The cross-baldy effect

 Today’s woke world needs to wake up to a blatant bias

A sinister problem is seeping stealthily through society, spreading its tentacles and hounding good men. I became aware of it when a friend told me I was the splitting image of his cousin and showed me the cousin’s photograph on his phone. The man had a lighter complexion, rounder face and broader nose than me. His eyes were wider apart. And while friends have often remarked on the prominent nature of my chin (“It enters the room before you do”), his was almost non-existent.

In fact, we shared only one characteristic: a smooth, well-shaven head. The gross injustice, always hovering in the depths of my subconscious, surfaced suddenly. I realized that this was not the first time a bald man was being declared a close resemblance to another bald man and it won’t be the last. I recalled my bald friends relating instances of their friends, acquaintances and even strangers declaring them to be identical looking to a cousin, boss, colleague or distant uncle. The prejudice is everywhere: bald men are being mistaken for each other in WhatsApp forums, dimly lit pubs and crowded football stadiums in every country, every day.

Today’s woke world comes down hard on people exhibiting any form of this insidious bias of likening one human being to another just because they belong to a common category. For example, if you were to ask two of your black American colleagues whether they are related would you not get a severe and well-deserved reprimand from human resources? And if you ever express wonder at the resemblance between two Koreans because of the similarity in their passports, would they not immediately (and justifiably) scold you?

Indeed Wikipedia has a whole section called cross-race effect that covers mankind’s confusion in distinguishing between people of another race. It includes complex concepts like ‘emotion recognition’ and ‘cognitive disregard’. And for those afflicted, there is increasingly help available to handle the pain of the cross-race effect. For example, in 2016, The Washington Post wrote about “published guides to help readers distinguish between” Asians of different origin and went on to explain how “computer scientists at the University of Rochester tried to teach an algorithm to tell the difference between Chinese, Japanese and Korean faces.”

But is the cross-baldy effect raging around us getting the same indignant response from the same woke world? Far from it. Take Wikipedia for starters. Apart from a dry section on ‘hair loss’ offering the vapid and completely useless information that hair loss is also known as alopecia, there is nothing. There aren’t any training programmes to teach people how to distinguish between bald faces (Lesson 1: “The face starts above the eyebrows and proceeds downwards from there.”)? And no computer scientist is working on a baldy-recognition algorithm.

Perhaps we baldies are to blame. We have not come forward. We’ve accepted this grievous injustice with stoicism and resignation. That is why conducting research in Google on the topic of bald men being mistaken for each other throws up not examples of this happening but a variety of balderdash instead. There is an article in The Guardian offering tips for dealing with baldness, starting with asking you to accept it – and making bald men wonder if there were indeed a choice in the matter that not been conveyed to them – and then pontificating about the use of wigs, hair transplants and drugs. Other links lead you to examples of bald men who are famous and successful, hinting that if you’re bald you should simply hang in there, and your very hairlessness will one day catapult you to fame. (These articles fail to mention people who are famous and successful, and have a head of hair. I believe there are a few of them.) There is research to reassure bald men that their affliction is not their mother’s fault. And finally, there is some claptrap claiming that women find bald men attractive. All I can say on that matter is that the woman who chose to marry me often looks at old photographs featuring my hirsute days and sighs wistfully.

So I urge my bald brothers to take inspiration from this ground-breaking article and flood the internet with real stories of real hairless heroes. Tell the world that you don’t really care that you’re bald, that you like it, that you actually use a razor twice a week to achieve the effect. Clarify that you have not spent the better part of your life and a significant part of your mother’s blaming her for your baldness. Admit that you would not mind becoming rich and famous and successful, but you don’t believe baldness alone will take you there. And above all rave and rant about the injustice being reaped on you when you’re mistaken for another bald person. Tell them it rankles. Exhort them to stop.

But if they say they cannot help themselves, that, in order to earn a good night’s rest, they must equate one bald man’s looks with another, request them to aim higher: instead of mistaking you for an obscure second cousin on their father’s side, mistake you for Bruce Willis or Jeff Bezos and seek your autograph.

