Virender Sehwag's Approach to Cricket and Training

 

The stark truth about management and power

 Stefan Stern in The FT

 

“If you want power to be used for good, more good people need to have power.” 

This quotation is usually attributed to Jeffrey Pfeffer, professor of organisational behaviour at Stanford University’s graduate school of business. Pfeffer himself is more modest about its origins. He cites it at the beginning of his new book — more on this later — but describes it simply as “a quote attributed to me”. 

This slightly sheepish opening sums up an intriguing paradox about the man. He tells stark truths about management and power and what it takes to get to the top, which some may find unsettling. But, fundamentally, his purpose is compassionate. The challenge embedded in his famous aphorism is this: it is little use criticising the excesses of terrible leaders but then being too squeamish to engage with and win power yourself. 

When I call Pfeffer at his Californian home he sounds a bit distracted, for reasons that become noisily apparent. “I need to move my car,” he says. “My garage is about to be . . . I’m having some construction work done . . . I’ll be back in a minute.” 

He is true to his word, and proceeds to offer a tutorial on the realities of power, revealing why his course on the subject at Stanford, where he has taught for more than 40 years, is so popular with students. 

“Exercising power and being a leader is not about winning a popularity contest,” he says. “It was Gary Loveman [former chief executive of the Caesars casino business] who said: ‘If you want to be liked, get a dog. A dog will love you unconditionally.’ 

“A lot of leaders are not necessarily nice people,” he adds. “Many of the things that leaders have to do are not necessarily nice . . . There is very little overlap — I mean, almost none — between companies on the ‘best places to work’ list and companies led by leaders who are on the ‘most admired leaders’ list,” Pfeffer says. 

His new book, published this summer, is called 7 Rules of Power: Surprising — but True — Advice on How to Get Things Done and Advance Your Career. His seven rules are: 

Get out of your own way — that is, speak with confidence and do not undersell yourself. 

Break the rules — do the unexpected. 

Show up in powerful fashion — with conscious body language and actual language. 

Create a powerful brand. 

Network relentlessly. 

Use your power — do not be afraid to wield power once you have it. 

And, finally, remember that “success excuses (almost) everything” — the powerful attract and retain support. 

These rules are not simply plausible-sounding assertions but are in fact based on deep research and decades of social science experiment and observation. These are “the realities on the ground”, as Pfeffer says. 

While clearly not a fan of former US president Donald Trump, Pfeffer notes that he was a skilful follower of these rules. “He was seven for seven,” he says. He describes the winning Trumpian mentality in these terms: “You tell me what I need to do to win, and I’ll do it. I will say anything, I will do anything. The question is: are you willing to do what it takes?” 

This may sound Hobbesian and bleak. But note, too, that Pfeffer’s last book was called Dying for a Paycheck, and was a strong attack on the worst forms of modern management and the harm it can do both to employee health and company performance. An earlier book was called “The Human Equation: building profits by putting people first”. There is a touching passage in the book’s acknowledgements about the author’s late wife, Kathleen, who died last year and to whom the book is dedicated. 

Our call is once again interrupted by an off-stage crash. “Pardon the background noise — they must be doing something serious here — they should be, for what I’m paying them . . . ” 

In this latest work, Pfeffer writes: “One reason why people fail to achieve their objectives or lose out in competitions for high-status positions is their unwillingness to do what is required to prevail.” 

This is his reality check for aspiring leaders and those who want to get on in the organisation. You have to take responsibility and put yourself in a position where professional advance is possible and likely. “Happy talk”, or “leadership BS” (the title of another of his books), will not get you there. 

“I don’t think anybody is going to say that Elon Musk is sweet,” Pfeffer says, “or that Jeff Bezos is sweet, or Steve Jobs was nice, or Jack Welch was going to be picked by anybody to be stranded on a desert island with. Many leaders are narcissists,” he adds, “although their ‘autobiographies’ say that they are lovely human beings . . . ” 

Pfeffer looks power in the eye and does not flinch. He tells it like it is. Can we handle the truth? If we want power to be used for good, more good people need to have power.

