may be no right method but still there is a need to understand what methods may apply at this early stage of research on women in India. Say, for example if we want to study women and technology, are we studying how women affect technology or how technology affects women? Which is more important? Will quantitative studies help us in a better understanding of such a phenomenon or are qualitative studies better? Whatever the methodology may be, one needs to be cautious about misinterpreting data.

There are a number of research themes that come up when talking of women that may have seemed irrelevant so far. How do women access the internet? How does work take precedence over family and how families are able to support women at work? Are women challenged by the presence of really intimidating signs of ‘male-ness’ (eg., moustache, gestures and behaviorisms that speak out loud about men’s paternalistic roots). Businesses have definitely to gain from such studies and more. How women score as consumers that may bring attention to, say, ICT companies manufacturing gadgets. How women search the internet, what do they search for are going to help shape e-commerce target women audiences? Are women multitaskers between work and family responsibilities can help companies manage women talents? What is better for women, to use a mobile phone or to use the laptop or just call a friend to get information can help companies develop favorable information environments? There is no doubt that these questions may be prevalent for all irrespective of gender however, the reality stands that we need more research on women and maybe more so across cultures. It is plain and simple putting out a word from the women members of the Indian-society that seems to draw a lot attention now days, a possible shout-out to the researchers and the entrepreneurs. How about capitalizing on this new trend?

Anindita Paul is an Assistant Professor of Information Technology and Systems at IIM Kozhikode.

INTERVIEW WITH PROF. DEBASHIS CHATTERJEE – DIRECTOR OF IIM KOZHIKODE ON HIS LATEST BOOK ‘THE CLASS ACT’

 PART I OF THE INTERVIEW

(The interview was conducted by Milind Padalkar and Chacko Jacob, doctoral students of IIM Kozhikode.)

Prof. Debashis Chatterjee

Interviewers:  Sir, thank you indeed for agreeing to speak to us at a short notice. To begin with, what can you tell us about the genesis of the book?

The book arose out of my teaching career of 20 years. Teaching is a reflective art. In fact, it allows you a lot of reflective time. The book is an attempt to capture the nuances that a “career teacher” – if I may use the word – faces as he or she evolves in the craft of learning and teaching

Interviewer: And what are some of the challenges one faces as a teacher? How does one pursue excellence in this craft and what are the aspects of discipline that one must practice to achieve excellence as a teacher?

I have tried in my own modest way, without any claims to being a great teacher or anything. I make no such claims. All I am doing is that I am putting a perspective. I am expressing an indebtedness that I have to my own teachers who have taught me how to not just teach but how to live. So I thought I will capture the essence of what the craft is about. What is getting lost in the euphoria of new age education is that teaching is still a craft that cannot completely be digitized. What can be digitized must be digitized. But teaching is a living experience, so it cannot be fully digitized. It has to be lived.   And in order for this to be a ‘lived’ profession, it is very critical to have a set of values. Therefore this book tries to articulate, to put in perspective some of the critical values that make a teacher.

Interviewer: You speak of the civilizational DNA in your book. Can you explain this concept a little further?

DNA is a metaphor. In this case, I am not speaking of the biological DNA. Now if you ask me what is a DNA? In reality, what is a DNA biologically? DNA is no more than a door that opens you up to your potential. It’s like a switch board. The DNA switches you on to your potential. By itself, DNA is not the potential. It’s like… the switch board is not electricity. Electricity is switched on when you switch it on. All of us have a DNA for grey hair. When the switching mechanism for that pigment is switched off, then you have grey hair. Can you have grey hair at any age? No. But the potential for grey hair remains in all of us. It is just that the potential is switched on at a certain age based on your genetics, sort of predisposition and the stresses in your environment.

The point is that the teacher’s job is to open those doors. Switching on, discovering rather than adding, discovering the potential for learning, the potential for greatness that exists in all of us. Raising a person to his/her potential is fundamentally a teacher’s job. So when I say it transfers the DNA of the civilization, I simply mean that. The entire gamut of what it means to be an evolving human being.

