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November 2012
This was attached as part of submission for admission into IIMA's fellowship program on Organizational Behaviour. Post the very short interview (barely 15 minutes which I thought was unfit for a fellow program) I was surprised to find that I was offered the admission. However, I eventually decided not to take up the admission.
One was a practical reason: I had to again go through the post-graduate level courses which I assumed I did not need to when applying. That assumption incidentally was based on available facts. My guess is that the fact that I had more finance courses in my PGDM at IIMC as opposed to HR/OB/OD courses necessitated in me taking up the post-graduate level courses once again. The other fact could be that I was in the 30 percentile of my batch at IIMC and not the top 10%.
Second was a more basic factor. The reason I wanted to do the fellowship was to actually take time away and think through the work I have done till date and what particular theme in the work is worth pursuing, defining, elaborating and worth theorizing (and monetizing). However, during the interview I realized that one is expected to have a basic contour of a research question in mind before commencing the program. If it is a conflict between one's assumption and an institutional procedure, of course it is the individual assumption that is in the blind alley (as per conventional wisdom). And of course, when it seems rational, it makes sense to follow conventional wisdom in certain matters.
The third reason was one of convenience. I wanted time to actually read and relax. Between the application and the offer for admission I realized there are ways to work and find time to read (and relax). Thus one of the most attractive feature of the fellow program (which obviously I was not honest enough to mention in my SOP) stood to lose its charm.
There was a fourth reason. Which was that I could not find reasons to explain why a fellow-level interview should be so short and yet the candidate be offered a fellowship. Fellowship is a serious business (or should be one). Hence, there should be greater scrutiny of the candidate. Minus the scrutiny one would assume that there is lack of interest from the institute into the candidate. Obviously, I was missing something here. There was limited time and resources available to find that missing piece before confirming my admission. And without that piece I was too uncomfortable to take up the admission offer. The logical extrapolation of "a lack of enough time invested by an institute into a candidate" leads to not so favourable conclusions about the seriousness of the institute about its own program. Alternately, the second explanation could be that I was probably not the first choice (and maybe not the second one too). If the first explanation holds true then the institute's ego is wounded. With the second explanation, the candidate's. Both are not healthy from a stand-point of building a fellow relationship.
My subsequent correspondence to the admission office was quite brief. The response was even briefer: pin-drop silence.
Statement of Purpose
Since completing PGDM from IIM Calcutta in 2007 I have practised as a management consultant---first with Accenture's Mumbai office and then, beginning 2010, with Monitor Group's "Inclusive Markets Division" that focuses on social change. I recently left Monitor to co-found an NGO, Tapas India Foundation (Tapas), that works with a select set of social organizations to provide institution building support over a 3 to 5 year period with specific emphasis on internal organizational development rather than external growth or scale---a perspective increasingly sidelined in the mainstream debate with regard to a socially critical class of organizations.
Personally, starting Tapas was also a pretext to seriously explore further a conception---one already internalized through experience---concerning a certain model of organizations (using the term "organization" in the broadest possible sense). This internalization is an important reason behind this doctoral application too. However, it (internalization) happened without any conscious intent on my part. Instead, events leading to and prompting unconventional career shifts were the real reason. This unconventionality, though, was hardly radical; rather, at each stage, it maintained the core nature of my work (i.e. consulting) but brought about a remarkably fresh sensibility to the work at hand. This evolving sensibility fundamentally transformed my philosophy of organizations.
This sensibility first arose nearly four years ago during a particular engagement at Accenture. It concerned the post-merger re-structuring efforts at Air India-Indian Airlines to which I was part of for over a year. A most challenging professional engagement, it was also the richest in terms of learning. The engagement dealt with supporting decision-making at multiple-levels within an industrial organization of over 28,000 employees---with a significant fraction organized across several unions. The climate that the merged entity faced was one of severe uncertainty and stress--- result of a steady decline in a historical position that was once a place of pride, a fledgling merger and severe financial stress (proper identification of whose causes required a literal and detailed historical re-construction going back a considerable period). Airlines are amongst the most difficult organizations to manage. The above factors made an already difficult decision-making process nearly unwieldy.
But it was the numerous interactions with employees at middle and junior levels working under a climate of constant uncertainty that brought home, very starkly, the remarkable significance of the intangible make-up of an organization. Constructs such as value system, organizational history, culture, governance, narrow and sharp self-interests---an organization's psychology that seemed hard to define, accurately identify and even harder to act upon---acquired a real meaning. A deeper understanding of this psyche seemed of immense practical utility (in that particular context at least). I was strongly convinced that this type of understanding can at least prevent extremely grave mistakes; if not directly participate in improving near-term financial results. This initiated an interest in the "inside-out" perspective of organizations and potential value that "intangible capital" of an organization holds. These intangibles were very vague. But this vagueness seemed to reflect deeper philosophical (and mystical) undertones that held a strange and subtle interest for me.
This sensitization of "intangibles" remained quasi-dormant. It got viscerally activated in Monitor while trying to construct a "business model" of a decentralized drinking water solution operating in an urban slum context. The on-going discussions somehow felt incomplete and I strongly felt the approach was missing an important dimension. Over time, this dimension became more distinct and concerned finding ways to understand and co-ordinate interests of highly varied group of stakeholders including several factions of slum-dwellers, community-based groups, local officials, commercial operators who provided the technology and finally the investor. It was no longer chiefly a problem of a "business model" viewed through an economic framework (the prevailing viewpoint; that continued to be so) but, to a significant extent, an extremely complex sociological one. The limit to design a solution then was very much limited by my own understanding---conceptual as well as practical---of the highly localized socio-economic factors at play. This threw open some hard questions particularly a strongly ethical one that agitated and pre-occupied me considerably---what is the right thing to do?