This article first appeared in The Strait Times, in Oct 2022

It's urgent to make sense of overwork

 A rose by any other name may smell as sweet but ‘overwork’ smells much sweeter when named ‘sense of urgency’

I was playing tennis with a friend, an entrepreneur. During every changeover, he would sit down and get engrossed with his phone. After being made to wait three or four times, I asked him what was so urgent.

“On email with my sales manager in India,” he replied crisply: “I reply to every email within 20 minutes of getting it.”

“But it’s 7:30 am on a Saturday morning! 5 am in India!”

“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “We attend to everything with a sense of urgency. I’ve instilled a 24/7 work culture.” The pride in his voice, cloying and self-righteous, overflowed into the tennis court.

By displaying a keen sense of urgency, he was not really attending to work in between tennis; he was playing tennis in between his work. 

Like him, many of us take our work with us everywhere – to the tennis court, cinema, food court, even bed. We check our emails just before sleeping and immediately on waking up (even if it’s for a midnight toilet visit). Work consumes every hour of our day, every fibre of our being. 

THE GLAMOUR OF A 24/7 CULTURE

It was not meant to be like this. In a 1930 essay, the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted a 15-hour week 100 years later. But the workweek has only grown since then. Mr Keynes rightly prophesised the advance in technology and leaps in productivity that could render shorter working hours, but grossly underestimated mankind’s resourcefulness in grappling with the problem. “If machines do much of what we did yesterday – we’ll do other stuff today!” seems to be our defiant response to Mr Keynes.

Thirty years ago, the New York Times lamented the increase in working hours and corresponding reduction in leisure, and every passing year has featured the same story. In Oct 2019, just months before Covid-19 ravaged the world, The Guardian cited overwork as a major cause of burnout.

What drives people to work so much? It’s “their own ambitions refracted through the expectations of their employers”, suggests James Suzman in his book exploring the history of work. In a similar vein, a BBC article talks about how “Billionaire tech entrepreneurs advocate sacrificing sleep so that people can ‘change the world’”; and how, having bought the argument, we “devote ourselves to work and glamourise long-hours”.

But in recent years the glitz of overwork is being dimmed by a counter movement: work-life balance. Op-eds , TED talks, business literature and mainstream news are all exhorting people to live a more holistic life, with work occupying a part, not dominating its entirety. In this environment, it is unbecoming for chief executives to overtly demand overwork, and embarrassing for employees to wear it as a badge of honour.

A USEFUL EUPHEMISM

In typical fashion, business leaders found the answer to retain the allure of long hours – in business jargon. ‘Overwork’ sounds harsh, exhausting and degrading. ‘A sense of urgency’ sounds stylish, statesmanlike and purposeful. And when it is emblazoned on corporate walls with the inspirational image of a sprinter cutting the tape after a 100-metre dash, featured in CEO townhall addresses, and written into performance appraisals, it acquires an ethereal, spiritual, quality.

As a young executive, I was once told that, by taking two weeks to start work on an idea that our managing director had thrown our way, I had not exhibited an appropriate sense of urgency.

 “But that idea is for next year,” I said.

 “So?” My manager looked puzzled.

 “So it’s not urgent!” I said.

Shaking his head and adopting a fatherly tone, he explained how a sense of urgency could work for me, career-wise, especially if it were accompanied by fire in the belly.

“People who bring transformative change have courage, know how to re-frame the problem and have a sense of urgency.” says Malcolm Gladwell. As a bestselling author – of Outliers, The Tipping Point and Blink ­– Mr Gladwell’s words carry the weight of gospel to many. But his statement, while true, is grossly misleading. He has clubbed two irrefutable traits of change agents – courage and creative thinking – with a dubious third, one that is equally exhibited by successful change agents and resounding flops. I personally know entrepreneurs who pursued ideas without merit, but pursued them with a reverberating sense of urgency – and the only transformative change they effected was a downward one of their bank balances. 

