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There’s a conversation that plays out in organisations with quiet regularity. I’ve seen it in boardrooms and team offsites, in performance reviews and leadership coaching sessions.

The leader, usually well-meaning and genuinely frustrated, says some version of this: “My team is stuck. They won’t change. I keep pushing but nothing moves. I know it sounds like blame, but I know that they are capable of more, but they don’t’

It often takes the team members some time to feel safe enough to share a version of this: ‘Easy to point at us. But we’ve been wondering the same thing about our manager.’

Two sets of people. Both convinced the other is holding back. Both partly right, and neither entirely honest.

The tension reminds me of an old fable that I came across in the Ammaspeak column in The Indian Express today.

A poor farmer struck a deal with the village baker. The farmer would supply butter; the baker would give him bread in return. The exchange worked well for both - quality butter, fresh bread, no complications.

Until the baker began to notice the butter portions getting smaller.

He was furious. He accused the farmer of manipulating the weighing scales, of cheating him, and dragged him before the local judge in town.

‘Punish him severely,’ the baker said. ‘He has manipulated the scales and cheated me.’

All eyes turned to the farmer. He was nervous, but he found just enough courage to look the judge in the eye.

‘My lord, I have no weighing scale. I have no other means to measure. The only weight I have ever used is the weight of the bread the baker gives me. Every time, I match the butter to that.’

The courtroom went quiet. And so does the room, usually, when I tell this story to a group of leaders.

Because most of us recognise both characters.

We’ve been the baker quite often. Giving a little less, quietly, without fully admitting it to ourselves. Shorter conversations. Thinner feedback. Less genuine interest. And then, when the team gives back less, we name it as a performance problem instead of a relationship one.

The blame game is comfortable. The mirror is not.

What the farmer understood and what the baker had forgotten is that most exchanges in life are self-calibrating. People match what they receive. Not always consciously, not always immediately, but over time, the butter finds its own level.

As leaders, the question worth sitting with is not ‘Why aren’t they giving more?’

It’s simpler, and harder, than that.

‘What quality of bread have I been putting out?’

Bread, Butter & Blame is part of the #1MinuteStories series of stories you can read in a minute and use to make your point

Back in ’96, my first semester at B-School started with two D’s. I struggled in Accounting and Quant. Failed miserably. A third ‘D’ in the 1st year meant suspension from the course. Two days later, when I called home, I got to know that my parents got a warning letter from the Director. ‘Another D for your ward, please be ready to take him back.’ It crashed them.

Six of my study group members sat around me that evening. We’d already worked on some 3-4 projects and built a bond. Not much was said. They just decided to own me up. Next few semesters, each of them took up one subject they would check me on. No lectures, no motivating talks. They ensured I stepped up by just being there. They were my first Board. They weren’t my best friends in campus. But when I landed my first job in campus, they were the first ones I thanked.

24 years later, I was in a similar puddle of mess. I had to transition out of my last organisation. The deal looked good - but it was still a transition into the unknown, that was thrust upon me. My walk back to the flat that evening was the slowest. But, Mahesh, my flatmate then, made me see it differently. Even as I struggled to accept the moment, he helped me to own it. We set up calls that evening to all the people who mattered, where I told them exactly what happened and that I am embarking onto a fresh voyage. I sent my first proposal on storytelling training that midnight.

If I’ve been consistently lucky in one aspect of life - it’s been having the best set of people around me always. They weren’t people who said ‘yes’ to me mostly. They were not always nice. Some, stand by me always. Some taught me a valuable lesson by walking off and watching from far - for my own good. Some just played transformational cameos. But, they were always kind. And Fair. Saw me for who I am. They became the scaffolding when I needed it. And moved on when they knew I didn’t need one.

If Uday is an organisation named Uday.inc, these folks are my board of directors.

It just takes a moment to check if you’ve built your set of folks. Pause, right here. Write down the names of 5 people who can take that seat on your board.

You have them? Great. Else, go get them. You may not have to tell them that they are that - but boy, you’ll need them.

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It’s been a tough week for one leader who put 1000 foots or more in his mouth. He has been slammed and trolled. For a moment, let’s step away and imagine that he did have a fair intent in asking everyone to put in unyielding hard work, as the current times need it. And let’s just believe that if it were not for his urge to sound witty and improvise, all would have been well.

He isn’t the only leader who may have tried to improv and made a mess. And on the other hand, there are many leaders who used their improv skills to create great inspirational moments.

This week’s theme of #1MinuteStories is just this…on leaders who struggled on that big momentary question ‘To improv or not to improv’ and then made it memorable in their own way.

On the 23rd April, 1991, Gerald Ratner, CEO of the Ratners group, was invited to give a speech at the Royal Albert Hall at London to a 6000 strong prestigious audience of Institute of Directors and members from British Royalty. It was a speech to celebrate the success of the entrepreneur who made it big. Gerald Ratner, at that point, owned the largest jewellery group on the planet.

Just that, in 3 minutes of the speech he delivered, he destroyed his brand and business. And was on the road to become a pauper in 24 hours.

Yes, just that one speech.

Gerald Ratner was born in London in 1949 and was expelled from school at 13 and joined his family business of running 6 jewellery shops at 15. It was a tough time for jewellers as most consumers were spending on clothes - shopping malls were busy, jewellers were not. But young Gerald was aggressive salesman who believed ‘the people who shouted the loudest and appeared to give the best offers sold the most’. He steered his family business, making smart moves and became a millionaire at 35.

His shops shocked the former staid jewellery industry by displaying fluorescent orange posters, advertising cut-price bargains, and offering low price ranges. The Ratners Group consisted of Ratners, H. Samuel, Ernest Jones, Leslie Davis, Watches of Switzerland, including brands like Kay Jewellers. By 40, he owned 1500 stores in UK, 1000 in the US. He was the CEO of largest jewellery group on the planet.

Ratner started his speech nervously. He was a self made man, a school dropout who made it big on his own and now stood before royalty. He did not feel that he was a part of this high powered audience. He wanted to show his defiance. Three minutes after he started, he finds his own theme - mocking his own brand.

The audience loved it. They were laughing and clapping. It made Ratner braver.

Making fun of his consumers and calling his own products ‘total crap’! He was on a unstoppable high even as he saw members in the audience egging him to tell more with their laughter. He was also silently killing his own business empire. There were newspaper reporters in the room who smelt a story. Ratner did not realise at that time that the speech that had gone very well with the audience in the hall, would be received very cold when it hit the newspapers the next morning. UK was in the middle of a recession at that time and ordinary people did not like the multi-millionaire standing in front of his fellow 1 percenters and mocking his own customers for their crappy taste.

Who would buy an engagement ring from a company whose own boss mocked his products?

Sales crashed the very next day. Stocks went downwards. By Christmas, Ratner was sacked from his own company. They changed the company name because Ratners had become a toxic brand.

To this day ‘Doing a Ratner’ means committing a humiliating gaffe.

But there is one truth about Gerald Ratner’s speech that I must tell you before ending this story. His speech was not fully extempore. Infact, Ratner prepared his speech meticulously. He even got his aides to review it. He had used the ‘total crap’ joke before and it seemed normal to them. Only his wife asked him to be careful.

Here’s the thing - most people thought that he would sound self deprecating. And it would sound awesome, just as it did in their small informal lunch parties when Gerald would go off. They were horribly wrong. What sounded like a harmless self deprecating humour by a CEO mocking his own products to the amusement of a live audience, sounded terrible in the newspapers.

In truth, Gerald wasn’t laughing at his customers. Infact, he was trying to identify with them. He was trying to establish a point that all you big business leaders never gave me a chance, but look at where I am. He was keen to prove that he gave customers what they wanted. He wanted to say ‘You laughed at us - but look, my customers are happy - so who’s laughing now..’

Gerald failed, not because of lack of preparation. He failed because of his utter lack of judgement. The search for a good joke destroyed his business and destroyed Ratner.

The big lesson? If everyone is watching, choose your words with care - don’t just wing it.

But not all improv speeches went that way.

It seemed that Rev Martin Luther King Jr was always preparing for giving that great speech on the steps of Lincoln memorial. At the age of 5 he was learning the bible passages by heart. Martin’s father was a preacher and the boy took to the art of speech making early.

Martin worked very hard on his speech preparations. He would research, quote from the works of Plato & Gandhi extensively - draft, redraft, memorise and finally deliver with passion. He woke up at half past 5, made coffee, shaved off his stubborn bristles into a neat moustache, worked on his doctorate for 3 hours and put enormous efforts on his Sunday sermons for which he began working from Tuesdays itself. He wrote his speech neatly on yellow lined paper, memorised, and then leave the papers at the pulpit and spoke from memory.

He spent 15 hours crafting every sermon. He was always prepared. He never liked to impovise on the go

But on that day of Aug 28th 1963, of what would be his greatest speech and the one that is counted amongst the 20th century’s greatest - Rev Martin Luther King did the unthinkable. To the stunning disbelief of his speech writers and his aides, he chose to improv on the moment.

A quarter million marched to Washington DC and were waiting to hear him. He would be live on every TV network. This speech demanded intense preparation. Dr King and his aides prepared a very tight script for the 7 minutes he was allocated.

Standing in front of the statue of Abraham Lincoln, King began his speech. It was a very serious script. Parts of it read like poetry and most parts were confusing legalese and uninspiring. Halfway into the speech, there were murmurs of discontent in the crowd. King was not having any impact. This was not what the people had come to hear from him. Suddenly towards the end, there came a biblical flourish from him - ‘We will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty street’.

The first cheers came up.

King looked down at the next line on his script. It was very limp. He couldn’t get himself to say those words. And that is when he decided to step away and improvise. ‘Go back to Mississippi, Go back to Alabama…’ , his voice thundered. Behind him, his friends and aides knew he stepped away from his speech and this was the moment of highest danger. The pivotal moment.

He then he heard voice of the opera singer Mahalia Jackson ‘Tell them about the dream..Martin’ It was a reference to a dream that King was talking in the churches. A reference to the dream of equality and harmony between whites and blacks. Of a dream when one day he would see little black children play with little white kids.

And it was then, as he was looking into the television cameras and a million people looking at him for inspiration, Martin Luther King ditched his prepared script and went on to deliver the greatest ever speeches in history . ‘I have a dream..’

