Dollars & Pennies

Today was one of those days! The end of which you go to bed saying, hope tomorrow I wake on the right side. Its one of those days when a single event at the beginning of the day keeps running in your mind the whole day and you can't stop feeling bad about it.

It was the Organizational Behaviour class and I was answering a question on the importance of appraisals within the organization. In my enthusiasm, I said - "We can do an ABC analysis of employees using appraisal. A - star performers, B - Averagers, C - Laggards". This comment of mine sparked a series of weird looks and raised eyebrows. My professor, turned down my idea saying that its heard of only in the field of inventory management and maybe marketing, but not in HR. Go fish! A few of my friends were mocking at me.

I am not worrying about my idea being turned down. But I was trying to understand the attitude displayed by people around me. Maybe, I'm just a guy suffering a trauma due to my industry experience, something like the villian in "Universal Soldier", but I would still like to gripe about it.

You will use a toothbrush to clean your motorcycle, but you cannot stand an SCM concept being applied in HR. If I were a student, or worse a janitor working at The Harvard Business School and I had spoken these words, the world would have seen it as the new age mantra to all HR problems. I could have even won a noble prize for it. (Ok! this was a bit too much). Funny people!

And worse, my class is a bunch of engineering stalwarts, who aspire to be like the students of IIMs and what not, but can't digest a new idea. Ideally, I would have been happy, if somebody had said - you are talking bullshit, I have a better idea. I would have digested that. But instead, making a hue and cry about a genuine idea and considering it sacrilege to have even conceived such a concept makes me feel nauseatic. If you want to comment on my idea, come up with a better one first.

There are two kinds of people - Ones who save pennies by crook or crane to buy sickles to slit throats (small people) and the ones who dream of dollars, will go out and form camaraderies to get it so that they can buy duplexes on Sunset Boulevard (big people). I would like to be one of the latter.