నీ తరగతిలో మా పురోగతి - Made in Prasanthi

విద్య నిరంతరం, వినయం దాని సారం,

నైపుణ్యమవసరం, గర్వమొక భారం,

Knowledge is recurrent while humility is its undercurrent,

Essential is our talent but ego turns it blunt,

భక్తి శుభారంభం, జీవనం దాని బింబం,

మనస్సు మందిరం, మాట అచట పరిమళం,

Devotion is true when life is blended in it's brew,

At the altar of the conscience, sweet speech the only fragrance,

కర్మ నిష్కామం, కృషి మన ధర్మం,

కృప కర్మానుసారం, క్రమశిక్షణ సంస్కారం,

Selfless shall be our action and efforts primary obligation,

Grace follows acts noble, while discipline scripts our preamble,

ప్రేమ అమితం, మితం సర్వదా హితం,

సమయం అమూల్యం, విలువలు అతుల్యం,

Love is limitless and limiting desires leads to the limitless,

Time is precious while values turn us plenteous,

జీవితం ఓ వరం, కరుణ దాని ఫలం,

ముక్తికి సోపానం, రాదు మరో తరుణం,

Life is a present and is fructified with compassion abundant,

This is the highway to peace with second chance scarce,

నేర్పావు అనుక్షణం, అలుపెరుగని నీ వీక్షణం,

మరువలేని తీక్షణం, మరలరాదు ఆ క్షణం.

Hence taught by you always, under supervision stupendous,

The memories are magical and the moments irrepllicable!

* for alumni presentation on 24th Apr.,2019

Leading from the Front - Col.S.P. Wahi (Retd.)

Motivation:

An organization can ill afford too many square pegs in round holes. Negative attributes are like parasitic weeds – they demand continuous attention to remain controlled. It is our responsibility to learn from the observations of senior leaders from our own organization who walked their talk and more so when such chronicles are few. This is an attempt to provide interesting lines verbatim from ‘Leading from the Front – from army to corporate world’, by Col. S.P. Wahi (Feb. 13th, 2019 – 2 years in memoriam). This is the result of a chance encounter of a copy supplied by Corporate communications lying on my senior’s desk. Most of the book surprisingly rings true to this day though contains thoughts from early 90’s. A well written Appendix- B is a must read to every ONGCian.

• In theory, theory and practice are the same, in practice, they aren’t. (Foreword)

• “The buck stops here”-it takes a truly great leader to make the tough decisions and even greater leader to not begrudge those who opposed him after they are proven to be wrong. (Foreword)

• Human relation problems are the root cause of low performance of the enterprises.(Preface)

• A control room to document all decisions and the authority taking such decisions, does help to identify leaders with character and courage. (Preface)

• ‘The honour and safety of the country comes first, always and every time, the welfare safety and comfort of people under your charge comes next and your own self comes last, always and every time’.(p.7)

• The philosophy is that anyone who ceases to improve ceases to be good.(p.8)

• Leaders have to know their people well to inspire and motivate them to put their best. (p.8)

• Common uniform creates a sense of belonging to the group.(p.8)

• One can delegate responsibility and authority but never accountability. (p.10)

• Individuals who had to achieve quantifiable results in a limited time had more onerous tasks than those occupying staff positions either in field or peace stations. (p.11)

• The executives/ managers remained out of touch with the practical problems and realities on the shop floor. A culture of confrontation instead of collaboration with the workers was prevalent which caused low productivity. (p.12)

• Concept of Officiating pay in army! (p.13)

• Learning the ‘don’ts’ of working! (p.14)

• Perseverance pays and never allow your rights to be curbed. (p.15)

• “I will not allow this gear box on any tank to endanger the life of my son who may be on this tank during war”- lesson on quality. (p.22)

• I have never bowed down to anyone and have learnt to stand on my own legs and fight my own battles. (p.23)

• One should never volunteer, but also never refuse when some task/responsibility is given. It is a golden principle. (p.25)