One great leader who improvised in the moment and became an inspirational icon forever. Another one who destroyed his career in a minute.

This is where you can see the Gerald Ratner speech and here is Martin Luther King’s greatest speech. And I was inspired to write this piece after listening to the great podcast Cautionary Tales by Tim Harford.

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The world famous chef Heston Bluementhal reveals a big secret on how he knows if the chef or the restaurant that he just walked into is good or bad, even before trying the food. He knows it immediately after he sits down. As soon as the butter is brought to the table.

‘Butter..’, he says, ‘is an indicator of whether or not the chef has eaten at their own restaurant. If the butter is rock solid, if you have to tear the bread as you try to spread the butter, it signals that the chef hasn’t eaten at their own restaurant. It’s a small detail but a chef wanting to create a great experience from start to finish will always ensure that the butter is placed on the table is at room temperature - not so soft that it looks limp, but so soft that it spreads easy. It means that you’re in the vicinity of a chef who cares not just about their craft but their customer too.’;

It’s a small detail but chef Heston Bluementhal has figured his own early warning signal relevant to his work. (Source : Billy Oppenheimer’s Six By Six Newsletter)

While early warning signals are an essential element in all things we do, their value hinges on the severity of the problem and the time we get for a response. Early Warning Signals - that’s the theme for this week’s edition of #1MinuteStories..

At the very core, it begins with paying attention, having the presence of mind and taking swift action.

When 10 year old Tilly Smith saw the sea water swelling and frothing like how you get on the top of beer, she ran to alert her father, Colin Smith. The first thing that came to her mind was the lesson her elementary school teacher, Andrew Kearney, taught her class just two weeks ago on tectonic plates, oceanic earthquakes and tsunamis. She and her family were vacationing at a resort on Maikhao Beach in Phuket, Thailand. It was the 26th of Dec 2004.

At first, her father ignored her. But Tilly was persistent and pushed her father to finally approach the security guard stationed on the beach. The guard heeded their warning and immediately ordered evacuation of 100’s of tourists on the beach - far and away from the shore.

When the 9.1 - 9.3 magnitude earthquake struck the Indian Ocean off the Sumatra coast that day, the resulting tsunami devastated coastal regions and took more than 2 lakh lives with it. The 100 odd tourists on that beach owe their lives to Tilly Smith. The 10 year old who paid attention to the lesson in class and also had the presence of mind to sound an alarm. She was named Child of the Year by French youth magazine Mon Quotidien and also has an asteroid named after her. (Source: Now I Know, Dan Lewis)

Ability to frame and ask the right question is a rare skill. It is also a sure shot way to stumble upon early warning signals. Something that Ryan O’Neill, head of the customer service for the travel website Expedia, discovered in 2012.

Ryan was stunned to come across an unbelievable data point while sifting through the call centre data. For every 100 customers who booked travel on Expedia, 58 of them were placing a call afterward for help. He was baffled that a self service app was requiring almost 60% of customers calling back. Traditionally the call centre had been measured on efficiency and customer satisfaction. So the reps were trying to make customers happy and do shorter calls.

Ryan thought ‘We had been trying to reduce cost. Instead of a 10 min call, could we make it a 2 min call. But the real question was : Why 2 mins? Why any mins?’ When you spend years responding to problems, you can forget that we can prevent them too. Ryan shared the data with his boss and they dug up the reasons why people were calling back.

The number one reason people were calling was to get a copy of the itinerary! In 2012 alone, 20 million logged a call for this. 20 million calls is akin to all of Delhi metro making a call in one year. At a cost of $5 per call, it was a $100 mn expense. Why were the customers missing the itineraries? - they were reaching the customers spam folder, they made a wrong email entry or had accidentally deleted the mail. Easy tech fixes that Ryan and team got on to.

In a record time post the intervention, the support calls reduced from 58% to 15%. 20 million support calls just vanished. $100 mn was saved by Expedia team. (Source: Upstream - How to Solve Problems before they Happen, Penguin)

One could say, we may not always have that low hanging fruit to solve as Ryan and Expedia team had. Sometimes the problems need deeper analysis and accurate prediction.

Marcus Elliott, a doctor and sports trainer, joined the New England Patriots in 1999. It was a team plagued with hamstring injuries. At that time, it was commonly believed that injuries were a part of sport.

Marcus came from a different perspective that most injuries are a result of bad training. So he bought an individualised approach. He studied each player, classified their injury risk as high, moderate or low. And ensured that each of the high risk players got rigorous training during off season. The number of injuries the next season reduced from 22 to 3. It was then that people started believing sports science was a thing to trust.

Elliott went on to launch a sports science firm called P3, which had a 3D motion capture technology to micro analyse athletes when they jump and pivot. He would say ‘see when you land after a jump, you've got 25% more force coming through one side of your body - we are noticing your femur is rotating internally, your tibia is rotating externally -puts your relative rotation at 96th percentile of all athletes we've examined. And every single athlete we've seen above the 95th percentile has suffered a knee injury within 2 years..we should work on that, reassess to see how much it has changed'

Elliott’s famous line was ‘you don’t wait for a bad thing to happen, instead you look for a signal that theres a risk there and then u act on it. Because if you wait for the bad things to happen, you can’t never put things back the way they were before’ (Source: Upstream - How to solve problems before they happen? , Dan Heath)

Some early warning signals are more critical than others. And some like this, need an angel like Chen Si.

Walking one day on the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge one evening, ‘he spotted a woman - a young migrant worker like himself - on the edge, 70 meters above the water, crying and contemplating jumping’. Chen stopped to talked to her. The woman climbed down and it was only then he realised that he inadvertently saved her life’. He felt a great degree of pride and promised himself that this would be his life’s mission - to save lives in distress. It was the year 2000 and Chen was just 22 years and from then onwards he kept coming back to this bridge for the next 2 decades.

What he was not aware at that time, was that this bridge, built across city of Nanjing, held a dubious distinction of being cited as the home to the most suicide attempts anywhere on the planet.

‘It is very easy to recognise,’ he says of potential jumpers. ‘A person walks without spirit!’ He approaches those he deems at risk and talks to them, showing them that someone indeed cares and is willing to help. He’s not always successful. He has, unfortunately, witnessed people jump, but he always tries, and often with good results. At times, Chen has bought people home and helped them with money, meals, shelter and even finding them jobs.

As of July 2024, Chen has saved an estimated 469 people. In 2015, he was the subject of a documentary filmmaker who dubbed him the ‘Angel of Nanjing’!

When we can forsee a problem, we have more maneuvering room to fix it. That’s why a key question to always ask is - How can you get an early warning for a problem that you are trying to solve? Imagine them to be like smoke detectors that are custom tailored to your work. Each of the protagonists in these stories had their own. We need to set up ours.

See you next week, with another theme, and a set of #1MinuteStories to story the same.

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Greetings Everyone! There are two things that I am trying to achieve with this post. One, to share my random lightbulb moments of 2024. And two, to restart this blog. Here is my list of 24!

1.⁠ ⁠At some point of time, children at home become adults. And we adults struggle to remain and behave as adults. 2024 was me going through that, a lot of times.

2.⁠ ⁠Indian cricket is the greatest leveller. If the Great Watchman above would really take the karmic cycles that Indian fans go through into account, he would’ve granted us moksha a while ago. Alas, even he thinks 'it's just a game!'

3.⁠ ⁠I have arrived at a time in life when it’s sort of embarrassing to start a sentence with ‘during our time…’ or ‘you know, in the past..’. Can’t take the eye rolls and sighs anymore.

4.⁠ ⁠So often this year, I’d start making an upma or whip up a a rasam. After putting the kettle on stove, I discover there is no kari patta, green mirchi or even rasam powder. And then I get it delivered within 6 minutes flat, just in time for the tadka. Super quick delivery service apps have made me lazy, unplanned and disorganised in 2024.

5.⁠ ⁠If I had the chance to be a dictator, I would make every individual go through one year of sales conscription. The number of young people who look at sales as if it were a rotten caterpillar is not funny. That’s why, a few of us got together to begin an exclusive sales community for the pure love of sales.

6.⁠ ⁠Fifteen years back, my wife made a random comment on how nice it would be to offer arghyam (offering) to Sun God every morning. It was a moment that got me to restart sandhyavandanam . So much of my personal journey into exploring the Puranas & storytelling began from there. Earlier this year, she casually asked me to accompany her on a Veena concert as a storyteller. It was the beginning of a new journey in front of a live audience. Listen to your spouse’s offbeat comments. They could be life changing.

7.⁠ ⁠I am professional business storyteller. Over the last few years storytelling has become my meditative retreat. Puranas say that the Bhagavath Katha is the form of Bhagwan itself. God is in the stories I hear and share. I’ve learnt what it means to worship the very form of story.

8.⁠ ⁠Chatgpt taught me how to make the perfect into ordinary. So often, when I ask a summary from it, I find myself editing it to make it seem like I wrote it. In the process of making it sound like my voice, I mess up a little bit of grammar, use simpler words. and make it imperfect.

9.⁠ ⁠For anyone using reading glasses without any power, just go buy a Rs 500 or lesser ones from a good spectacles shop. Trust me. This comes after busting close to 20k, buying fancy frames and loosing them, until a friend pointed out - opened my eyes, rather - on what a fool I was to rip myself off.

10.⁠ ⁠The best advice I got in the year is about dressing better. 'Uday, showing up cool and informal is fine. You may connect very well too. But this world always pays a premium for the way they see you. Especially in public spaces. When it can give you a 25% bump up, why aren't you allowing yourself that?'

11.⁠ ⁠'Stop watching Reels so much' is the worst kind of thing I tell as a parent to my kids. Because I myself suck at it. Have to find a way out of this reeling madness in 2025.

12.⁠ ⁠Buying new books vs Reading old books. I finally cracked this in 2024. I re-read more old books than I bought new ones. So much value gained, so much of fresh perspective. Going back to an old book that you loved is like a special home coming.

13.⁠ ⁠Cribbing and crying about Bangalore traffic seems to have become a psychological need. Don't have a topic to talk? - let's curse Bangalore traffic. I love Bangalore traffic and am grateful for it. It's given me so much time to reflect, listen to long podcasts, talk to ones I've not been in touch with. And, by the way, every city traffic sucks - Mumbai, Gurgaon, Hyderabad are like the younger siblings who get away when the elder one gets thrashed.

