Book Review: Ready, Steady, Go! by Deepak Mehra

Book Review: Ready, Steady, Go! By Deepak Mehra

Book: Ready, Steady, Go!

Publisher: Jaico Books

Author: Deepak Mehra

The ‘Stockdale Paradox’ refers to the observations presented by Admiral James Bond Stockdale, who was a prisoner of war for eight long years during the Vietnam War. Despite regular torture and the miserable conditions in the prison camps, Stockdale survived to tell his tale, while so many of his fellow-POW’s did not make it. The ‘Paradox’ I referred to was the Admiral’s recounting of how it was the most optimistic of soldiers who died in those camps, while the realists (or pessimists, as they may be called in this firmly happiness-obsessed world) made it. To quote Stockdale itself:

“They were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”

You'd expect James Bond to survive Vietnam, somehow.
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

It sounds counter-intuitive. Surely the ones who held on to hope would be the ones who survived, while those who did not would lose the will to live. Conversely, as Stockdale pointed out, he was still convinced he would get out, but he did not try to deny or sugar-coat the brutality of the conditions he lived in. And this healthy dose of realism is the reason why he and others like him survived eight years in the ‘Hanoi Hilton’, as it was called, and and came out to go on to become a decorated Admiral and Vice-Presidential candidate.

But why am I writing about the Stockdale Paradox in a review of a self-help book for corporate climbers?

Well, because the modern corporation can be as much a prison of the mind as the Hanoi Hilton was for the body and souls of its unfortunate guests. Inflicting needless torture, denying nourishment and periods of isolation were how the North Vietnamese tried to break down the resolve of the soldiers who fell into their hands, and if you have spent much time in an Indian corporate, your brain might find the proliferation of pointless and illogical work and lack of tasks requiring actual creative thinking and application of mind to be not very different.

And because Ready, Steady, Go! is the Jim Stockdale of Corporate self-help books.

Self-help books

A typical corporate self-help book is page after page of relentless optimism. Cheerily the book’s cover promises to ‘empower’ you, the reader, to ‘change your career trajectory’ and ‘unleash your potential’, as though it were a dog that just needed to be let loose upon the world. This is followed by a lot of philosophical verbosity of a fluffy, light-on-substance variety, invented anecdotes that appear to have gone through a protracted hostile divorce from reality and then a series of motivational quotes by CEO’s who are at least twenty years removed in terms of careers than the readers of these books.

But this one is different

None of that for Ready, Steady, Go! Mr. Mehra’s work is grounded in realism, its tenets firmly practical, readily implementable and, as far as I can tell from my own experience in Banking, entirely valid. No ‘corporate gas’ or philosophical murmurings here. Ready, Steady, Go! is an illusion-breaker, very down-to-earth, and reads like genuine advice being given by an older, wiser professional to his juniors.

In short, they won’t teach you this in B-school. Or in corporate trainings, motivational seminars, personality development classes, spiritual meditation sessions and so on.

What’s in it?

The title is also used as the headings of the three separate sections of the book.

Ready is the first section, and deals with helpful tips for making the transition from academics to corporate life. From dress codes to the importance of maintaining a clean desk, from managing your immediate superior to minding your body language, this part of the book tries to inject a healthy dose of reality into the lives of young white-collar employees.

Steady, the second section, deals with the pointers for making a mid-level employee able to maintain his standing and continue to make forward progress up the career ladder. The importance of keeping your personal and office lives separate, of being not only working hard, but being seen to do so, of needing to always keep your game face on, is consistently emphasised here.

Go! Is the final section of the book, and tries to take the reader through the essential characteristics for rising above the mid-level and breaking into upper management. Here Mr. Mehra speaks about the importance of being known to your superiors, focussing on return on investment, creating a positive work environment, embracing the solitude that comes with being at the top of the corporate pyramid.

Decoding the Corporation

There are, in my opinion – and I have had a fairly long corporate career that was successful by most metrics to back it up – two ways to survive corporate India.

One is to become a cultist – to actually believe you are doing something significant, that every situation you face is a life-and-death one, and to do what it takes to rise up in the cult. If that means sacrificing others –or yourself - at the altar of corporate greed, you will do it, fully believing that what you do is holy and just. Unfortunately, like most cultists, only the one’s at the very top actually get anything out of it, and they are jealous of their privileges.

The other is to become a cynic, detaching your personal opinions - even your innate sensibilities – from your workplace, wearing a slick mask for the ten or twelve hours you spend in the workplace, and allowing it to come off when you get home, hopefully in time to retain your sanity.