• Know how to assert yourself. (p.26)

• Follow up peoples activities meticulously without breathing down their necks. (p.29)

• Any organization which does not grow will stagnate and perish. (p.33)

• Ownership concept for Operational managers is essential for quick decision making and accountability. (p.39)

• Once senior executives identify themselves with work, no matter how small it may look, it raises the morale and motivation of the workers. (p.40)

• A culture for concern for employees to meet their needs, dreams and welfare, needs to be created. (p.42)

• Latecomers are never allowed to enter during the meeting. (p.43)

• To keep the overall objective of the enterprise in view and the functional group loyalties subordinated, avoid conflicting instructions. (p.44)

• Those who collect salary without adding any value are worse than beggars. (p.44)

• The head of the department is mostly busy in meetings, leaving no time for decision-making in the department. (p.44)

• Labour problems need to be resolved on the spot, otherwise they escalate into major problems resulting in loss of time, money and faith. (p.44)

• The benefit gained by the organization as a result of individual innovative action must be shared to sustain the interest of employees. (p.45)

• In critical situations one cannot afford to wait for information; one has to take the risk to move to the spot of the crisis. (p.45)

• People can perform even beyond their normal potential, if provided with proper work environment to ensure high morale and motivation. (p.51)

• Management through wandering ensures involvement of rank and file and fast feedback for corrective measures – those responsible for decision making were encouraged to move out of their offices and interact with the men on sites. (p.54)

• No forum for formal identification of employee problems except through unions results in confrontations. (p.56)

• Higher rungs of management were only busy in purchases and sales. Executives were stagnating in their existing positions for years. (p.57)

• Employees should experience their own growth with the growth of the organization. (p.57)

• Productivity linked incentive scheme for increased commitment. (p.60)

• Most of the technical problems are man-made due to human relation issues –either ego or greed. (p.60)

• The seventh five year plan of the country was publicly acknowledged as the ONGC plan. (p.62)

• Exploration is a scientific gamble where input is deterministic but output is probabilistic. (p.63)

• LOB (left out of battle), state of R&D – no sense of involvement, lack of discipline and freedom from accountability. (p.66)

• Culture of ‘do it yourself’ gave way to ‘get it done’. (p.67)

• Bombay High structure was delineated with the help of Russian ship ‘Academic Arkhangelisky’ and first well drilled by Sagar Samrat. Field discovered on 19.02.1974. (p.70)

• In the Siberian basin, they had explored for almost 40 years and drilled 90 dry wells before discovering the huge reserves – determination and perseverance. (p.73)

• Business is like a battle front – read Art of War by Sun Tzu. (p.83)

• 3F for man management – Friendliness, Fairness and Firmness. (p.84)

• It is not enough to do good work but people should know about it, to establish credibility and name for the organization. (p.85)

• Consultants never accept responsibility, but only diffuse accountability. (p.96)

• A ‘Yes’ culture, stifled initiative and compelled one to respect rules and procedures rather than focusing on performance, had crept in. a culture subservient to the consultants and contractors had developed. (p.97)

• All those who aspired to be leaders had to continuously update the knowledge to remain effective. In the annual appraisal forms, the executives were required to list the publications they had read. (p.103)

• Every decision has a risk element, otherwise all decision-making could be taken over by the computers. An average manager would hate to take a decision, unless ordered from the top or pushed from below. (p.138)

• Review and control cannot be so detailed that initiative is stifled, freedom to perform is throttled, and flexibility in approach subordinated to regimentation. (p.140)

• ‘Blame Game’ is our national hobby. (p.146)

• Management of business involves perspective planning, quick decisions and risk taking. (p.147)

• There is a need to ensure integration of the oil sector through a holding company or supervisory board, preventing multiplicity of efforts on the same subject. (p.158)

• A man ahead of his time and who tells the truth first has to be necessarily hanged as per a French song, or at least be attempted to be hanged. (p.162)

• Saudi oil minister to OPEC – “Stone age did not come to an end due to shortage of stones.” (p.164)