14.⁠ ⁠Back in 2021, when I started posting on linkedin, I just had 950 followers. I was desperate to get to 10k, looking at everyone else. It took me 3 years to cross that 10k mark. By that time I was so oblivious to it, that I realised it only after a month. We loose the value of something that we gain. Things also come quicker when you stop chasing them mindlessly like a mongrel.

15.⁠ ⁠Bad jokes are gold. Bad jokes are those that just did not get funding yet. Bad jokes make us laugh truly. The so called good jokes only make us think ‘why the heck didn’t that idea come to me?’ Bad jokes are the greatest equalisers in this unequal world.

16.No one is really impressed and keen to know about the work you do, beyond a point. Knowing what that point was, took me a lot of time. When people asked me about my work earlier, I was insufferable in my ranting about my business storytelling work. Now, I know when to stop. Like, how I stopped here.

17.⁠ Earlier this year, I went a tad proactive, and solved a serious problem one of my collaborators was facing with a tough client they were handling. They did not ask me for any help. I just felt I should make it easier. So I was shocked when they said that they did not like my help at all. Infact, they went completely cold on me. Big lesson learnt. The wisdom to know when to offer help, when to not to even venture - and the ability to know the difference, is priceless.

18.⁠ ⁠For the last 2 years, I’ve been doing a daily series on Stories from Puranas on mentza. 675 days and going. Yet, I’ve been shy to share it on other platform where more may listen. Very few listen in currently. While it hasn’t bothered me, I wished some feedback would come my way . For the first time this year, I downloaded a few episodes and Whatspped to some family & friends. It has been gratifying to listen to their response. For the nth time in my life, I was taught a lesson in not being overtly self critical and not overthink on how people will judge.

19. I am realising that the biggest secret in life is staying excited with being bored. At some point of time, everything gets boring - relationships, work, travel, chitchat, food - and life itself. The trick is to expect boredom to hit always, seize it, enjoy and revel in it. I think ‘boredom’ competes with ‘change’ as the only constant in our lives.

20. I often get pilloried for being my optimistic self. ‘..But you only want to see the positive side, I know. So there is no use talking to you’ is something I hear from friends and family. Having said that I am yet to meet a successful, happy, pessimistic person in my life.

21. Most arguments are not really about arguments. Especially the ones on WhatsApp with close family and friends. Most arguments can’t be won by arguments. I officially gave up being argumentative in 2024. Even on cricketing matters.

22. Calling parents and your loved ones every single day or as often as you can is a golden habit. It may not mean much to you. But I can promise, that they are just staring at that screen, waiting for it to light up with your name.

23. Humility is mostly being honest with yourself on how much of everything you achieved is due to luck and a million people who had had teeny weeny hand in it.

24. ⁠That thing about rich get richer and poor get poorer over time is wonderfully true for the best friends in my life. 2024, more than any other year, has made my bonds with my best friends stronger, richer and deeper.

Those are my light bulb moments for 2024 amongst many others I am unable to reflect. Thank you for getting till here!

Wish you and your loved ones a wonderful, bright 2025!

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The tall tree fell with a loud thud. Just barely missed crashing on to young Joseph. He seemed completely unaware of what happened. Even as his dad and siblings who were slightly away, watched this moment with horror.  It was perhaps then, that they decided that this boy will not be working anymore in logging.

In a small town called Baracara in East Berbice Corentyne, Guyana, 225 km up on the banks of the Canje River, 2 days away by boat from the port city of New Amsterdam, Joseph grew up with three sisters and five brothers. All of them worked in the logging industry sending down timber to New Amsterdam. The small town had no internet till 2019. It just had one black & white television and some landlines for communication.

Joseph used to watch the highlights of test cricket matches on that black & white television set. He watched Courtney Walsh & Curtley Ambrose, the great opening fast bowlers of the West Indies teams with eyes full of wonder. Joseph started imitating their bowling style with fruits such as lemons, limes, guavas and peaches along with a tape ball. They called it the jungle-land cricket in Baracara.

When his family sent him off to New Amsterdam with a hope that he would get to play more, Joseph started working first as a construction labourer. He later took up another job as security guard doing long 12-hour day & night shifts, leaving little scope for playing cricket. It was his fiancée, who eventually pushed Joseph to quit working and supported him as he began to pursue his cricketing ambitions full time.

We now have the benefit of hindsight to say that Joseph had this knack of starting everything with a bang.

He took 6 wickets and gave away just 13 runs in his debut Division 1 game. He again stunned everyone by taking 8 wickets in another trial game. The authorities decided to pick him for 1st class cricket for Guyana. Meanwhile he also had another big moment when he joined a fast bowling clinic run by Ambrose.

The turning point was to come a little later when Shamar Joseph was announced as one of the 8 uncapped players selected to tour Australia for the 2024 test series.

This is where he again begins with a bang. With his first ever ball in Test Cricket at the Adelaide Oval, he stunned the world by taking the wicket of the great Steve Smith. Shamar Joseph had arrived with a fifer in his test match debut.

And on 28th Jan 2024, in a sensational burst of inspired fast bowling, on a tense 5th day afternoon at the Gabba, running in with a badly injured toe that was crushed earlier by a yorker from Mitchell Starc - he was not even sure if he would make it the ground, Shamar Joseph turned back the times to take 7 Australian wickets to land West Indies their first win in 27 years on their soil.

Shamar Joseph. Remember the name.

Watching him run up, load, take that jump at the crease and let loose his fierce deliveries that rattle the timber behind the batsman, sending them cartwheeling, is just pure unbridled joy. It is the most beautiful sight to behold in cricket.

Shamar Joseph’s story has just begun. A journey of a young boy with raw talent, hunger, passion with a deep love of the game from the backwaters of Guyana. Another miracle story not just for sport, but for life, where adversity played the role of a positive propeller.

Of luck, that always picks it’s great timing and hangs out its hand, daring us to grab that opportunity. Of a beautiful family that did not not want their precocious boy to get lost amidst timber and instead dreamt of him rattling the timber behind great batsmen on 22 yard strips!

May many such stories bloom and inspire us.

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'You have my entire well trained, battle hardened, aggressive crack regiments of Yadava army lead by the fierce commander Kritavarma, on one side. And then just me on the other side. Choose!' Krishna said, looking at an anxious Duryodhan and a calm faced Arjun.

Arjun was to choose first as Krishna saw him first as soon as he opened his eyes from his nap. Both the warring cousins had rushed to Dwaraka to seek formal support from Krishna and his army for the impending war. The battle lines were drawn. Duryodhan was not willing to cede even an inch of his kingdom back to his Pandava cousins. It was time to strike the biggest strategic alliance with the powerful Yadava forces lead by Shri Krishna.

This is a moment from the Udyog Parv of the Mahabharatha when the Kauravas and Pandavas, represented by Duryodhan & Arjun respectively, rush to Krishna at Dwaraka for making a formal request for the support of the Yadava forces.

Even as Arjun was about to open his mouth, Duryodhan blurts 'But Krishna, this is not fair. Everyone knows about your superhuman feats. So whichever side that picks you, will win. So you should promise to not take up arms in the battle..'

Krishna smiles at this suggestion. Looks at Arjun and says ‘Choose, O mighty armed warrior. Do you want me - alone & unarmed, or the crack regiment of the powerful Yadava forces under Kritavarma?’.

Arjun doesn't bat an eyelid 'I just want you, Krishna, nothing else’. Duryodhan yelps with joy, sighs with relief and restrains himself to not explode in happiness. He cannot believe his good fortune and he thinks ‘I got what I wanted. This was too easy. These Pandavas are stupid. Of what use is a Krishna who will not do a thing in the battle?’. Duryodhan hastily walks off lest Krishna changes his mind.

I've often reflected on this moment as a metaphor on the choices that we have to make in our lives at crucial times. Between immediate wealth, power, visible material richness on one side like the powerful crack regiment of the Yadava army. And character skills, values on the other side as represented by Shri Krishna - alone and unarmed.

It is very difficult to not think and behave like Duryodhan most of the times. Think of it. He is prepping for the biggest war. He needs the strength of numbers. Feet on Battlefield to outnumber the opposition. It is the here and now challenge. And choosing Krishna for who he is, but will do nothing on the battlefield always seems like what we often hear 'All this character and values is fine - but we need the money - we need comfort now - we need to get this job done!’

Adam Grant addresses similar themes in his latest book Hidden Potentials : The Science of Achieving Greater Things . He writes how much of a challenge it is to practice principles & values.

It is a brilliant book in which Adam Grant substantiates with solid scientific research on how folks with character skills trump everyone else in the long run.

In the epic battle of Kurukshetra, Arjun and the Pandavas stand to gain much from the strategy and direction from the ‘unarmed Krishna’. Duryodhan and his vast swathes of armies also make an impact initially, but eventually fall.

It’s a tough one when we arrive at the decision point comes to us to make a choice. And it will be the moment that defines the journey ahead.

Hello Dear Reader,

Yes. Some of you must surprised to find this #1MinuteStories Newsletter after an age in your inbox. I really do not have an excuse as to why I stopped writing this newsletter. And I would like to think that a series of moments have got me back to restarting this today.

So yeah, get ready for a ton of new #1MinuteStories. Just like old times.

Immense gratitude for reading, supporting, staying and encouraging. May you get to make the best choices that matter in 2024!

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Hello Folks! I’d decided to take a break for a month. Just like that. All is well at my end and I do trust you and your families have been keeping safe in the interim.

Sixty Seven #1MinuteStories till this one. The one month gap was just timely. A whole new line up of authentic stories from science, movies, business, financials and so much more coming up.

Welcome to all the new joinees and subscribers and for the rest of you who’ve been in this journey - lets story on!

Meanwhile, 1MinuteStories has found a voice on Mentza. It is an incredible, social audio app focussed on learning and growth. The sessions are limited to just 20 minutes. So one cannot faff. And all the recordings of the previous sessions are available. Do check it out. Download here on to your mobile. #1MinuteStories goes live for 20 minutes every Tuesday, 19.30 pm IST with a brand new story.

And, now for that 68th story..

Exactly at 17:44:00 UTC on July 20th 1969, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong began their lunar descent in the ‘Eagle’ - the lunar module of Apollo 11 spacecraft. Five minutes into the descent, 6000 feet above the surface of the Moon, the guidance computer triggered an alarm.

