Indian Idle

It’s funny the things I do to appear busy at work. Not that anybody cares what I do. Heck, it doesn’t even matter if someone notices because anyways I am going to be evaluated on my sales targets, and not on my utilization levels. But yet, that 6 and half year stint in a delivery role has affected me much more than I give it credit for.

Whenever somebody walks past my cubicle, I feel guilty about not doing any “work”, and immediately open some sales presentation and start staring at it blindly. A couple of minutes later, I am back to my browsing ways when sanity returns to tell me that I don’t have to show to anyone that I am working. But this episode has been repeating so many times over the past couple of weeks that I am sure most of my colleagues have branded me the "Indian Idle".

It’s not that I am not trying to work. I am. I have read through tomes of collaterals, and presentations. I have met quite a few people within the organization to understand the practices, and continue to set up meetings with more. I was also on a 3 day residential training program, where I was one of the most active and vociferous participants. In between all this, I was also running around to get my travel documents in place. So clearly, I have done all that I could to earn my pay package, although it doesn’t seem all that obvious.

And that’s not all. I have even interviewed with a professor from Penn State for his Organizational Theory research paper on MindTree. The interview experience was quite interesting. The professor, after promising confidentiality and seeking my consent, recorded the interview for future consumption. The content of the interview was a colorful mix of my take on the organization’s strategy, about what it has done right and what it can do better, and how it should position itself for the future. Of course, all this heavy duty content was carefully packaged in a good bit of b-school jargon, although not with any intention to show-off but purely in the interest of conciseness and brevity. At the end of it, he also spoke to me about ISB and the faculty that came to teach our batch. All in all, it felt good to talk to a B-school professor again, and hopefully, I convinced him enough to accept the offer to teach at ISB the next time ISB approaches him.

Coming back to the original topic of this post, I know I am definitely under-worked, and thanks to my “utilization” oriented conditioning, I can’t help feeling guilty about it. But it is also true that I have been over-worked several times in my career, but never over-compensated. Considering the overall picture, I guess I can afford to sleep peacefully with the knowledge that, although I may not be generating any operating revenues right away, I am a “real option” for the future.

Till such time that the organization exercises this real option, I might as well enjoy my charmed life. I love "Options Thinking".