84. Fancy corporate post-names/titles : not so amusing anymore

Just saw this on TV. It blew my mind. The WTFness-quotient of the content I saw was so high that its urged my to post it here almost asap.

It turns out that this is pretty old news, but I'm sure not many would've heard of it. Did you ppl know that the Future group has a 'Chief Belief Officer'. And they have a person, a fully-salaried employee for that post too, Dr.Devdutt Pattanaik.

Its not the post exactly, but the model he presented on CNBC that left me flabbergasted. He first says, the 3B model of management is Belief-Behavior-Business. And then he actually goes ahead and draws 3 circles on a chart and connects them linearly to show the relation. Can you believe that??? And the interviewer actually gasped as if she'd seen the Haley's comet. What horseshit ! Unbelievable !

read this - 60 seconds chief
and watch this - My work as a Chief Belief Officer

The ex-COO of the firm in which I previously worked, has been the 'Gardener' of that firm for the past few years. Another post which although sounds creative, is in a gray area with unclear responsibilities and un-quantifiable objectives.

A colleague of mine, who started off his own company handed me his card which read "Mr.XYZ, Founder". The word Founder did have a great zing to it. Much better than the regular CEO or COO or MD.

When I get into an organization, I would want a cool job title, depending on what I join as. Like say

"Awesemolyst" (analyzes awesomeness of the work being done, Barney Stintson style) or

"Head Markgeneer"(a Marketer + engineer) or

"Logisticologist" (an Ops profile for Logistics) or

"Procurement-man"(again, an Ops profile for Procurement)...has the super-hero zing to it :) or

"Chief emotions officer" (one who reads all of Paulo Coelho's books and recommends women-related policies) or

"Chief emoticons officer" (one who recommends all the emoticons that can be used in any official report or e-mail) or

"Tantri, the Pantry Mantri" (one who heads the Pantry staff)

I wouldn't mind a pay-cut for a month or two in return. The cool name is all that the outside world knows about your job. They don't see the ass-kicking nor do they see the ass-prints that your boss has left on your ass by the end of the day. When someone asks me about my designation at work, I'd rather say "Script Detectivologist" than merely saying "Bug-fixer".

83. The career path

Most of us are clueless when it comes to our careers. We don't know what to do next ? Lets face it, we've never known what to do. If you belong to the minority-group of people who have it all figured out and are on-track and are all set to achieve it, I'm not talking about you(although at some stage, you'll figure out that you just can't figure out where you'll go next in your career, unless all you plan to do next is to sit at home and eat curd-rice).

Mom and pop gave us a name, we dint have a say in that. And by the time we even gained enough consciousness to think about it, they put us in a school, to keep us busy....and we kept going to school. They told us to take Math, Phys, Chem in 10+2 and prepare for JEE....and we did it, most of us not even knowing the expanded form of JEE. They told us to do engineering and we went through 4 more years of 'something we dint know why we were doing but we just had to do', coz mom and pop and 'well-wisher aunt' and 'irritating neighboring uncle' thought it would be good to do so.

There's no wonder that after like 20-plus years of little-finger-holding(career spoon feeding), when we're out in the real world searching for work(or while at work), we're at sea. We don't know what to do, where to go, whom to ask for help. All we know is that we want to do something to be something-else but we're yet to figure out what that something or that something-else is. This is a tribute to all the clueless souls, we are the ones who are endlessly in the pursuit of happyness, although our efforts are mostly random and directionless(but what the heck, we try).

82. Learning curves

Was just filling up a form where I was required to fill the 'Languages you know' table. I was tempted to write C, C++, Java, Perl...but considering the fact that it was a pretty important form, went ahead and wrote the usual four.

1. English
2. Hindi
3. Tamil
4. Telugu

The question intrigued me and with all the idle time I'm having right now, all I needed was a poke, however useless the poke was. The question cannot measure the adeptness with which I used or the fluency with which I spoke those languages. I sat about thinking the various extents to which I knew each language, which one was I more comfy with and why. Now for most of the gen pop, the order of the languages one knows follows a predictable pattern. The degree of comfy-ness with the set of languages one knows most generally is as follows.

1.Mother-tongue > 2.English > 3.then by Hindi(if the mother tongue aint Hindi already) > 4. other languages known(if any)

But for me, a TamBrahm born and brought up in Hyd, followed by a 4-year stint in Gujju-land, followed by a 2 yr stint in the North of India, the order of comfy-ness has changed from time to time.

Learning a language is fun and a gradual process. Slowly I've learnt, sometimes also un-learnt the languages I know, un-learnt due to sheer lack of people around to speak that language(for long periods of time). So I thought, why not plot the learning curves of each of the languages I know and see if there's pattern.

And then, I plotted this.....