The first one was followed by several other alarms. They were three minutes away from landing on the surface of the moon. It was the most critical juncture of the mission.

For those few moments, man’s first ever moon landing was all set to get aborted.

In the many months leading up to the launch of the Apollo 11 expedition, as the leader of team building the software for the entire lunar mission, Margaret Hamilton had exactly imagined this situation. In her own words:

‘What if there was an emergency that came up and we had to let the astronaut, and also the mission control know that it is an emergency, and so I realised I could come up with a solution for that…and be able to have our software displays interrupt the astronaut displays and basically take away what he is working on and replace it with priority displays. To let him know that there is an emergency and give him a choice of what to do…’

The use case she imagined actually happened. As soon as the normal hardware programs went buzzing - the on-board flight software immediately kicked in to action. It interrupted the normal display of the astronauts with priority alarm displays. Like Hamilton had said - it was a moment of emergency when the decision had to completely shift to the astronaut on board and to the mission control team. To enable them to assess and take the go/no-go decision. One of the engineers at the mission control immediately understood what the priority displays meant - and he shouted - ‘GO. GO. GO’ to Armstrong and Aldrin.

The astronauts followed his command. They did not abort the mission. And safely landed on the moon. The rest was, well, history.

The cause of the alarms was discovered a little later. The astraonauts had kept the rendezvous radar switch open, causing the computer to process data from both the rendezvous and landing radars at the same time. This caused an overflow of information into the guidance computer which sent out alarms because it could not complete all the tasks in real-time. There was no other danger. If the astronauts and the mission control had to rely only on their normal displays at that time - they would have had to let the system abort the mission. The priority displays set up by Hamilton, forced the correct decision to be made.

‘To blame the computer for the Apollo 11 problems is like blaming the person who spots a fire and calls the fire department. Actually, the computer was programmed to do more than recognize error conditions….The software's action, in this case, was to eliminate lower priority tasks and re-establish the more important ones. The computer, rather than almost forcing an abort, prevented an abort. If the computer hadn't recognized this problem and taken recovery action, I doubt if Apollo 11 would have been the successful Moon landing it was’

Margaret Hamilton, was the engineer on ground who ensured the astronauts in Apollo 11 made that historic landing on the moon and safely come back. Hamilton and her team wrote the code for Apollo 11’s in-flight software. She won the NASA Space Act Award for her work on the Apollo 11 moon mission. The code she wrote has been recognized as the ‘foundation for ultra reliable software design’

Margaret Hamilton, with the software code she wrote that sent man to the moon

When Margaret was working in MIT in the early 60’s she jumped at the opportunity to be a part of NASA’s biggest mission - to take humanity to the moon. She was put in charge of developing the in-flight software. The 60’s were a time when software was a mystery - a black box for everyone including the top management. Margaret and her 20-something team were given complete freedom to design things that had to work right the first time, and the systems had to be ‘man-rated.’

It was an age when software developers lived in our their own world, had their own culture and were seen inferior to the hardware folks. For most of the management, software was like something that would magically appear by folks who were mostly chilling.

Until that seminal moment on Apollo 11 happened and the sheer brilliance of Margaret Hamilton’s far thinking code saved the day for NASA.

Infact, Margaret Hamilton is credited for creating the term ‘Software Engineering’ and the entire discipline around it.

‘When I first came up with the term, no one had heard of it before, at least in our world. It was an ongoing joke for a long time. It was a memorable day when one of the most respected hardware gurus explained to everyone in a meeting that he agreed with me that the process of building software should also be considered an engineering discipline, just like with hardware. Not because of his acceptance of the new 'term' per se, but because we had earned his and the acceptance of the others in the room as being in an engineering field in its own right. ‘

Barack Obama honoring Margaret Hamilton with the Medal of Freedom in 2016

So, the next time, we hear and celebrate Neil Armstrong’s famous line - ‘That’s one small step for a man, a giant leap for a mankind’ - let’s also call out Margaret Hamilton - the woman and software engineer who played the critical role in ensuring Armstrong and Aldrin got to the moon safe and glitch free.

Story Notes

Margaret Hamilton is a software pioneer and icon of our times - not celebrated enough in our popular culture as the other names.

Apart from all the wiki’s this story on Futurism, an interview she did gives a great insight into her work and legacy.

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‘We don’t want to hear your ideas. Just do what you’re told, John!’. the boss’s voice boomed in the silent room.

It didn’t finish. A few moments later, the boss, Ed Hansen, again called John into his room. This time to finish it off: ‘Well, John, your project is now complete, so your employment with the Disney Studios is now terminated.’

John was a young animator working under Ed Hansen, the animation adminstrator of Disney Studios in 1984. John was keenly interested in computer based animation that was in it’s infancy those days. He tried to pitch a computer animated version of a film that Ed gave him to work upon. The boss didn’t like the young kid showing off new technology instead of doing the work given to him. So he fired him.

Disney was the place John dreamt to be as a child when he began drawing. He would draw everywhere - everytime - even in the church. His mother, an art teacher herself, supported him joining the California Institute of Arts where he learnt animation from the famous veterans of Disney Animation. After graduation, John was amongst the final 45 to eventually make it to Disney out of the 10,000 animators who applied for a job. And now, he was fired.

Around the same time in 1983, George Lucas had set up a small computer technology firm that would do animation work for the film industry named Lucasfilms. John grabbed the opportunity to work with Lucasfilms as soon as he was offered. It would be his period of complete immersion into computer animation. The first big turning point in his career.

The next one happened 3 years later in 1986. Geroge Lucas had to settle an expensive divorce so he sold off Lucasfilms. It was bought for a sum of $10 mn by an upcoming tech visionary who made it an independent company with the dream to revolutionize movie making. In the next 5 years, that man would pump in $50 mn of his own money to just keep the company going.

You would’ve worked out Steve Jobs and Pixar, by now.

John first met Jobs for a pitch he prepared for a short animated film. After the pitch, Jobs went silent for a long time - held his fingers together and seemed to stare into the future. When Jobs finally spoke, it was the only thing he would ask John to do in Pixar.

‘John, Make it Great’

That pitch became ‘Tin Toy’ and won the Best Animated Short Film in 1988 - the first ever Oscar given for computer animation.

John Lasseter and Pixar had arrived.

‘Tin Toy’ became the inspiration for Pixar’s first ever production: Toy Story in 1995. And then a series of great hits followed: A Bugs Life, Cars, Monsters Inc, Ratatouille, Finding Nemo, Tangled and ofcourse - Frozen.

The only way John Lasseter knew how to ‘Make it Great’ was to make the story the core of the whole process at Pixar. Here’s something I found to illustrate this.

The first page of the original screenplay of Toy Story (1995) from Scott Myers blog

Urge you to read through this first:

And now, play this video here. Atleast the first 40 seconds. Notice how the screenplay matches frame by frame.

Pixar, never made the film until the story was fixed to the finest detail.

Steve Jobs said it best about Johan Lasseter’s Pixars story process :

‘Basically we build the movie before we make it. One of the things that I’m proudest about Pixar is - we have a story crisis on every movie - and production is rolling and there’s mouths to feed and something’s just not working’ And we stop. We stop and fix the story. Because John Lasseter intalled a culture of story - story - story - even though Pixar is the most technologically advanced studio in the world - no amount of technology will turn a bad story into a good story’

Disney bought Pixar for $7.5 bn in 2006. That’s how much Jobs inital $10 mn turned into. And John Lasseter was made the Chief Creative Officer for Walt Disney and Pixar. Ed Hansen, the boss who fired him, was nowhere in the scene.

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Story Notes

Yeah, John Lasseter disappointed everyone in 2009. He accepted sexual misconduct charges. Stepped down, this time again Disney Pixar. Took a sabbatical. And now is the the Head of Animation Division of Skydance. Well, that’s another story.

The Storytellers Secret by Carmine Gallo, captures this story and whole lot of secrets of storytelling through the lens of words greatest storytellers. It is a must read book, if you haven’t yet.

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This week, I am picking up a light story. Literally. Wonder Why?

You’ll know in a minute.

First, that picture up here. If you are thinking why is there nothing inside that Hot Wheels blister pack - it was intended to be that way. And no - it is not a photograph of an empty blister pack by mistake. You have to be very lucky to purchase it and maybe shell out over $100.

What made Hot Wheels put this up for sale? And here’s another related question - to what extent will fans stretch to own a piece of a story?

Let’s start right at the very beginning. In December 1941, an American pyschologist and comic book writer William Moulton Marston created the Wonder Woman - the greatest female super action hero, who appeared in the DC Comic’s All Star Comics number 8. Incidentally, Moulton along with his wife Elizabeth Halloway also created the test for the systolic blood pressure that led them to develop the first prototype of the modern polygraph machine.

Moulton saw Wonder Woman as the heroic character who would win over the bad guys with love and not with ‘fists and firepower’. But he still had to give her supreme powers. So besides the super strength, she’s armed with indestructible bracelets, a boomeranging tiara, and her Lasso of Truth — a lasso which, when it ensnares the bad guys. prevents them from telling lies.

But perhaps her coolest gadget is not the one she’s always equipped with. Infact, it is one something she’s never seen with. That’s because it’s invisible: The Invisible Jet.

The Invisible Jet was created by Wonder Woman when she was a little girl - Diana Prince - staying with her mother on the Paradise island. Her mothers’ planes were getting shot down in the Man’s World. So she designs her invisible plane that can fly at super sonic speeds, silently, without being detected by any hostile forces. Avoiding unpleasant conflict, as much as possible.

Though the plane was depicted as semi-transparent to help the reader visualise, the in-story dialogue in the comic books indicated that it was completely invisible. But as multiple other story lines developed over the years, the Invisible Jet became less and less important in Wonder Woman’s scheme of things.

In fact it became so irrelevant that by 2010, it became a joke.

Which gets us to the blister pack.

The 43rd annual Comic-Con was hosted at San Diego in July 2010. It had a record attendance of more than 130,000 comic book fans and industry folks from all over the world. Mattel, the toy licensee of Wonder Woman, decided to use her invisible plane as a promotional tool. A few months before Comic-Con, Mattel announced a new product on their Facebook page: ‘a collectible Invisible Jet action figure’.