Daniel Goleman on Focus: The Secret to High Performance and Fulfilment

How to focus your mind - Swami Sarvapriyananda

What is my duty in life?

What does focus mean in cricket ?

Simon Barnes in Cricinfo

Cricketers are always talking about focus. So is everybody else in big-time sport. You hear more talk about focus from professional athletes than you do from professional photographers. The difference is that when photographers mention it, there's a general agreement on what they are talking about.

"Hard work, sacrifice and focus will never show up in tests," said Lance Armstrong, making focus unlike most of the other stuff he used. Focus has become a magic word, one used to explain every half-decent performance in sport.

It has also become an interview staple - the right answer to almost any question.

"How do you feel about the shattering on-pitch row that took place today?"

"I just try and stay focused on my batting."

It's a rebuff to the interviewer, a statement of intent and a personal call to order: what matters here is not your story but my batting.

Focus reflects the idea that you can train your mind, that your mind is as much an instrument of the will as your body

Focus takes in every part of modern sport. It is used in the minutiae of action. A batsman's first job is to focus on the ball, and that involves literal and metaphorical use of the word. Batting is first about looking at the ball - some batsmen mutter "watch the ball" every single time. But there is also a figurative focus. You confine your attention to the action, refusing to get distracted by sledging fielders, the fact that the team is 108 for 7, and that you haven't made double figures for the last five innings.

From here the idea of focus expands beyond the immediate action and takes you to the mindset of the professional athlete. This fearsome thing combines a horror of the past with a straw-clutching concentration on the future. For some, this is a natural state, for others, one that requires painful effort.

Either way, the idea is that concentrating - focusing - on the past is counterproductive. Memories of both success and failure are equally damaging. All that matters is the next match. "I prefer to focus on what is coming next," said the racing driver, Sebastian Vettel, spelling out the way professional athletes school themselves to think.

Focus reflects the idea that you can train your mind, that your mind is as much an instrument of the will as your body. Both can be improved by coaching and training and sheer bloody effort. You can school yourself to "focus on the positives".

While everyone watches you, you watch the ball © Getty Images

So after a horrendous defeat, you talk about the good things it involved. Tim Henman, the British tennis player, was a master at this. "But there's a lot of positive I can take from this," he would say, before leaving Wimbledon at the semi-final stage once again. A focused individual chooses what kind of defeat he endures. The best make defeat a stepping stone to victory. Tim never quite did, of course, but we British never stopped loving him.

Focus can operate over a still wider field. You keep your focus not just on the ball or on the future or on the positives. You also keep focus on your entire life. Don't let outside distractions affect you. Stay focused on football or cricket or running.

So if you shift your focus from golf to cocktail waitresses, you end up like Tiger Woods. The conventional view of Tiger's troubles is that he lost his focus. The fact of the matter is that he had his life in perfect balance. What threw him off was getting found out.
That's because there is a contradiction in the idea of focus. It is normally understood as unrelenting concentration on a single thing, but batsmen maintain their focus by constantly going out of focus. The key to a long innings, as all batsmen will explain, is "switching off" between balls and at the non-striker's end.

The focused athlete has become part of 21st-century mythology - a perfect example of what we all need to do if we are to become more successful people

In the same way, many male athletes improve dramatically when they become fathers. The loss of focus actually helps. Sport is no longer the only thing or even the most important thing in life. The consequent lessening of intensity - of focus - becomes a positive asset.

Focus has become part of the survival kit of the modern athlete. The focused athlete has become part of 21st-century mythology - a perfect example of what we all need to do if we are to become more successful people. The image (preferably in sharp focus) of a sprinter at the start of a race or, a footballer making contact with the ball, or a batsman in the instant before the ball arrives - these seem to reveal important truths about the way life should be lived. Only focus, and the world is yours!

The myth is that once you have achieved focus you can do just about anything. The word has acquired an almost religious significance, a mystic state of perfect attainment. That's mostly because it can mean more or less anything you choose.

