Cache (Hidden)

I have not seen anything like this movie before. It is an exercise in frustration. It is however an interesting, tense and positive kind of frustration. This type of orchestrated frustration is worth examining.

On the surface, the story is about a famous TV personality (a writer and book reviewer). He receives tapes which show recordings of his house. This recording is very direct, like a security camera recording. Is it a joke? Is it the handiwork of a stalker? The sinister, relentless arrival of tapes with seemingly childish violent drawings creates a tension and frustration between the husband and wife. The images and tapes bring to the surface long suppressed memories and lures the main character into a deeper trap. All the events culminate in a moment of tragedy which is unexpected and shocking.

This story is interesting, but not exactly the main force of the movie. The interesting aspect is the sheer ruthlessness and coldness of the story teller, the director. He offers no explanations. No easy storyline with defined positions for the viewer to hang on to. He is simply like the tormentor in the movie as far as the audience is concerned. The frustration and helplessness felt by the family is similar to the one felt by the viewer. The movie shows something and hides something else.

The viewer begins to pay attention, interpret things and watch out for things on the screen. The tension created by the unfolding movie drives the viewer in the same way it drives its main character.

The curiosity generated and the ambiguity of the movie are balanced masterfully. The director is teasing, or is he? In the hands of lesser craftsmen, this treatment will fall flat, however, here it stays on for days and months after viewing the movie. A questioning begins of the visuals we see. Are there things hidden in all visuals? Is the very nature of visuals ambiguous? Don’t we always bring to bear so many things to what we see, which are not visible, in the form of interpretations?

This brief description itself is actually an attempt to reveal the hidden! It is one of the many attempts I make to look beyond the visible in the movie into the realm it shows by hiding. This is a good movie for people who wish to focus on the silence in speech, the untold in the telling and the hidden in the revealed. You will love it, if you like the process of reading between the lines!

Magic Stone Soup

Once upon a time, somewhere in post-war Eastern Europe, there was a great famine in which people jealously hoarded whatever food they could find, hiding it even from their friends and neighbors. One day a wandering soldier came into a village and began asking questions as if he planned to stay for the night.

“There’s not a bite to eat in the whole province,” he was told. “Better keep moving on.”

“Oh, I have everything I need,” he said. “In fact, I was thinking of making some stone soup to share with all of you.” He pulled an iron cauldron from his wagon, filled it with water, and built a fire under it. Then, with great ceremony, he drew an ordinary-looking stone from a velvet bag and dropped it into the water.

By now, hearing the rumor of food, most of the villagers had come to the square or watched from their windows. As the soldier sniffed the “broth” and licked his lips in anticipation, hunger began to overcome their skepticism.

“Ahh,” the soldier said to himself rather loudly, “I do like a tasty stone soup. Of course, stone soup with cabbage — that’s hard to beat.”

Soon a villager approached hesitantly, holding a cabbage he’d retrieved from its hiding place, and added it to the pot. “Capital!” cried the soldier. “You know, I once had stone soup with cabbage and a bit of salt beef as well, and it was fit for a king.”

The village butcher managed to find some salt beef . . . and so it went, through potatoes, onions, carrots, mushrooms, and so on, until there was indeed a delicious meal for all. The villagers offered the soldier a great deal of money for the magic stone, but he refused to sell and traveled on the next day. The moral is that by working together, with everyone contributing what they can, a greater good is achieved.

The detail hound micro manager

In the trenches, projects huddle together interconnected to a million details like neurons in our brains. Delays, contingencies, breakdowns and meltdowns happen when projects with perfect blueprints collide with the forces of reality.

Only in textbooks and classroom studies do projects exist alone, in their own domain, unattached to other factors of life and isolated from the interference of the forces of chaos. Glorified reports of “how we did it” tend to suffer from selective amnesia and results in simplistic process descriptions.

These process workflows are usually gobbled up and regurgitated in some form or the other by that unique beast of the trenches called the micro-manager. The micro manager gets involved with, and even dictates, every detail in the work flow process. This brings on the feeling that you are just an extension of the manager. A robotic tool to do their bidding. This leads to a huge degree of demoralization and alienation from the work in front of us. The work we care about.

What makes micromanagement so common? What attracts this behavior?

A closer look reveals that the micro management ecosystem is rich with different species of micro managers. The simple ones are those who are driven by a feeling of superiority and a need for credit. The “my way or the highway” breed simply refuses to acknowledge that other people are capable to thought.The mentor type micro manager is a curious one whose actions driven by good intentions. The perfectionist micro manager has placards declaring the virtues of excellence, and urges everyone to embrace “the perfect way”. The insecure micromanager tends to keep a close eye on everything, and attempts to walk with magnifying glasses for spectacles.

The low levels of trust lead to an unbearable heaviness while working with the micro manager. In a team, trust is the main golden quality. Everything that aims to win, keep, and build trust drives the team to move forward, and the work, to gain momentum. Constant monitoring, interruptions, dictation and evaluation leads to a breach of trust. True delegation involves the risk of allowing the opportunity for mistakes. These in turn are sometimes pointers to areas of improvement and growth.