Now, the Facebook announcement was on April 1st and most fans figured that the invisible jet was an April Fool’s joke. Mattel intended it to be a fun promotion. But the super fanatic collectors would not have it that way. They protested that Mattel was cheating them. They just did not ‘see the truth’. They wanted the collectible plane.

The folks at Mattel were smart and seized the opportunity. Mattel quickly made a limited-edition collectible of the Invisible Jet. They priced it at $5 - as an exclusive item to be sold only at Comic-Con. The ‘collectible’ was just the packaging - the plastic mold inside the case contained an outline of a plane, helping to sell the story of the Invisible Jet of the Wonder Woman.

Needless to say, Mattel had blockbuster sales - even though the packaging was empty. Today, the value of the rare collectors item is $100 and is most sought after.

You could scoff at this and say - ‘Oh, these mad people’. But, pause and reflect on the the power of a story that makes one even see things that can never be seen. Literally.

It happened again. This time on April 1st 2013 when Seattle’s Museum of Flight announced that the Wonder Woman Jet would be available for a limited, three day engagement in its halls. The entry on their website noted that the plane was ahead of its time: its ‘technology demonstrated advanced stealth and speed capabilities more than 20 years before comparable human-built aircraft.’

The pictures on the removed page no longer appear, but if you think about it, you’re really not missing out on anything.

You see, what I meant.

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Story Notes

I hope you agree that this was one of the lighest #1MinuteStories ever. But you must read up on the creator - William Moulton Marston also known in the comic book world as Charles Moulton. He said in his later years that Wonder Woman gets her character from his two wives. That he invented the modern polygraph machine and then gave the lasso of truth to Wonder Woman does not seem to be a coincidence at all.

The rare collectors invisible jet of Wonder Woman is right here on Amazon. See, if you get lucky.

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How would you imagine the following three to be linked to a story?

A famous French surgeon who played a critical role during the Napoleonic Wars and changed the course of medicine.

One of the highest rated, iconic TV series in the US television history during the 70’s and 80’s.

And May 27th - that is today.

Let me try.

On the morning of 14th July, 1789, the city of Paris was in a state of alarm. Crowds of angry Parisians gathered outside Bastille, the garrisoned medieval fortress in the heart of the city. The building had become a symbol of royal tyranny for the French revolutionaries who were set to storm it down. As they began storming, the guns from the fortress pounded down. Many perished and hundreds were injured. Amidst all this chaos, very few spotted a young man of 21 years carefully picking up loads of injured, carrying them to an improvised horse carriage and taking them away to safety. It was perhaps the first version of an improvised ambulance.

Dominique Jean Larrey was that young man who was born in a shoemaker family and orphaned at the age of 13. He spent the next 8 years as an apprentice with his surgeon uncle who taught him everything and became the youngest medical officer in the French Royal Navy. He heard Bastille was to be stormed and was ready to save the wounded.

Larrey joined the French army and during the war in 1792 , he noticed the speed with which the carriages of the French flying artillery maneuvered across the battlefields. He then adapts some of them as ambulance volantes or Flying Ambulances for rapid transport of the wounded and manned them with trained crews of drivers, corpsmen and litter bearers. Before this, military ambulances had to wait for the combat to cease before collecting the wounded by which time many soldiers died.

What we now know as the modern medical triage - treating the wounded according to the observed gravity of their injuries and the urgency for medical care, regardless of their rank or nationality - was invented by Dominique Jean Larrey.

A model that is still the basis for the modern emergency medical services.

Larrey fought in all the Napoleonic wars including the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. The Duke of Wellington recognized his courage under fire and ordered his troops to not fire in his direction to ‘give the brave man time to gather up the wounded" and saluted "the courage and devotion of an age that is no longer ours".

After the wars, Larrey worked on increasing the mobility and organization of field hospitals, effectively creating what is now known as the modern Mobile Army Surgical Units or the M*A*S*H.

And that’s how I connect the great French surgeon to one of the highest rated TV series in US television history.

M*A*S*H, the American war, comedy and drama TV series aired on CBS from 1972 to 1983. It was originally based on a 1968 novel by Richard Hooker - MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors. The original spin-off was a film but the TV series version became a super hit - an iconic show of its times. The series follows a team of doctors and support staff stationed at the "4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in South Korea during the Korean War.

MASH units would not have happened without the pioneering efforts of Dominique Jean Larrey - and the TV series showcased the dangerous conditions under which emergency doctors worked in the army.

Which brings me to the last link. May 27th. You should’ve guessed by now May 27th is celebrated worldwide as the Emergency Medicine Day - a day when Emergency Medicine made a beginning in Europe.

The last one year the world has been in one continious emergency. Every doctor has only been handling emergencies. Thousands of doctors have succumbed in their line of duty - and all of them continue to fight to save every single life in that critcal moment that matters.

Respect and Heartfelt Gratitude are the only things that we can offer. This story, in a very small way, is a tribute to them.

Story Notes

Everything about this great French Surgeon - who has not been called the Father of Emergency Medicine - but he is the inventor of triage, battlefield medicine and pretty much everything in medicine that is urgent and saves lives.

If you are from a generation that has missed M*A*S*H, I would urge you to have a look at the back episodes. It started off as a war comedy but has handles many serious issues across many wars.

Some good reading and information on the World Emergency Medicine Day

All pics are courtesy : Wikipedia

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One hot afternoon on Oct 23rd, 2006 in Hoston, Texas, Jeffery K. Skilling, Criminal No. H-04-25 was looking at the Judge delivering the verdict.

‘The evidence established that the defendant repeatedly lied to investors, including his own employees, about various aspects of the company’s business’ The Judge read out his punishment: severe imprisonment for 292 months - 24 years.

Skilling wasn’t a murderer or a rapist. He headed Enron. One of Fortune’s most admired company in the world, till that year. He now received one of the heaviest sentences ever given to a white-collar criminal.

It started in July 2000, when Jonathan Weil, a financial reporter with the WSJ got a call from his source in the investment business to check on Enron : ‘How and where their earnings come from?’ Weil got curious. There was a lot of information available and he got on to it. Soon, he realised, it was an avalanche - ‘there was so much noise’ around the financial information that it took him more than 2 months and expert help from senior Professors in Finance and Accounting to get to the bottom.

The first revelation was on how Enron used the ‘Mark to Market’ accounting practice:

1. Enron enters into a $100 mn contract with the state of California to deliver 1 bn kwh of electricty AFTER 10 years.

2. Enron will not get paid for 10 years. But it must estimate the worth of the contract at the time of signing.

3. If electricity prices rise after 10 years, Enron makes a loss. If the prices fall, Enron gains.

4. Enron used ‘Mark to Market’ accounting to estimate the revenue this deal would bring. And then they put that estimate of the revenue on their balance sheets at the time of signing the contract. 10 years ahead.

Weil now wanted to know how much of this money Enron said it was making was real. Turned out that in the 2nd quarter of 2000, $747 million of the money Enron said it had made, was not realized - that is, there was no cash flow. It was imaginary money and if that number was taken away from Enron’s balance sheet, they had made severe loss in that quarter. The most admired company in the US, 7th largest corporation on Wall Street, had no cash flow.

Two things happened when the story got published. The first one was obvious: Enron stock tanked. The second stunned even Weil. Enron sent their financial team and chief accounting officer to the WSJ office in Dallas to meet Weil and explain. The Enron officials openly acknowledged that the money they said they earned was virtually all money that they hoped to earn. When Weil asked them how certain they were about the money - Enron backed it’s brilliant financial brains and their mathemetical models.

Eventually ‘There was no dispute about the numbers, There was only a difference in how you should interpret them.’

The second finding was on Enron’s ‘Special-Purpose Entities’ (SPE). Enron contracted with investors and put in oil deals worth milions of dollars of expected money into each entity. They got banks to recognize these SPE’s who in turn lent money to them at very low rates. Enron created many such SPE’s but here’s the thing : it was close to impossible for an ordinary investor to understand what an SPE really constituted. The complete public documentation on all the Enron SPE’s ran into - hold your breath - 3 million pages.

Enron violated all rules with the SPE’s. They attached junk oil bonds to the SPE’s and jacked up their values. The indvidual investors of most SPE’s were Enron’s senior management themselves. Enron was contracting with itself. No one could get into this because the sheer volume of documented information on SPE’s - just the condensed summary was 1,20,000 pages. The summary of summaries reduced it to 1000 pages. The summary of summary of summaries that had only the most critical information was ‘250 mind-numbingly complex pages’ - which was done on the orders of the court.

The third clue nailed Enron completely but it had to be pointed by an independent expert - a teacher at the Colarado Law School. Enron did not pay income tax for 4 years. How did they manage that? The ‘Mark to Market’ accounting showed imaginary money on balance sheet. The SPE’s ensured bank funding was fully on. The accounting games did more than enough to fool the public and stock market.

But Enron did not pay any taxes to the IRS because it did not make real money.

Skilling resigned in Aug ‘01. Enron filed for bankruptcy in December 2001.

Everything Weil and other journalists learned to expose Enron came from Enron themselves. There have been bigger corporate scandals in history but what sets Enron apart was that they complied with all the rules - on paper. All their secrets were out in the open. They were so transparent - no body bothered to question them. It took a set of journalists who began to explore the mystery of Enron’s accounting system - dig deep into the avalanche of information to ask the right questions. And shut Enron’s financial noise to hear the truth.

These are times when most financial entities boldly claim: ‘We disclose 100%. We have nothing to hide. All our information is out there for you to access, verify and check’

But scams still happen. Common people get cheated. Financial bubbles destroy shareholder wealth. And this happens with big corporations admired for their governance. The ones who’ve always kept saying: Trust us. We disclosed everything - can’t you see? No scope for us to cheat.

The point of Enron’s story is to build competence to understand and call out not just the story in the data - but also look for the one that is conveniently hiding behind all of it.

The needed capability is not the ability to find particular information, but rather the skill to assemble disparate data points into a clear image of the whole.

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Story Notes
Some of you who are familiar with the updates on Enron would know that Skilling was skilled and resourceful enough to file multiple appeals and get a reduced sentence of 14 years. The last we know is that he was planning to get started on a new energy trading start-up.