Economics is too important to leave to the experts

Citizens may be able to see the world more clearly than narrowly focused professional economists

• 
• • Ha-Joon Chang
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 30 April 2014 17.30 BST

'Thatcher's big bang in 1986 laid the ground for freewheeling financial capitalism, whose destructive nature is at the heart of the current mess.' Photograph: PA Archive

You wouldn't have guessed it, given the fanfare surrounding the 0.8% growth figure for the first quarter of 2014, but people in the United Kingdom have been living through a period worse than Japan's infamous "lost decade" of the 1990s.

During that time, Japan's per capita GDP grew at 1% per year. This means that in 2000, Japan's per capita GDP was 10.5% higher than in 1990. In the UK, per capita GDP at the end of 2013 was 6.6% lower than that in 2007. This means that, unless the UK economy miraculously grows at around 5% a year for the next four years (factoring in population growth rate of around 0.7% a year), it is going to have a decade that is even more "lost" than Japan's 1990s.

The costs of the 2008 crisis in terms of human welfare have been even greater than the growth figures suggest. Unemployment is still nearly 7%, or at 2.24 million, depriving people of dignity and putting them under huge stress. Real wages have had some of the biggest falls in the OECD bloc of 34 countries and have a long way to go before they can recover to pre-crisis levels.

Steep cuts in welfare spending have hit many of the poorest hard. Increasing job insecurity, symbolised by the rise of zero-hours contracts, has been making workers' lives more stressful. The spread of food banks, the popularity of "poverty recipes" in cookery, and the advance of German discount supermarket chains, such as Aldi and Lidl, are the more visible manifestations of this pressure on the living standards of citizens.

What is more, even this sorry achievement has been made on the reversion to the economic model whose bankruptcy was laid bare by the 2008 crisis. That model was predicated on the deregulated financial system fuelling unsustainable growth by creating asset bubbles, one of the highest household debts in the world (as a proportion of GDP), and a large current account deficit.

How has this mess been created? The mismanagement of the crisis by the coalition government means it has to bear significant blame, but the main cause lies in the nature of the economic model that the UK has pursued for three decades.

This model started, as is well known, with Margaret Thatcher. She ripped up the post-second world war consensus on the mixed economy and started establishing one of the most deregulated economies in the rich world. Full employment was ditched as a goal and worker rights were weakened. State-owned enterprises were privatised, often with very negative consequences, as in the railways, water, and energy. Most importantly, her big bang financial deregulation laid the ground for the development of freewheeling financial capitalism, whose destructive nature is at the heart of the current mess.

Subsequent Labour governments took the roughest edges off Thatcherism by, for example, increasing social welfare spending and introducing the minimum wage. However, the underlying economic model remained intact; the New Labour thinking was that we should let the City maximise its profits by minimising regulation, and then help the poor with the taxes on those profits. There was no realisation that the financial system itself may be a problem.

After a brief period when it made noises about rebalancing the economy and the "big society", the coalition government has made a headlong dash for Thatcherism-plus. True, it has somewhat strengthened financial regulation, but in the meantime it has also subsidised the banks to the gills, both explicitly (bailouts) and implicitly (quantitative easing). Pursuing the doctrine of the balanced budget, it has cut spending in the middle of a recession, seriously delaying the recovery. It has made cuts to the welfare state that Thatcher herself would have found radical, while privatising "the Queen's head" (the Royal Mail), which even she refused to sell off.

Of course, all of these policies are supposed to have been backed up by scientifically proved economic theories – saying that markets are best left alone, that making the rich richer makes everyone richer, that welfare spending and protection of worker rights only make people lazy and dependent, and so on. Most people have accepted these theories without much questioning because they are based on "expert" advice.

However, all these economic theories are at least debatable and often highly questionable. Contrary to what professional economists will typically tell you, economics is not a science. All economic theories have underlying political and ethical assumptions, which make it impossible to prove them right or wrong in the way we can with theories in physics or chemistry. This is why there are a dozen or so schools in economics, with their respective strengths and weaknesses, with three varieties for free-market economics alone – classical, neoclassical, and the Austrian.