As you can see, every species in the animal world goes through a certain learning incubation before the fledgling goes out and makes a living for itself. For humans, this gestation period is the longest. No other species teaches its young so much. That transfer of knowledge from one generation to another generation can only happen through a school system, rather through the teaching and learning processes. For us, the world is a complex place. That wisdom is already embedded in the human context. But the teacher actually opens the doors and tells you that you that you have it in you. The word “Guru” for me means G-U-R-U. The teacher is saying “Ji, you are you”. The teacher does not a follower. The teacher leads a leader. Such a commitment to human potential is very critical, before you can be called a teacher. And that is the role of a teacher, to connect a generation with its past and push it towards the future. If we are aware of that role of a teacher, we must dignify and honor the profession, restore the legitimate credit the teacher must be given, because sustaining a civilization is not easy. It carries an enormous responsibility. That is what this is about.

Interviewer: If I may expand on that topic a little, we hear about the clash of civilizations. We hear a lot of people talk of civilizations as if they were contesting entities. Whereas your view of a civilization is actually quite mellow, as if no contest is implied. Are we right in thinking like that?

At one level, civilizations are about material things. They are defined by artifacts. They are defined by what they stand for, in terms of processes, methods, structures. Under this view, the natural self of the human being is possessed by the juristic actors, the state, the enterprise, the society. These actors claim the natural self and civilize it, tame it in a manner so the human self fits into a particular mode. So by definition, civilizations will clash.

But if you look at a deeper aspect, civilization is also culture, human culture. Culture means something deeper. How do you look at the essence of who you are, how do you refine yourself, how do you evolve to a higher level of consciousness and perception? That is culture. And if you want to preserve the human culture and transfer the knowledge, then of course you have to go into civilization’s elements. So essentially when I talk about the DNA, I am referring to the human culture. For example, you may say that the British had a civilization. But India and Indians have a culture… a culture of knowing that the human being is the child of the immortal realm “Shrinwantu Vishwe, Amritasya Putra”. It means that there is an aspect of you which is infinite in dimension. But this is not easily accessible to the British, because their civilization is about table manners and all that. They did not know that India had such extraordinary culture, because at the civilization front, India wasn’t really polished.

So essentially what I meant by civilization is this, that you also transmit culture. You build confidence in the student about who he is. As far as the juristic actors, the enterprise, the state, the society will clog the child’s mind and life. But the teacher will prepare the child to face the challenges of life which are evolutionary in nature.  For instance, if there is a loss in the family, how do you cope with such a loss? How do you cope with amelioration? How we cope with a very dysfunctional society? These are very important. You may be a giant in terms of creating wealth, even intellectual wealth, but you may be a moral pygmy.  The Class Act: Notes from the  Diary of a Teacher

Interviewer: In the book you make a powerful statement about teachers. You talk of motivating, awakening the brain, instilling confidence in the learner. And you use a nice term, the “learner” rather than the student. One could almost say that you are touching upon the art of ‘critical conversation’, to borrow a term from psychology. How is a modern teacher to learn this art of critical conversation?

First of all what do you mean by critical conversation? Let me understand that first.

Interviewer: Critical conversation is saying very little, but having a big impact. What we glimpse from the book is that the teacher says a few things and they have a momentous impact. While in other cases, you may surround the learner with a lot of words and it may have no impact.

You see the reason that these impacts happen is because of the consciousness behind the words and not the words per se. So if the words have the realization of the truth. For instance, just casually saying “you will be successful, go” is one thing, and saying “Go! You Will be successful” based on your appraisal of a person is quite another. There is a difference in consciousness. Do you really mean what you say? Aurobindo, one of the India’s greatest masters used to say “you must not speak anything that you don’t really mean”. That should be realized. If you really mean it, then you say. Once you consistently practice this, your words acquire the power and potency of realization rather than just a set of casual words. The way in which you utter those words, and the way in which you kind of commit yourself to the truth behind the words; that what makes the words powerful. It is this power that touches the people.

Even the teacher may not realize as to which word or phrase has touched the student. I had a student whose name is Jayaram. He was the director of Oracle worldwide based out of New York. He visited me after 15 years of having taught him. He comes and tells me, “sir, I took this class which you taught 15 years back.”. I said, “what do you remember of that course?”. He says just one phrase out of the whole 30 contact hours. So I said tell me the phrase. And he says the phrase is “matters of consequence”. You took a session called “matters of consequence” and that’s all I remember. He says, “I have applied that in my life”. I said that I am really happy to hear something like that but honestly, I don’t remember having taught this class. He says that he has the notes to prove that I have taught the class.

It’s not about saying things from your memory, so you may not remember what you said. But it is saying things from your being, there is a difference between the two. When you recall a word from memory and vomit it out, it has one kind of effect; but when the word comes from the depth of your realization of truth, it has another kind of impact. Learners go beyond the words. They sense the energy behind the words and that’s what connects. Words don’t connect.