There is so much information on the Enron scandal - but the one that pointed me to pick this up was Malcolm Gladwells Open Secrets. If you have 20 minutes of time, it is the definitive piece to read. Not just on Enron - but Gladwell’s own taken on how Enron was solved by investigators who looked it as a mystery to be pursued and not a puzzle to be solved.

The commission members listened with bated breath. The celebrated scientist who was speaking had the reputation of being at his dangeorous best when he spoke slowly.

‘Before the event, from the information that was available..it was agreed everywhere that this seal would become unsatisfactory at a certain temperature…and there was some sort of temperature at which this shouldn’t be run’

As he spoke, he took out the seal from an O-shaped ring, put it in a glass of water, pressed it, and held it up for everyone to see. ‘I took this stuff that I got out of your seal and put it in ice cold water and then I discovered that when you put some pressure on it and then undo it, it does not stretch back ..”

‘In other words, for a few seconds at least or more…there is no resilience in this particular material at a temperature of 32 deg. I believe that this has some significance in our problem’

Richard Feynman was exactly being himself. He was speaking on the live televised debate of the Rogers Commission, set up to investigate the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion, 73 seconds after it took off on Jan 28th, 1986 from Cape Canaveral, Florida. All the 7 astronauts which included Sharon Christa McAuliffe, an American teacher, were killed. In one simple act, he showed the world how the poor resilience of seal in the O-rings of the booster rocket, ignored by NASA officials despite many warnings, caused the shuttle to explode.

Richard Feynman excelled at what many great scientists failed. He simplified complex problems and looked for the most elementary solution that was possible.

When he was 12 years of age, he learnt to repair old radios on his own. People would just call him to try their luck with their radios. One man had a peculiar problem. When he turned his radio on, it would roar and wobble with tremendous noise. And then quietened after a while and played normal. Young Feynman was intrigued and started walking up and down the house. ‘Are you going to repair my radio or just walk up and down my house’ asked the man, slightly irritated. But Feynman was thinking - ‘The reason the loud sound was coming up front was because the tubes were getting heated up in the reverse order. The amplifier heated up early- the tubes did not. Nothing to feed in to the amplifier - so the loud noise.’ He simply reversed the tubes inside and turned the radio on again. This time it played quiet and perfect.

The man was stunned and in complete awe.

‘He fixes radios by thinking’ spread like a wildfire after that incident.

A few years later Feynman was at Princeton. His professor John Wheeler asked him to deliver his first seminar. It was on a new classical theory of quantum electrodynamics that Feynman and his professor had worked upon. Just one day before the lecture, the assistant organising the seminar told Feynman: ‘I think the work you’re doing is very interesting. So I have invited Henry Norris Russell - famous astronomer, Prof. Von Newmann - the great mathematician, Prof Wolfgang Pauli - the famous physicist and Professor Einstein- who only comes rarely to our department, but your work is so interesting, I’ve invited him specially’. Feynman went yellow. He was to give his first technical lecture before the legends of science.

The physics and his idea took over so much after the first few minutes of unease that he finished his lecture in a breeze. Pauli and Einstein challenged him with questions that helped Feynman develop the theory with further experimental evidence. The experience gave him the belief that he belonged amidst the best. It formed the basis for the work that won him the Nobel Prize in 1965 - for building the clear working connections between the classical 19th century electromagnetic field theory and the 20th century quantum mechanics.

Feynman truly believed that if you could not explain something simply then you didn’t understand it. He made a habit of showing off his simplicity.

In the 1950’s people were trying to figure out how super fluid helium worked. A Russian mathematical physicist put out a complicated theory full of integrals and formulaes that no one understood. Feynman decided to figure it out. He first tried to visualise how the quantum wave function of all these Helium molecules would look like. He had two simple visuals - when the molecules were close to each other, he visualized the wave function would be at 0. And at the lowest energy state, the wave function would be perfectly smooth.

With these two boundary conditions in his mind, a piece of paper and pencil, he then wrote down the simplest wave function that even a smart high school science student would understand. It was a super powerful technique that revolutionized the way physics was taught and studied.

It was the technique of Feynman diagrams. Very simply put, Feynman diagrams, for the first time, showed what happens when elementary particles collide.

Richard Feynman was a man of many parts - great scientist, philosopher, drum player, brash and irreverent. But above all he is the greatest scientist storyteller of our times.

Because it takes one kind of genius to be a great scientist. And a completely different level of genius to simplify and make ordinary people visualise and understand the story behind the science.

Richard Feynman did both.

Story Notes

I’d wanted to publish this on May 11th - Feynman’s 103rd birth anniversary. I missed that deadline that I set for myself only because I was just sucked up into reading every single book on Feynman this week.

So what I’ve written here is just a fraction of those hundreds of Feynman stories I’ve been bingeing on. Feynman will come back in many more stories again,

Pick up Surely, You’re Joking Mr. Feynman, first. And then also Richard Feynman: What do you care what other peeople think?. Both, terrific reads. There is a tome of information on the great man’s life, times and talks - especially his physics lectures on youtube and ted talks. He left the world a whole lot intellectually richer than anyone else.

And, this is that clip of him addressing the live debate of Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster.

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Listening to an old episode of the popular podcast Haal Chaal Theek Thaak Hai, I learnt of three kinds of music makers in Bollywood. The ones who are celebrated the most are the Music Directors. They design the melody and mostly work on the singing part of the song.

The second lot who fill in with the preludes, interludes, instrumentals and give a body and structure to the song are the Music Arrangers.

The rarest kind, though, are those who see through every element of the song from its inception to the final recording. From designing the melody, working with the singers, writing the notation and filling in with the preludes and interludes with the instrumentals, they are the Music Composers.

Indian film music has seen very few of these real composers. Vanraj Bhatia stands the tallest amongst them. One of the finest composers of our times, Vanraj Bhatia studied Western classical music in depth and successfully mixed that knowledge with an understanding of Hindustani classical music.

He walked his own path, chose his own style and delivered great enduring musical experience to his listeners. The popular film press never gave him the space he deserved.

He quietly left us a few days back.

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‘If you send him to learn music, he will have to sell channa at the Chowpatty in Mumbai when he comes back’ - his uncle warned his father. By then, Vanraj already knew all the Indian ragas and had a strong foundation in Indian classical music.

One day, he heard The Blue Danube, a compostion by Johann Strauss. And then chanced upon the splendour of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concert No 1 at a friend’s home. Both seminal moments that would plunge him into Western classicals. His father, a cloth merchant in Kutch, favoured his sons talent and paid for his journey to London.Vanraj studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London and later at the Paris Conservatory supporting himself with a Rocekfeller Fellowship. His musical genius was taking shape.

Reality hit when he returned to India and had to work as a musicologist in Delhi University. He hated it - ‘Anybody who was not a musician would become a musicologist’. He was desprate to compose music. It was then that Durga Khote - a formidable artist turned producer of Hindi and Marathi cinema asked him - ‘I am doing an advertisement for Shakti Silk Mills, would you do the music?’

Vanraj Bhatia grabbed the work and composed the first ever jingle in Indian advertising. He would eventually render a staggering contribution to the world of brands and advertising by composing over 6000 jingles in his lifetime.

It was also the time when Shyam Benegal set up his New Wave Cinema and got Bhatia to team up with him. The duo went on to create some of the most enduring works in Indian cinema, advertising and television.

‘Mero Gaam Katha Parey’ from Manthan which was released in 1976 made Amul what it is in the consumer’s minds. The song captures the heart beat of great Indian milk co-operative. The making of this movie is a trivia seekers treasure trove. 5 lakh farmers contributed Rs 2 each to help produce the move and tell their story. If you dwell a bit on the names in the credits - they contain the who’s who of the Indian advertising industry.

Pause. Listen to this song.

Few years later, Alyque Padamsee was looking to set up the right mood with a lilting jingle score as Karen Lunel jumped, frolicked and cavorted under the waterfall in a bikini. Vanraj Bhatia’s score for Liril ranks amongst the greatest ever compositions in an ad film.

And while you see this, here is one of my earlier #1MinuteStories on India’s Sensational Splash.

And then, with Redffusion, the jingle for Garden Vareli, the tune which is based on Indian Raag Desh. A hauntingly endearing composition - a signature tune of the 80’s.

There were more than 6000 of them. Almost every brand has been touched by the music score of Vanraj Bhatia.

Durga Khote would come back later in the 80’s to get him to score music for Wagle Ki Duniya. He would go on to score music for the greatest DD TV serials at that time -Khandaan, Tamas , Yatra and Naqaab.

One of his earliest teachers at school pushed him to learn and complete his Baechelors Degree in Sanskrit. Many decades later, this helped him score the title music for Shyam Benegal’s Bharat Ek Khoj based on Pt Jawaharlal Nehru’s The Discovery of India. The chantings in the opening lines are from the Vedas.

A few weeks back, I had started seeing this series again. The title song takes me back to the Sunday afternoons in my 80’s home.

Vanraj Bhatia was the only chosen one by the so-called parallel cinema stalwarts because the cinema they made appealed to a global audience in which high quality soundscaping was integral. Bhatia’s background music was not just a filler - it was a key character.

One of the best examples of this is the background score for that iconic Hindi film - Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro. Everytime I watch this movie, it is an experience unparalleled. (pun, slightly intended).

As the pre-eminent composer of Indian cinema’s parallel movement, away from the restrictions of commercial dictates, Bhatia brought technical expertise, a deep understanding of musical tradition in India, and its combination with the sound foundations of Western harmony to film music.

There is so much more to Vanraj Bhatia’s contribution to Indian music then a few lines of prose can ever capture.

When he says ‘My music is unique and perhaps even more unique now’ it rings truer than anyone else who might have said the same.

Vanraj Bhatia, would have found his own space in a musical heaven, by now.

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From the #1MinuteStories Archives: India’s Sensational Splash

Story Notes

With the passing away of Vanraj Bhatia, there has been so much written about him.

But I was inspired to share this after listening to this Episode: The Legend of Vanraj Bhatia Haal Chaal Theek Thaak Hai by Pavan Jha and Subrat - a podcast that I would highly recommend you to listen. A great one on India popular culture from the lens films and media.

The Vanraj Bhatia interview on the Scroll by Greg Booth. You want to understand the man and his musical mind, with some awesome links to his best work, you must be reading this.

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Yes. Been away for a couple of weeks. All is well at our end and thank you for checking in.