It also opened a definitive line of thinking. Starting to engage with different types of organizations and stakeholder groups with some regularity, their specific differences were self-evident after a point. However, what was not readily discernible was the "commonality" across organizations and how to account for observed differences within such a common framework. This seemed an overarching critical question. An answer to such a question is of any practical use only when it is sought in a very specific historical and socio-cultural context. For me, it was the Indian context and more importantly, the highly varied local contexts within India that really interested me.
This overall object of inquiry led to certain second-order curiosities---how does an organization's particular history reflect in its daily thinking and behaviour? To what extent is decision-making strictly rational and to what extent ideological? How does an organization's evolving operating environment shape, at a very fine level, the unconscious biases, tendencies, i.e., it's "psyche", that very much contributes to its ideology (implicit as well as explicit)? What ideological elements of are constantly in flux? What is the interplay of the individual with organization? How to embed an institutional perspective that views individual not as a unit of production or a competitive performer but as someone who works to seek, foremost, self-respect followed by emotional and creative satisfaction? Under this perspective, how to systematically approach genuine holistic development of an individual that, at the same time, is distinctly tied to organizational effectiveness? After a point, does an organization develop an innate DNA (that can be expressed as a set of psychological primitives) that is at once the source of its strength as well as couches within it the highest risk of it's downfall? If yes, how to tease out this DNA from daily observed realities and make decisions mindful of it?
The originality is not in asking these questions. These questions are interesting because they inter-connect at some abstract level. Such abstraction, due to its extreme complexity, may never be fully grasped. But it may be possible to express part of this abstraction through detailed theoretical constructs that provide a much concrete rational guidance. This approach is typical of any complex intellectual endeavour. But what is of peculiar interest in this case is that underlying the development of such theoretical structures is a finer philosophical conception of human nature.
Thus, the real creative challenge in the field, in my opinion, lies firstly in evolving such a fine conception and casting it in an actionable theory of organizations (a formidable intellectual task); and secondly, developing a practical approach that integrates such finer understanding with current management and organizational practice with a sole aim to make it more holistic and, by implication, more humane.
This possibility is of considerable interest to me. The nature of the discipline of organizational behaviour (OB) holds potential to place strictly rational intellectual pursuits very closely within a framework of universal ethics. This in turn opens up the possibility to develop and realize, through the discipline of management, a much fuller philosophy of life---a very important personal consideration.
When one is constantly piqued by curiosity one usually strives to achieve an "immediate sense of closure". Working increasingly with smaller organizations---first with Monitor and then subsequently through Tapas provided a tempting opportunity to attempt such a closure. Being smaller, the organizations were mentally easier to model. My method was (and remains) rudimentary, i.e., detailed observations fitted into a constantly evolving framework developed through drawing analogies and basic insights from readings across philosophy, evolutionary themes in biology, scientific reconstruction of Indian history, political science, etc.
This approach is, of course, neither sustainable nor effective beyond a point. But it has embedded a certain perspective making it almost innate (to my nature)---that of viewing any social organization as a complex organic system subject to certain evolutionary principles. This appears a powerful macro-level conception to me. It hardly answers any of my more specific questions but it has ingrained a temper that is brought to the fore with constant regularity when working with organizations. This affects what points I keenly noticed (and not notice), issues I feel passionate about, and emphasize in discussions (placing me, often, in a noticeably sceptical and at times strongly contrarian position). The most physical manifestation of this temperament has been the starting of Tapas through which I can attempt to practice as a consultant, in a more dedicated manner, under this temperament.
In the elective year in IIMC, I had not pursued important courses in organizational behaviour and thus, I find it quite ironical that questions in this area should grip me. In that sense, the experiential route, over last 5 years, has been a strong teacher in pushing me, in an incremental manner, in a definite direction. I have thoroughly enjoyed this journey. It nurtured an intellectual curiosity and gave me a substantive object of inquiry---one that helps anchor my professional pursuits. At the same time, this journey, especially of late, has made me acutely aware of the highly multidisciplinary nature of this inquiry and, more importantly, the need for a reflective "time-off" to try develop a sounder theoretical base from which to, hopefully, build a stronger practice. In this case need for a strongly supportive environment is a given and in that sense, doctoral study seems a natural next step for me.
However, the question of the path post doctoral studies is a one difficult to answer concretely at this stage. In OB any theoretical framework is a constant work-in-progress. This offers possibility of on-going research grounded in and combined with hard practice as a vocational technique that is quite appealing. Consulting will continue be an integral element of this technique. But a doctoral pursuit provides additional opportunities. There are two distinct possibilities (not mutually exclusive) that come to mind.
First possibility flows from a particular aspect of consulting that I found emotionally highly fulfilling---that of acting as an on-going coach or mentor to individuals within organizations. Helping them re-cast their thinking, articulate it, ensuring a degree of consistency in decision-making, acting as a sceptical critic, facilitating in development of specific functional skill-sets, counselling on intra-personal issues and on personal development. These themes when translated from an individual to a group context suggest to me a teaching-centric path. However, so far, I lack any meaningful exposure to practising in a group context. Thus, I cannot confidently assert my own capabilities in this regard. But it is a strong wish to develop competencies in this direction.
Second possibility results from the highly multidisciplinary of nature of OB as a discipline. Some of the advanced disciplines, amongst others, that OB partakes from are cognitive psychology, philosophy, sociology, evolutionary themes in natural sciences etc. The canvass is quite rich and wide. And I think it a real possibility that at some stage in my career I may develop a very peculiar interest in one or more of these areas and may seek further study and specialization. As a matter of fact, this possibility has in some non-significant measure motivated me to explore doctoral studies in OB.
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