Breaking the tyranny of mechanical processes is very much required if work has to be freed. A process which compromises trust and works towards the reduction or elmination of it is definitely a recipe for painful projects.

Loss of ownership of work is a common effect of being micromanaged. “It is not my code, it is no longer my design, this is not my baby” are some of the common cries of the victim. Motivation plummets and affected person no longer responds to situations.  A zombie feeling seeps in and every query is redirected to the micromanager as decision making abilities atrophy.

The micro manager also suffers from the effects of this working style. The successful micro manager is like a football (soccer) player who gets the ball and then tries to do everything to score all alone. Goal Keeper, Defender, Forward, all rolled into one. It is no fun for the team and burns out the manager. In the long run, the team simply disbands as the game is no longer playable.

A solution to micromanagement is to move the focus away from the process to the people. The Goal Keeper, Defender, Forward are there in those positions to play. The idea is to give them the ball and let them run with it to score. Scoring  opportunities will be missed, goal keeper might not stop a few balls, forwards might not coordinate. These are all part of the game. The idea is to help nurture the players in their positions so that they can all come together to play a fantastic game. Less talk about the game and more play will definitely help.

Being with the micro manager in the trenches is a painful predicament. However, understanding the causes and the fact that the behavior is not personal goes a long way in adapting to the situation. Sometimes, an honest and open discussion about the diminishing trust in the execution of the project helps wake up the micro manager. The micro manager is often unaware that things are not going well. From their perch, micromanagers tend to bring all their focus to the process and blank out the other important aspects of work.

I am no productivity guru. In fact, I rate myself as very average when it comes to being optimized, primed and ready for anything. Till recently, I did not realize I should have a terrific productivity system in place to feel optimized, primed and ready for anything! I often get a feeling that I missed something important while running behind that high priority to do item. Like having fun while working.

The tyranny of to-do lists is the same as the tyranny of over talkative, micro managers. Making a to-do list is planning. Planning is not doing. In fact, at some point of time, the to do list gains an upper hand over the pleasure of doing something. I might be among the minority or doing something wrong. There have been times I add an item which is fun, but when I get to doing it, the fun evaporates and vanishes.

So, I am looking to make a few changes. I honestly don’t know if there is an alternative to the tyranny of the to do list. However, since I have identified it as the main cause of my distress I am attempting a change.

The whole idea is to get back in control. To Do is no longer the prime driver of my time. In fact, I have chucked out the To Do lists. The rigidity of the list has to be replaced with the flow of activities.

Here are some ideas that I have been thinking of.

Planning is usually revealed in retrospect. Like success. Life is a complex series of events. The human mind is incapable of comprehending all the possibilities. It is impossible to factor in things according to their importance in a dynamic system like the events of everyday life. It requires constant steering and readjustments. Like a missile hitting a moving target.In a constant state of change, we need the ability to adapt, focus on what is in front of us and not what is on the horizon.

Things are never finished and finishing things is often beyond our capabilities, dependent on many external factors. Starting is within our control. We can look at the situation now and choose to start. Once we are in the present and not looking at the future or predicting/measuring how things should have been, we can concentrate on the doing.

Getting rid of the guilt by separating efficiency from ego is another step. I am not just my work. I am not just my goals. A realization that self worth comes above success, failure, efficiency, capability provides a certain level of safety to play freely with the work in front of us. This is important.

Recreation as a tool to concentrate better. We need time away from work to do quality work, enjoy work and develop a capacity to concentrate and engage with our work. This is a contrarian concept, but all artists, musicians and athletes whose work is performance will vouch for the fact that more time they spend away from work, free of guilt, the better the quality of their work.

After spending 20 to 30 minutes, I seem to be drawn towards the stationery section. There, I usually pick up a beautiful, luxuriously built blank notebook. The kind that would have lavish binding, gilded pages and superb paper quality.

What’s going on?

Before this blank book phase, I used be drawn to buying the same titles again and again. This is a curious phenonmenon. Being slightly disturbed by this, I decided to investigate this strange case of recurring books. I found that there were many other friends in whose bookshelves there lived these kind of twin books. They appeared in slightly different covers, older versions, different formats and typography. These books were different for different people.  The recurring book phenomenon is puzzling. It is like a peculiar case of deja vu. Something is wrong with the Matrix!

Like all book lovers, I end up amassing quite a bit of them and procrastinate endlessly on giving them up to make space for new and more interesting ones. When faced with the inevitable option of having to dispose off books, I still seem to cling to the twin books preferring to sacrifice less dearer books.

In case you are wondering, my two main recurring books are Animal Farm and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Funnily, when I lend it to someone, I insist on getting it back as soon as possible. Let it be known for the sake of these recurring twin, triplet and sometimes (OMG!) quintuplet books, a lot of shelf space and books have been sacrificed!

Recurring Books!

Do you have multiple copies of the same books?

What is your excuse/explanation?

:)