I hope and pray that you and your loved ones are getting through these grim times with a good measure of hope for better times.

I was keen to put my efforts where I can make a tangible difference in these times. Safe and locked up as I am, for now, the best I could offer was a safe space for anyone to reach out and talk their anxieties through. I put out this post on Linkedin last week:

Happy to share that many have reached out. Am grateful for the opportunity to be an ally in their journey in these times. If there is anyone who needs a ‘listen’ or a safe space to talk, please help me to get this word around to them.

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Exactly a year back, on the 4th of May 2020, the pandemic was raging at a different level. A lot milder and less virulent. It was also a period when many of us were presented with the time and space to dig deep into our own selves and get started on doing things that we had put off.

I was watching this episode of the Big Bang Theory in which Sheldon and his gang are celebrating the Star Wars Day. It got me curious as to how May the 4th came about. Remember, you will always get a story when you ask - ‘How, What, When and Where’. Not always you will get a story by asking ‘Why’. Anyways, my curiosity inspired the search and digging. In about an hour, I wrote what I learnt into a post on Linkedin. Here it is.

It eventually became the first of the #1MinuteStories blog: May the Fourth Be With You.

I messaged my best friend on an idea that struck as I posted that:

You can tell from those typos that I was way too excited. It was the evening of May the Fourth that I first came up with ‘Monday Stories’ as the tag name. Within an hour, I changed it to #1MinuteStories.

That’s how a combination of my Best Friend, George Lucas and Star Wars got me started.

The next few stories followed a similar pattern like the Star Wars - George Lucas origin story. I wrote on my favourite brands. historic personalities, diseases and medical miracles. And many more. But I promised myself that every single story would be authentic - not original, mind you, but researched and authentic with due credit given to the source.

It is a credo that #1MinuteStories will always live by.

And then I shared some of my own stories that got noticed. Some of them went massively viral - the story of saree, on my old salesman friend Srini, the one on Parle G, Beirut bombings and the one on the Cadbury’s cricket film.

And just like that in a year, there are now 60 incredible stories. Every story taught me something. Helped me grow as a person. Every story was a project in itself. Made me research, read books at a great speed, do background checks on the facts and anti-stories.

As it progressed, I challenged myself to take up tougher plots. And still live up the credo of the #1MinuteStories - stories you’ll take about a minute to read - but will stay with you way longer. Stories that you can retell, to influence, engage and inspire.

Thank you, dear reader, for choosing to be on this story journey with me. Thank you for your support and encouragement that you have given me all along the way.

Some 30 stories into the journeym, some of you reached out to me in ways which pumped my enthusiasm even higher.

‘Trust you are doing good ! I just thought of letting you know that I love your Monday stories ! Sometimes I do share it in my sessions ... you must write a blog where one can always go and refer ... keep sharing! ‘

‘Am a big fan of your short 1 min stories and follow it.’

‘Love your 1 minute reads Uday. 1 Minute read, thought provoking for days

We are just getting started. And a lot of stories to tell.

But one thing I will commit to you is to be more disciplined and regular with this newsletter. It has been way too random. From today. #1MinuteStories will hit you every Tuesday and Saturday.

Writing and working on #1MinuteStories has transformed my life. It has helped me grow into my new identity as a Storyteller. I never knew who a ‘Story Coach’ was, a year before.

Now, I live that by working with people to tell their stories better.

Before I wrap this up, I have a request. Please spread the word about the #1MinuteStories Newsletter and help me grow this story community. Do tell as many people as possible who you know will enjoy this. Please share this link below and get them to subscribe.

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The times are grim and we will get through this.

Meanwhile, #1MinuteStories will always find a way to take your mind away to a better place and leave you with something worth looking forward for - a story of inspiration, innovation and courage. Or just a dose of good old humour and trivia.

Stay Safe.

May the Fourth Be With You

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This is a story of two great women copywriters. One was conservative, other was a rebel. Both worked on the same category at two different points of time. And with the phrases and lines they penned, they went on to deeply impact the feminist sensibilities of generations of women.

***

Shirley Polykloff was quite sure that the lunch meeting with her orthodox, Jewish, future mother-in-law did not go well. ‘What did your mother say, George?’ she asked as they drove back. George chose his words carefully - ‘Well, she said you paint your hair.’ And then after a pause, he asked: ‘Well, do you?’

Shirley let out a wan smile. She loved to colour her hair. But now she felt humiliated to hear the voice of her future mother-in-law in her head - ‘Does she colour her hair? Or, doesn’t she?’

It was 1950’s America and women were just stepping into actively visible roles in the work place. There was this need to look good without letting go of their conservative strings. Shirley joined ‘Foote Cone & Belding’ as a junior copywriter in 1956 and was put on the Clairol account. The company was launching the first ever hair color bath that made it possible for women to lighten, tint, condition and shampoo at home in a single step.

‘This was to the world of hair colour like what computers were to adding machines’. Miss Clairol gave American women the ability, for the first time, to colour their hair instantly at home. But there was still the stigma and the prospect of the disapproving mother-in-law.

Deep inside, Shirley felt that women had the right to look the way they wanted. But she also believed that women ought to excercise that right with discretion. It made her pen down these lines:

‘Does she..or Doesn’t she. Hair colour so natural, only her hairdresser would know’

Fashionable girl next door models, with either the husband or her child around them, were the dominant visuals. The product served the need and Shirley’s lines captured the aspiration of the woman of those times: ‘I will decide my look - but I will do it secretly’

The campaign was a runaway success. From the 1950’s to 70’s, Clairol’s market share grew from 7% to more than 40%. Clairol became the undisputed leader in America.

***

Ilon Specht was under pressure. The big launch was just weeks away and the set idea that they were working on had been dropped. Now, they had to re-think and re-start. As the creative writer at McCann Erickson, Ilon was debating hard with her team on the new creative route.

In 1973, the french hair colour giant, L’Oreal was set to enter the Amercian market to take share from Clairol. L’Oreal believed that it’s product, Preference, was technically superior and they planned to showcase that in the launch communication but they dropped that idea in the last moment.

Now, Ilon was a rebellious kid who dropped out of college at 23 years to join advertising. She spoke loud and fast, was super creative and unconventional.

‘We were sitting in this big office,’ recalls Specht, ‘everyone was discussing what the ad should be. They wanted to do something with a woman sitting by a window, and the wind blowing through the curtains…The woman was a complete object. I don’t think she even spoke. They just didn’t get it…I could just see that they had this traditional view of women and my feeling was that I’m not writing an ad about looking good for men..’

In a fit of anger, she wrote this down in 5 minutes:

That last line ‘Because I’m worth it’ hit the home run for L’Oreal. Every 70’s woman who wanted to step up, got this at a deeper level. The fledgling women’s movement got wind under its wings with this one line. Consumers started shifting from Clairol to Preference and by mid 1980’s, Preference overtook Clairol’s Nice ‘n Easy to become the leading hair color brand.

‘Because I’m Worth It’ was translated into 40 languages and has united women around the world, encouraging them to fearlessly embrace their ambitions and believe in their self-worth every day.

And by 1997, L’Oreal made the line their company slogan. Because it was worth it.

***

Why are the stories of Shirley Polykloff and Ilon Specht important? Because, both were brilliant copywriters who in their own way, converted their personal life moments into phrases that defined the feminist sensibilites and self esteem for that particular generation.

They channelled their creativity to tell stories that connected consumers to hair colour with a deeper meaning and purpose. And changed the fortunes of two mega brands.

Story Notes

Malcolm Gladwell wrote this first The New Yorker on March 22, 1999. This, and a set of other brilliant stories by the prolific writer are now available in his book 'What the Dog Saw And Other Adventures’

It has been my wish to storify this for a while. There is a lot more which happened after this - and you need to read the full piece for it. Fascinating.

Other famous ‘Does she..or doesn’t she?’ classic ads on this page and the ad film with the male voiceover below:

And this is the orginal 1973 L’Oreal film:

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At a community recreation centre, 32 paid lifeguards were divided into 2 groups of 16. Both these groups were put on training and inducted into their roles.

The first group named as the Personal Benefit Group were asked to read 4 stories that described on how other lifeguards, down the road, benefitted from the various functional skills acquired on the job.

The second group named as the Meaning Group were asked to read another set of 4 stories on how other lifeguards had rescued drowning swimmers and saved their lives.

Rest of the training on the skill sets was exactly the same.

The response was striking. The lifeguards from the Meaning Group voluntarily signed up for 43% more number of hours in the weeks following the story intervention.

Now, the test did not stop there. All 32 were deployed under various supervisors. Each supervisor had a mix from both groups but they did not know the stories each one of them had read - whether they were from the Personal Benefit Group or the Meaning Group. The supervisors were asked to rate each of their team members on ‘helping behaviour’ in the next few weeks.

The helping behaviour of the Meaning Group increased by 21% . There was no increase in the ratings for the ‘Personal Benefit Group’. The stories read by the Meaning Group about the lifeguards saving lives of drowning swimmers seemed to have made an impact - got them seriously interested to not just sign up for 43% more hours but put in significantly higher efforts than those who just read about the functional skills benefitting the lifeguards.

Both groups were equally passionate to start with. But the lifeguards in the Meaning Group were cultivated into a purpose. That made the difference.

Purpose is the sense that you are contributing to others - that your work has a broader meaning. It is often confused with Passion - a feeling of excitement or enthusiasm you have about work. Purpose connects self to a meaning while Passion tends to be more individualistic.

Morten Hansen, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley was curious to understand this distinction and he did an extensive study amongst 5000 employees to see which of these has a bigger impact on job performance.

One of the questions that he got the employees to rate themselves on was:

‘What I do at work makes a strong contribution to society, beyond making money’.

He designed a simple 2X2 grid on Passion and Performance and got the bosses to rank these employees in the 4 catgeories as per the grid below. Remember, the bosses did not know the details of how the employees rated themselves.

In the Fig: 1 below, employees in the ‘Low Passion-Low Purpose’ grid were ranked at an average of 10th percentile and the ones in the ‘High Purpose - High Passion’ grid were at the 80th percentile. Least motivated and the star performers, respectively. Obvious and not surprising, isn’t it?