To paraphrase Mr Gladwell with a sports analogy, I could say, “Tennis players who rise to the pinnacle have immense talent, an unwavering will to win and a decent pair of tennis shoes.”

THE CORONA-SENSE OF URGENCY

Under the guise of a sense of urgency the indoctrination of excessive work into our culture was complete well before Covid-19 hit us and irrevocably changed the world we knew, taking a tragic toll on lives and livelihoods, shrinking the economy, slowing businesses, and forcing us to work from home. In its midst, one might have expected some respite in working hours (for those not in healthcare).

But the reverse happened. The corporation’s answer to slowing consumer demand, disrupted supply chains and travel cessation? Work harder! The World Economic Forum reported that Covid-19 caused up to a 40% increase working hours in some countries. At home, reported in this paper last month, one in two Singaporeans has worked more hours since the onset of Covid-19; and many have added two hours to their workday.

Working from home has actually facilitated this by obliterating the office hour constraint. Like bananas into smoothies, days blend into nights and weekdays into weekends. “When the business slows down, we go faster,” leaders seem to suggest. “And since you work in your pyjamas anyway, why stop just because it’s 8 pm? Or a balmy Sunday morning?”

But the toll of overwork is now proving worse than just stress and burnout. Recent research suggests that around three-quarters of a million people die every year due to it. So, business leaders, please stop demanding a sense of urgency from your people; in fact eliminate the phrase from your business lexicon. And do it with a genuine sense of urgency. Otherwise the next time an employee tells you, “Excessive work is killing me”, they may not be speaking figuratively.

This article first appeared in The Strait Times, Singapore, on 1^st May 2022

Wanted - vaccine against corporate speak

Business jargon is not new; neither are articles on it. But Covid-19 has augmented every professional’s game. Doctors are treating more patients, economists are suggesting larger structural reforms, politicians are holding more meetings and executives are indulging in greater corporate guff. So the pandemic’s boost to business gobbledygook is worth exploring.

Here’s what BCG, a consultancy, posted on its website two years ago, soon after Covid-19 was upon us: “Immediate action is critical, but leaders must also embrace a new agenda — one aimed squarely at what comes next, for business and all of society”. I was flummoxed when I read it for the first time… and the second. On the third reading the meaning finally seeped through: BCG was urging us to do stuff we have to do now and then do stuff that we have to do next. Not to be outdone, its rival EY-Parthenon raised the level of twaddle, saying, “through the crisis, long-term value is going to become a much brighter ‘North Star’ by which to navigate.”

As the pandemic has spread, so has business parlance to deal with it. Two years into Covid-19, BCG continues to offer such pearls of wisdom (on its landing page, no less): “Always-on business transformation is essential for surviving disruption.”  

Perhaps the most important lesson emerging from this tragic pandemic is the need for transformation, especially digital transformation. Google Trends shows the use of the phrase, already on a steady rise since 2015, has doubled in the last three years. When we hear a CEO say, “We need urgent digital transformation to prepare for the post-Covid world”, we are not sure whether they want employees to encourage customers to shop online, reply to inter-department emails faster or keep the camera on during Zoom meetings. Perhaps they’re not sure, either.

In my experience, managers use complex jargon for three reasons: to sound grand, obfuscate ignorance, and follow the herd. Perhaps a crisis like Covid-19 accentuates each motive.

Take sounding grand to start with. Consultants want to show that they know what they’re saying when advising companies to deal with a once-in-a-century pandemic that no living person has experienced. They could play it safe and advise clients to “do a few things at a time” but the CEO, who gets such advice from their grandmother, will baulk at paying big bucks to hear the same words from their consultant. So this is how one consultancy words the same advice: “Choose the journey carefully to start. It is too easy to try to boil the ocean.”  Similarly, get your ducks in a row sounds grander than prepare properly and think outside the box than think creatively.