Interviewer: you might say that the energy has a psychic quality to it?

No, energy is such that there is a quality of consciousness. You see when you casually say “something is hot”, that is one thing. When you consciously utter a word, you say “Its Hot!”. It is a realization, out of a simple experience. The consciousness and conviction behind the word makes it even more potent. We had this thought in India that “Mansa-Vacha-Karma” should be in alignment. When your mind, thought and actions are in alignment, is there is mindfulness behind the word, and there is mindfulness and word behind the action…

Words are very powerful. The word can penetrate layers of consciousness and can make an impact. Suppose I told you that the President of India will give you an award. Immediately those words will heighten your energy. In an instant. So you can see how much potency the words have.

Teachers play with words. And they recognize, they ought to recognize that you can kill a students’ spirit by marks and remarks. That words can damn a student forever. Or lift a student forever. Either way it can happen, so have to be conscious of the words you use.

(To be continued and concluded in Part II)

CHESS, CHOICE MAKING AND MANAGEMENT RESEARCH – PART II

Prof. T. N. Krishnan

The similarity to an organizational context -Like chess players organizational managers are faced with complex situations, are limited in their information processing capabilities and also need to decide under time pressure. Managers do make decisions by doing a cost-benefit analysis, but the interesting part is that most of the times just as in chess situation there are too many variables and too much information that all of which possibly cannot be humanly considered while taking a decision. What this implies are atleast two things. First, they need to conserve their energy and not dissipate it on things that would not yield much returns. Second, they need to simplify the decision making process.

Firstly, it is found that great managers appreciate the unique abilities and eccentricities of each of the employees[1] accept them as they are and offers job opportunities which match their talent. Just as a good chess player knows the possibilities of each piece and accepts its strengths and limitations and creates the positions accordingly. There is probably greater energy wasted in trying to change someone both at an organizational and individual level than increase our capacity to accept the other as they are and offer opportunities that match their interests and talents. Good organizations try to make jobs relevant to employee’s life interests[2] and try to match the motivations and unique talents of each employee to the job at hand[3]. That being said research in organizational psychology has long debated the role of both nature and nurture in human behavior. While something are more stable, some others are less so and can be trained for, but the trick is to differentiate the one from the other.

Secondly, simplifying the decision making process could be done by atleast two ways: one is to perhaps consider only those variables that are most relevant to the decision to be made and the other is to make use of pattern recognition. The work by Simon on bounded rationality choice making suggests decision makers given the constraints, often employ heuristics rather than optimization. Factorial designs and policy capturing studies have become popular as research methodologies in management, and the methodologies are based on the premise that decision makers rely on a relatively small number of factors in making judgements. Not all factors need to be considered and some are more highly weighted than others, given a context. For instance in Employee selection literature though two types of fit – person-job and person-organization fit have been previously established, a recent interesting policy-capturing study finds that one type of fit becomes more relevant to the other depending on the kind of employment relationship and tasks performed in the job and the fit is established based on a small number of factors. In a similar vein, not all choices need to be analysed to make a move. The pattern recognition ability of expert chess players is similar to the case of an experienced business leader being able to make correct choices without much analysis while a rookie manager would have to navigate through piles of information before deciding.  This could perhaps explain why an expert Chess player rattles through his moves in a simultaneous game and still win or why a doctor has diagnosed a disease even before the patient has completed reciting the symptoms. Again the work by Simon provides interesting insights into these.

The dissimilarity between the organizational situation and the chess situation is that managers are invariably faced with different and often competing goals while in a game of chess it could be a singular one (to win).The trade-offs between long-term and short-term goals are popular in management literature and there are numerous research and examples. In an oft quoted example on staffing we often hear the recruiters complaining that there are not enough skilled people to occupy positions. This might be surprising given a recessionary economy the scales favour the employer.But in the interesting study by Cappelli (2011[4]) finds that given a recessionary economy,employers are expecting prospective workers to be able to fill a role right away, without any training or ramp-up time – the paradox being to get a job, you have to have that job already.What this has lead to is a situation in which companies are investing less and less in training and development (less cost) and expecting more of performance (more benefits). A related pointis that in a game each match could be taken in a ‘sportsman’ spirit while in an organizational situation the outcomes of each decision made could have an impact on the ongoing relationship between the affected parties and is often more nuanced than raw cost-benefit analysis.