Given this, it is entirely possible for people who are not professional economists to have sound judgments on economic issues, based on some knowledge of key economic theories and appreciation of the political and ethical assumptions underlying various theories. Very often, the judgments by ordinary citizens may be better than those by professional economists, being more rooted in reality and less narrowly focused.

Indeed, willingness to challenge professional economists and other experts is a foundation stone of democracy. If all we have to do is to listen to the experts, what is the point of having democracy?

What this means is that, as citizens in a democracy, all of us have the duty to learn at least some economics and engage in economic debates. This is not as difficult as it may seem. As I try to show in my new book, Economics: The User's Guide, most of economics can be understood by anyone with a secondary education, if it is explained accessibly.

The economy is too important to be left to professional economists (and that includes me). As citizens, we should all learn economics and challenge what the professionals tell us to believe.

Cricket - Dhoni and the revelation that at first wasn’t noticed

MAKARAND WAINGANKAR in the hindu

  

APDhoni’s success did not come overnight. Nor was his selection in the Indian team a fluke.

 

Watching Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s career graph can make any one believe in miracles. The man with the Midas touch has been a revelation to experts ever since he arrived on the scene.

Dhoni’s success did not come overnight. Nor was his selection in the Indian team a fluke. He had been playing the Ranji Trophy for Bihar from 2000. But where Dhoni’s fate was different from that of others like him was the introduction of the Talent Resource Development Wing (TRDW) of the BCCI. No one noticed talent in his zone, which tended to promote players from one state, something the then selection committee chairman Kiran More objected to.

TRD officers P.C. Podar and Raju Mukherjee were scavenging for talent, hopping from one match to another in Jamshedpur during the Ranji one-dayers in 2003-04.

They came across a 22-year-old opener who was whacking bowlers all over the place. They promptly fed their assessments on the National Cricket Academy website and the chief TRDO Dilip Vengsarkar strongly recommended Dhoni for the India ‘A’ tour of Kenya.

MUST THANK HIS STARS

Within a year, Dhoni was in the Indian team to Bangladesh. Everything said and done, Dhoni has to thank his lucky stars for getting noticed in the first place.

He was fortunate that Vengsarkar’s recommendations were accepted by More’s selection committee.

More, being a wicketkeeper himself, wasn’t happy initially with Dhoni’s keeping abilities but every decision maker felt that Dhoni was a special talent. Dhoni gave the impression that he enjoyed pressure situations.

In an interview in Dr. Rudi Webster’s book, ‘Think Like a Champion’, Dhoni says, “I see pressure as an opportunity to do well. If you are under pressure you should not see it as a danger and give in to it.

DEALING WITH PRESSURE

“People say a lot of negative things about pressure. Pressure to me is just an added responsibility.

That is how I look at it. It’s not pressure when God gives you an opportunity to be a hero for your team and country.

“If you expect pressure and have a plan to deal with it you will know exactly what to do when it comes, and more often than not you will use it in a positive and productive way.

“The best way to deal with it is to stay in the moment and not get trapped in the past or caught up in the future on the result or on what might happen.

If you stay in the moment, calm your mind and focus on the process you won’t feel much pressure.”

The way Dhoni plays in the death overs is a mystery beyond explanation but these words of his certainly unravel some secrets. Webster’s book deals with many interviews of V.V.S. Laxman, Rahul Dravid, Sir Garfield Sobers and Greg Chappell.

It focuses on the psychological aspects of cricket, which is often referred to as “mental strength”.

Dhoni is candid in admitting that his technique isn’t of international standard. However, a glance at his performance (11567 international runs, 424 catches and 111 stumpings) shows that he has done what many great technicians of the game haven’t. To him, performance counts.

Technique is important of course, but Dhoni isn’t the kind to be a slave to technique.

The psychological aspect of the game that he emphasises should be an eye opener for people who are stuck with the baggage of technique.

Technique without performance is worthless; it can be at best used for technical comparison and nothing else.

What Leads to SUCCESS - 8 STEPs from TED