Fig : 1

The surprise lay elsewhere. Notice in the Fig : 2 below, the ‘High Passion - Low Purpose’ - those who felt enthusiastic and excited but didn’t see purpose were ranked at just 20th percentile. However, the bosses ranked the ‘High Purpose - Low Passion’ employees at the 64th percentile. These folks weren’t the stars and outliers. But having a clarity of purpose even if they did not feel the need to show it made them valuable and high contributors.

Fig : 2

Purpose trumps Passion every single day.

Purpose helped the lifeguards to connect with the real meaning of their job: to save lives.

This is true across disciplines. Scans done by the radiologists after they were shown the photo of the patient had much higher levels of accuracy. Nurses who packed the surgical kits worked 64% longer hours and made atleast 15% lesser mistakes when they saw the caregivers who would use them.

How does purpose show up in organizations today? I stumbled upon this data chart in a study by McKinsey & Company:

Leaders at the top think they are working with purpose. People down below just do not have a sense of it. The gap is embarassing.

So there is lot of work to be done. But a good starting point will be to create opportunities that help employees find more personal meaning in their day-to-day work. When purpose is lived at work, we are more fulfilled. The work is aligned with the company’s own purpose and that sense of fulfillment will ultimately benefit the company.

Exactly how the lifeguards in the Meaning Group were inspired to save lives.

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Story Notes

The Lifeguard Study was done by Adam M. Grant in 2008 : “The Significance of Task Sigificance : Job Performance Effects, Relational Mechanisms, and Boundary Conditions’ and published in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

A much simplified version of this study appears in ‘The Power of Moments’ by Chip and Dan Heath.

Hansen’s Purpose Vs Passion is from his book: Great at Work: How Top Performers Work Less and Achieve More. Also has a reference in ‘The Power of Moments’

And here is the link to the McKinsey study.

‘My life’s work is just not being seen as this angelic lady with the lamp’.

It was late 1850’s and Florence Nightingale had just come back to England after her services as the director of Nurses at a field hospital in the Crimean War. She and her team of young nurses were horrified to confront the ugly, unhygenic conditions and the lack of medical supplies in the barracks. The hospital conditions were killing the British soldiers more than the opposing army. The mortality rate was 42%.

Nightingale, the trained nurse, got into immediate action. Raised funds on her own, recruited and trained a team of nurses. She designed a pre-fabricated hospital ward, built her own hot laundry, kitchens, and supply lines. Years before the germ theory of disease was confirmed by Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister, Nightingale enforced an obsessive commitment to sanitation in that hospital and bought down the mortality rate to 2%.

And all this while, Nightingale also recorded data meticulously, on how the soldiers died: whether from contagious disease, wounds or other causes. She had a natural inclination to record data that was spurred by her love for mathematics and writing.

When Nightingale returned to England, her stellar work in Crimea was glorified in the press and her image of holding the lamp gave her an angelic status. But little did the world sense that the Lady with the Lamp was burning with a bigger purpose inside.

The biggest resistance she faced was from the senior doctors inside the system. The monumental data that she had gathered was of no use as the senior docs did not want to understand it. Florence knew her task was to get the larger public get this for her plans to gain momentum: ‘There has to be a better show of this data. Printed tables & all in double columns I do not think anyone will read it. None but scientific men ever look in the Appendix of a Report. And this is for the vulgar public.’

It was then that she connected with William Farr, an epidimeologist and a pioneer in data visualisation. She took his help in designing the famous Rose Diagrams - or the polar area graph which was based on the mortality rates of the British soldiers.

In her most famous pair of roses, below, Nightingale visually showed the causes of high Army mortality. The number of soldiers who died of preventable diseases are represented in blue and the ones who died due to battle wounds in red.

Diagram of the causes of mortality in the army in the East" by Florence Nightingale, 1858 via Wikimedia Commons

For the first time, it was starkly demonstrated how deaths from preventable disease outweighed combat fatalities enormously in 1854 and early 1855, and how the changes she put into place managed to greatly reduce those deaths by April 1855.

In another singular rose, Nightingale showed the effectiveness of her sanitation ideas by comparing mortality rates before and after her interventions. Note the significant dip in numbers from about 9 o’clock position and the subsequent clockwise decline in hospital mortality.

Nightingale framed these mortality diagrams, delivered them to influential VIP’s and commanded them to hang in their offices so that the public could see. ‘No one frames a table of data and hangs it on the wall. But people do frame maps.’

Nightingale’s innovation was less about technique than about her purpose. She was not the first one to use bar graphs, pie charts or scatter diagrams but perhaps the first one to bring the data and narrative together to create a powerful visual impact.

Florence Nightingale was one of the greatest data storyteller of our times. At the core was her purpose to alleviate the sufferings of her fellow human beings. Her vision was to drive compelling hospital reforms.

But above all, she took complete responsibility to ensure that the impact of her work was understood by everyone. She made it easy by creating data visualisations that told powerful stories triggering worldwide hospital reforms.

And that is how the Lady with the Lamp shed her real light.

Story Notes

Lots of Story Notes. Almost impossible to capture Florence Nightingale’s story in the framework of #1MinuteStories. I would consider this my bravest, toughest attempt.

The wiki itself is phenomenal - has many more links on the work Florence Nightingale has done for sanitation reforms in hospitals and her work in the field of nursing.

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Around the 1990’s, Elizabeth Newton, a graduate student in psychology at Stanford University designed a simple experiment to illustrate a powerful concept. She assigned people one of the two roles - ‘Tapper’ or ‘Listener’. The Tappers were asked to pick a set of easy songs like ‘Happy Birthday’ or ‘Jingle Bells’ that they must tap on the table like a morse code. The Listeners had to guess the song correctly.

Now, just before the Tappers started tapping the song for the Listeners, Newton also asked them to predict the chance of the Listeners guessing their song correctly. All the Tappers were confident. They predicted 50%.

And guess what happened?

This experiment was done with thousands of people across the world and with almost 120 songs. Only 2.5% of the songs were correctly guessed by the Listeners.

That’s it. 2.5%. The Tappers were frustrated. They were clear in their head and knew the tune of the song they were tapping. And for heck they could not figure out why the Listeners were not able to guess.

The reality was the Listeners had no clue most of the times. In a very powerful way, Newton illustrated ‘The Curse of Knowledge’

‘We forget what it is to ‘Not Know’ something when we already know it’

What the leadership team means by ‘Unlocking Shareholder Value’ is perhaps only known to them. Or when a company’s vision statement says that ‘we are a humane company’ or ‘Most respected brand’ - it is very vague down the line.

The boss forgets how it feels to ‘not know’ about career growth for a junior team member. The teacher doesn’t get why her students are not able to catch the simple trick in her head for the maths problem. The dad forgets what it was like being a teenager after becoming a mature, wordly wise adult.

Last week the curse of knowledge hit me hard. I was to address two diverse sets of young people on storytelling and sales. The first one was to the final year BBA students of Christ College, Bangalore. The latter was to a bunch of young aspiring men and women from the remotest parts of India as part of a Josh Skills initiative.

In my mind. I was the expert, a senior pro with tons of experience. And that line of thought unknowingly kept throwing up very insipid and drab set of messages that did not connect. My deck was uninspiring and I was under pressure.

After a few days of mind paralysis, I chanced upon the Elizabeth Newton experiment again. And then it flashed for me. I would have to beat my curse of knowledge in the only way it can be done.

With Stories. Stories, told with a point are a surest way to connect, engage, inspire in a concrete and memorable manner. Stories prevent you from being assertive or preachy. Stories help you not to go over the top and plead for audience’s attention. It made me rework my deck - rehearse it with a purpose and gain confidence.

I’ve never felt the kind of high after these two sessions got done.

But it’s not the end of the battle. The Curse of Knowledge will come back. Remember to dig hard and keep your stories ready to fight it.

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Story Notes

The Curse of Knowledge on Wiki

The famous HBR article by the Heath Bros.

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San Francisco is one of my favourite cities I have never been to. The picture above is one from a Google street view of a busy intersection in the heart of the city. There is something about the mysterious brick circles, like the one you see above, all around in San Francisco. They have puzzled tourists and residents as well. The circles are almost always in the middle of streets and near intersections.

At 5.12 am on April 12, 1906, San Francisco was struck by a 7.9 magnitude earthquake. ‘Violent shocks punctuated the strong shaking which lasted some 45 to 60 seconds..’ The immediate damage was immense, destroying buildings and hundreds of lives were lost. But the danger was only beginning. A series of fires broke out throughout the city, burning for days. More than three-quarters of the city was destroyed, and as many as 3,000 people died in the earthquake and its aftermath.

Typically, even more than a century ago, the city fire department was equipped to put out fires quickly. The firefighters would get to the fires in horse drawn carriages. Use the municipal fire hydrants connected by water mains to attack the fires without having to bring water along with their ladders and hoses. But the 1906 earthquake destroyed water and sewage lines and the roads quickly filled with rubble making it almost impassable for fire carriages and their small portable tanks of water.

The firefighters reached the blaze but they didn't have the water needed to put out the fires. 

About 100 years before this earthquake, in the 1800’s, many fires had erupted in the city. So the city leaders had built 16 underground cisterns around San Francisco to store water for firefighting in the event of an emergency. Later, San Francisco also started building the modern piping and water supply system. Confident that the new water delivery system was efficient and enough, they neglected the cisterns and stopped maintaining them. When the 1906 earthquake hit, the modern supply system they relied on was destroyed. The backup cisterns did not have any water.

The costly lesson was learnt. So in 1908, the city began repairing the existing cisterns and built more than a 100 new ones. They're basically massive tanks of water, separate from the municipal water supply, waiting in case the regular water systems fail.

Most of these cisterns are below street-level, and before GPS, firefighters needed to know where they were during an emergency. The red brick circles solved that problem and helped them to instantly identify the cistern with the tank full of life saving water when a fire breaks out.

The brick circles which seem like little art projects on the top are San Francisco’s ultimate life saving backup when the main system collapses.

What have we thought about our backups in life that need to get into action when the main systems collapse? How often have we got around to maintain them in top shape to help it serve our needs when it matters the most?

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Story Notes

More pictures on the Brick Cicles here

On the devastating 1906 earthquake, here

I first chanced upon the story of Brick Cicles in the Dan Lewis ‘Now I Know’ Newsletter about eight months back. The story stayed with me. What happened to a city can happen to any of us. I’ve made an effort to build up some fresh backups and relook at the ones I have, ever since.