Covid-19 also forces managers into hiding ignorance. When the pandemic hit us none of us knew what was happening – and we remain befuddled today. So there’s plenty of ignorance to camouflage. And Donald Rumsfeld has taught us that the best way to say “We have no clue” is by employing the phrase “unknown unknowns”. A Forbes article starts with this balderdash in its headline itself: “Leadership after Covid-19: learning to navigate the unknown unknowns”. And continues in the same vein in the article, offering incoherent advice like, “Post-crisis leadership requires tuning in to other frequencies and applying behaviours that are not as narrowly focused and have less immediate goals.”

We know that people follow the herd. And managers, who strive to do everything better, follow the herd with more gusto. During Covid-19 no managerial jargon has become trendier than ‘new normal’. In 2020, the World Health Organisation titled a webpage as ‘The new normal’. And just a few days ago, on 10^th February 2022, Forbes published an article on ‘Building effective remote teams in the new normal’. Meanwhile the Pew Research Centre issued a grim warning that “Experts say the ‘new normal’ in 2025 will be far more tech-driven,”. In our fast paced, fickle world, surely the new normal in 2021 would be an upgrade over the new normal in 2020 and the one in 2025 even more advanced? Maybe we should clear the confusion by using terms such as ‘newer normal’, ‘newest normal’ and ‘new normal 2.1’.

But managers don’t appear confused. Leaders in every industry – from agriculture to aeronautics, banking to building materials, and postal services to pharmaceuticals – are saying ‘new normal’ these days. Some of them are saying it several times a day.

The extend of corporate guff has been ridiculed often (like here and here). Despite this, managerial mumbo-jumbo has spread through organizations like an alarming virus. For example, in conference calls during Covid-19, hearing their CEO instructing them to take a discussion offline, employees start using the word at every opportunity, whether it’s warranted or not. For example, “To prepare for ACE (After-Covid Existence), I need to discuss key milestones with you offline. Or if you have time, we can discuss them offline now.”

New employees, listening to ear loads of such corporate blather from their managers – in the conference room, on the telephone, via email, and over drinks to celebrate the latest merger – begin speaking like that too.

As business leaders, we need to stop this nonsense. Let’s pivot from the jargon status quo and leverage normal language as a core competency. Whoops, sorry! I mean let’s stop using jargon and start speaking English.

If we don’t, jargon will become everyday parlance and employees will cease to understand us when we speak like ordinary humans. Soon you may face a situation like this.

You tell your manager to focus on only two things during the pandemic– e-commerce and delivery – because they are the “easiest to do and will produce quick results.”

They stare at you, puzzled. “But why?” they ask. “I don’t see the logic.”

Now you are puzzled. “I just told you why,” you reply. “Because they’re the easiest and will yield results soon.”

The manager’s face clears. “Oh, you mean I should go after the low-hanging fruit? Why didn’t you speak plainly in the first instance? 

This article first appeared in The Strait Times, Singapore, on 27 Feb 2022

Programming the driverless car for India

In Google’s California campus, the spooky spectacle of driverless cars moving quietly on the road is apparently common. Now Google is letting these cars roam the city streets, and, according to a recent article in the New York Times by Matt Richtel and Conor Dougherty, the cars are not enjoying sharing the road with human drivers.

The article describes how, seeing a pedestrian at a zebra crossing, a self-driving car slowed down, but the car behind it didn’t. The result? The pedestrian was unharmed, but the Google car ‘was hit from behind by a human-driven sedan’.

I smiled. Then, as I read what Donald Norman, an expert on autonomous vehicles, had to say, I chortled aloud: “They (driverless cars) have to learn to be aggressive in the right amount, and the right amount depends on the culture.”

How appropriate it would be for the car to be trained in India, I thought, affectionately reflecting upon our famous driving culture. I imagine being tasked to travel in the driverless car in Chennai (with the ability to take over control at my whim) to figure out what changes are needed in the car’s programming to inculcate an appropriate sense of aggressiveness in it.

I get into the car and input my destination into the map. The car reverses silently into my colony road. When we reach the main road, instead of turning right, the car switches on its indicator and waits. Immediately the driver behind us blares his car’s horn and gesticulates ‘Move, idiot!’ with his arm.