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[1] Buckingham, M. (2005). What great managers do, Harvard Business Review,

[2] Butler, T. &Waldroop, J. (1999). Job Sculpting. Harvard Business Review, 77(5), 144 – 152

[3]Cappelli (2011). Why Companies Aren't Getting the Employees They Need

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052970204422404576596630897409182 accessed on 23rd November 2013

T. N. Krishnan is an Assistant Professor of Organizational Behaviour and Human Resources at IIM Kozhikode.

CHESS, CHOICE MAKING AND MANAGEMENT RESEARCH – PART I

Prof. T. N. Krishnan

With the blitzkrieg of Carlsen against the (ex) World Champ Anand, the Chess world seem to have shifted back to a youthful era. Not long ago was the pseudonym‘lightning kid’ applied to the ex-world champion extolling his prodigious rise at a young age and his immense speed of play (and analysis). Perhaps age is no longer in his favour, perhaps consistency at the very top and for such long time requires ‘Godly’ effort or perhaps Carlsen was the better player who deserved to win or perhaps all the three … one never knows. For India,Anand’sincredible chess trajectory has done its work by revolutionizing chess with the country now boasting of one of the large contingents of Grand Masters(GM) – a contrast to the time in 1988 when it was anxiously hoped by the chess fraternity that Anand wins the Shakthi Finance Chess tournament in Coimbatore to complete his GM norm requirements (after just having won the World Junior Championship) to get the GM title and become India’s first Grand Master, which he did!

But what is interesting and possibly could be relevance to Managers and Management researchers is to contrast how Chess players make choices, and is there anything which we can learn that can be or cannot be applied to choices made in organizational situations. 

In grand old times before the advent of computers, Chess Mate in India and Chess Informantglobally was like a Bible carried by rated Chess players where the printed books carried annotated games which provided useful leads to ‘theories’ and ‘novelties’ that could be applied to forthcoming games. However many of the average players hardly worried about these and believed in ‘thinking through’ the various opening choices and this lead to interesting situations. One of the popular tournaments in 80s was the one held in the temple town Palani in Tamil Nadu (also the place famous for hair tonsure as an offering to the deity), which used to have a huge ensemble of both FIDE rated and unrated players. The FIDE rated players were on top boards which had the time clocks and the vast majority of the ‘normal’ players played without the clocks which essentially meant there was no time restriction in the games played by them. It was normal practice that players wandered around looking at other boards after making their moves. In one of the boards a player realizing that he could make better use of the time taken by the opponent to make his move, went over to the temple, had his hair and beard cut, came and sat back at his table. The opponent protested that this was an impostor and only after the tournament arbiter’s intervention could it be resolved.

We may not be faced with these lively situations at present times - with the proliferation of clocks and online chess repositories containing ‘theories’ and annotated chess games, I guess any decent club player in India is adept at most opening theories and could rattle off the opening moves in quick succession and at the same time pounce on any opening mistakes of the opponent. Theories in the chess context provides a framework for understanding a suitable response to a well-studied chess situation. With calculations as the engine and a single predominant goal for a chess player (winning as the sole aim), computers could perhaps perform better than humans in chess as revealed by the historic match between Kasparov and Deep Blue more than a decade and a half back. They could even challenge established ‘theories’ and suggest new alternatives because of the enormous increase in computing power[1]. The result of the Deep Blue match is not surprising; it is said that the number of possible choices in a game of 42 moves is in multiple billions. Obviously one does not expect any human to do even a fraction of these calculations while making the chess moves / choices. The paradox then is to resolve how does a top ranked player rattle off the moves in a simultaneous match when she/he plays tens of hundreds of opponents at the same time and still win the majority of games?Are there some parallels between choice making in chess and organizational contexts? Possibly not all chess choice-making is relevant to choice making in organizations but there are similarities and differences which we’ll explore.Management researchers (in organizational psychology and human resources) have some interesting insights into these questions.The attempt is to make some broad stroke comparisons and do some loud thinking rather than a thesis.                                                                                              (to be continued and concluded in Part 2)

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[1]Chabris, C and Goodman, D. (2013). Chess-championship results show the powerful role of computers http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304337404579209980222399924, accessed 23^rd November 2013

T. N. Krishnan is an Assistant Professor of Organizational Behaviour and Human Resources at IIM Kozhikode.