• Inefficiency is very infectious. (p.172)

• ONGC does not manufacture oil but locates it – in a response to media. (p.174)

• Ensure that long-range objectives are not sacrificed for short-term gains. (p.175)

• Leadership is an ability to inspire a group of people to move willingly and enthusiastically towards a common group objective in a synergetic manner. To inspire, the leader has to be a role model. For this the leader has to have character, competence, concern for the organization and the people, commitment to achieve results, courage to take decisions and lead from the front, the ability to conceptualize so that woods are not missed for the tress, and the attitude and ability to communicate. (p.180)

• There is an urge in every individual to be accepted as competent. (p.180)

• It is better to get 90 per cent of a high target than get 110 per cent of low target. (p.181)

• There is no shortage of managers, but managers with leadership are in short supply. (p.182)

• Leadership to inspire cannot be outsourced and had to be developed. Leadership calls for personal sacrifice to lead from the front. They have to have character and courage to act and not miss opportunities. (p.183)

• Responsibility accounting – every executive may be asked to identify his objective and accountability as perceived by him. (p.184)

• The Zero defect concept to do everything right the first time has to be our second nature. (p.187)

• There is knowledge explosion – each one of us has to catch up with this race and remain updated otherwise we would get obsolete. (p.187)

• The welfare measures need equal attention to make sure that individual problems are tackled without any loss of time. It would be desirable that inventory of personal grievances is maintained at all projects. (p.189)

• We must have ‘Millionaires mentality’. The work has to be done at a given cost and not at any cost. (p.194)

• ‘Monuments of inefficiency’- on the civil construction of our buildings/assets. (p.195)

• We continue to follow bureaucratic culture of ‘speaking’ on the files. A participative culture must prevail. Those involved in decision making should get together, discuss, finalise and record a common note. We should not stand on formalities or have any false vanity and avoid going to each other’s offices for this purpose. (p.195)

• We have not only to be honest but look to be honest. (p.196)

• Knowledge obsolescence is worse than equipment obsolescence. (p.200)

• The people are our greatest asset. Each one has to be treated as a ‘Gentleman’ till he proves otherwise. (p.201)

• To have a baby without any labour pains? Our boys have built up these assets by their sweat and toil – on gifting away ONGC fields to third parties.(p.214)

Man's Search for Meaning - Viktor E. Frankl

A book which urges to script our life based on meaningfulness steering clear of what the majority may feel right. The thoughts the author shares touch us with their sincerity as they carry the weight of experience from holocaust and not the typical steps to success. Came across this during a  TV interview of  Mr. RN Pravin Kumar of Telangana civil services. 

for the record:

• Nietzsche, “He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How”.
• Life is primarily – quest for pleasure: Freud, quest for power: Alfred Adler, quest for meaning: Frankl (Logotherapy).
• Source of Meaning – work, love and courage.
• Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.
• The man, whose self-esteem had always depended on the respect of others, is emotionally destroyed.
• Life is meaningful and we must learn to see life as meaningful despite our circumstances.
• Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.
• Life holds a potential meaning under any conditions, even the most miserable ones.
• Success, like happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success. Listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.
• Dostoevski – defines man as a being who can get used to anything.
• It is not the physical pain that hurts the most; it is the mental agony caused by the injustice, the unreasonableness of it all.
• Humor is one of the soul’s weapons in the fight for self –preservation.
• A man’s suffering is similar to the behaviour of gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the size of human suffering is absolutely relative.
• No man should judge unless he asks himself in the absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.
• There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.
• Man’s inner strength may raise him above his outward fate.
• A man who could not see the end of his “provisional existence” was not able to aim at an ultimate goal in life.
• A man who let himself decline because he could not see any future goal found himself occupied with retrospective thoughts.
• They preferred to close their eyes and to live in the past. Life to such people became meaningless.
• Real opportunities of life never cease to exist.
• It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future.
• Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.
• State of mind of a man is the state of immunity of his body.
• We need to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life – daily and hourly. Our answer must be consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct.
• When the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude.
• The immediate influence of behaviour is always more effective than that of words.
• Neitzsche: That which does not kill me, makes me stronger.
• What you have experienced, no power on earth can take from you.
• Human life, under any circumstances, never ceases to have a meaning.
• Someone looks down on each of us in difficult hours – a friend, a wife, somebody alive or dead, or a God – and he would not expect us to disappoint him.
• There are two races of men in this world, but only these two – the “race” of the decent man and the “race” of the indecent man.
• I called to the Lord from the narrow prison and He answered me in the freedom of space.
• No one has the right to do wrong, not even if wrong has been done to them.
• Moral deformity resulting from the sudden release of mental pressure.
• Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a secondary rationalization of instinctual drives.
• Logotherapy: Man’s main concern consists in fulfilling a meaning, rather than in the mere gratification and satisfaction of drives and instincts.
• Schopenhauer, “mankind is apparently doomed to vacillate eternally between the two extremes of distress and boredom".
• Responsibleness is the very essence of human existence.
• Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now.
• A painter tries to convey to us a picture of the world as he sees it; an ophthalmologist tries to enable us to see the world as it really is.
• Life has a meaning up to the last moment and it retains this meaning literally to the end.
• A life whose meaning depends on happenstance, ultimately would not be worth living.
• God preserves all your tears – Psalms 56,8.
• In the past nothing is irretrievably lost but everything irrevocably stored.
• At any moment, man must decide, for better or for worse, what will be the monument of his existence.
• Instead of possibilities I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, though these are things which cannot inspire envy.
• Pleasure is, and must remain a side-effect or by-product, and is destroyed and spoiled to the degree to which it is made a goal in itself.
• The cue to cure is self-transcendence!
• Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibleness. Freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness.
• Man is ultimately self-determining. What he becomes – within the limits of endowment and environment – he has made out of himself.
• Man has swine and saint potentialities within himself – which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions.
• Tragic optimism – to remain optimistic despite – pain (turning suffering into a human achievement), guilt (opportunity to change oneself for the better), death (deriving from life’s transitoriness an incentive to take responsible action).
• Human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy.
• Meaning orientation had subsided and consequently the seeking of immediate pleasure had taken over. People have enough to live by but nothing to live for; they have the means but no meaning.
• Man does not live by welfare alone
• Aggression can be subsided through collective purpose.
• Similar to a movie, Doesn’t the final meaning of life, too reveal itself, if at all, only at its end, on the verge of death? And doesn’t this final meaning, too, depend on whether or not the potential meaning of each single situation has been actualized to the best of the respective individual’s knowledge and belief?
• Priority stays with creatively changing the situation that causes us to suffer. But the superiority goes to the “know-how to suffer,” if need be.
• No reason to pity old people – instead of possibilities in the future, they have realities in the past.
• Difference between Being valuable in the sense of dignity and Being valuable in the sense of usefulness.
• One may howl with the wolves, if need be, but when doing so, one should be, I would urge, a sheep in wolf’s clothing.
• Challenge to join the minority – of “saints”.
• Few phrases: A brand plucked from the fire; hint from heaven; struck out whole former life; textbooks tell lies; love is as strong as death; death in Tehran; here were great destinies and great men; morally and mentally hardened men; existential frustration/ vacuum; hyper-intention; hyper-reflection; paradoxical intention; hierarchy of values.

Yours Truly, New Year

Laying our own Road

Even the Taj shall remain invisible,

If at night holding a torch is unviable,

Every day marks a vibrant beginning,

Nothing is new without an undertaking,

We have danced on many thirty firsts,

Resolving nimble mind and body that sprints,

Alas! All the excuses hardly shall budge,

Mirrors alone display depths of our pledge,

The apathetic clock is relentless in ticks,

Shielded from all our entreaties and tricks,

Parking and procrastination – both at owner’s risk,

None can know the flow left in the river – Be brisk!