Ready, Steady, Go! has the potential to be an invaluable tool for those of us in the second category. It is crisply written – each point gets not more than three to five pages – and clearly expressed. Anecdotes appear to be realistic and as I have said before, the author has avoided coming across as a empty talker.

Some of the suggestions in the book will appear trivial – waking up on time, organising your calendar, embracing being ‘boring’ – but far too many people seem ignorant of them.

Perhaps a weakness of the book could be it’s orientation towards the non-creative industries; the inherent biases towards outward appearances in firms operating in advertising and media-related industries would make Ready, Steady, Go! rather out-of-place over there. 

Would recommend this for every irrationally exuberant youngster who is embarking on corporate life.

The Author

Deepak Mehra is a banker of long standing, having worked with Commercial bank of Dubai and Credit Suisse among others, in a long career. This makes him uniquely able to understand the realities of working in financial services, which is one of the dominant sectors in the world today.

Links

Available here on Amazon 

Winning - A Corporate Story

Winning

In many ways, Sankalp Sodey was a winner. As a child, he had often won at the games he and his society friends played, such as hide-and-seek and catch-and-cook. In school, he had won a prize for dancing – he had been part of a group dance that had been very well-received, a sort of tamasha-meets-lavani-meets hip-hop. Later, in college, he would go on to win the day-boys’ carom championship, and a computer science quiz open to those who had not actually studied computers.

This is why he was very upset when he did not get recognised by his organisation, the world-famous-in-India DCTMR Bank, during their Annual Process Excellence Awards. It was true he couldn’t honestly say he had done anything particularly excellent during the year, unless a remarkable consistency in arriving at office forty-five minutes after the official time of 9 AM counted, but neither had some of those who HAD won. That Asrani fellow had done little more than make colourful excel sheets, and Adeline D’Sa had done even less, mainly concentrating on looking very pretty and talking in a husky voice with customers. And while Sankalp had, just two days ago quoted erroneous profit figures in the daily dashboard, and before that, used cumulative figures where he was to use monthlies, he was sure he was not the only one who did that sort of thing.

It was the high-tea following the awards function when he thought of taking it up with his immediate superior, the calculating machine-in-human-form known as Girishankar Sisodia, but Giri was deep in conversation with Shalaka Ghatak, the head of the NRI division in DCTMR Bank, over sandwiches and Marie biscuits. Moreover, Giri had been rather mean to him about the profit figures thing, and had not yet approved his late arrivals. No, it was best to leave Sisodia alone, thought Sankalp.

Then he noticed Girishankar’s boss, (his own super-boss) the dangerous, brilliant and possibly insane Ardeshir Behram Cowasjee, who was balancing his elegant six-foot frame against a wooden partition while chatting with three different youngsters who sat in Sankalp’s workspace at the Airoli office. In his right hand, as always, was his long umbrella, an ancient instrument without which he was never seen, and the long fingers of his left hand seemed to point at the speakers from which light elevator music played.

Incensed at the familiarity affected by the troika, who were not even anywhere in Ardeshir sir’s reporting structure, Sankalp advanced towards them with malicious intent writ large in his face. Seeing him approach, the girls squealed and fled, leaving in their wake only the faint smell of roast turkey sandwiches.

“Hullo, Ardy – esh – eer,” stammered Sankalp, suddenly realising he was entirely unsure how much familiarity that lofty personage tolerated.

The taller man’s eyes narrowed. For a moment Sankalp felt like he once had when, returning home late from a night of carousing with his friends at Geethanjali Bar, he had entered the unlighted lane that housed his parental home, and found himself staring into the bright yellow eyes of Drummond, the massive and dreaded grey cat that belonged to his neighbour. In the pitch darkness of night, Drummond had looked rather like a ghost, with his grey fur bristling and eyes like slits looking at him from the height of the palisade wall. His heart had sunk then, and it sunk now. The breezy confidence with which he had hailed the man was gone, and he began to recall the stories he had heard of the man’s famed temper.

“Who are you?” asked the scion of the Zorastrian religion at last.

“S…s….s,” he gibbered.

“Washroom’s over there,” the lanky Ardeshir suggested gently, pointing due north.

“Sankalp sir, from your team sir,” he finally blurted out.

“Oh yes, you’re one of Sussodeo’s chaps aren’t you?” a hand shot out in welcome. “Call me Ardy. Glad to see you, Sankalp sir.”

Sankalp shook the proffered hand with a smile. He was winning again. It was a soft sort of hand, clearly of someone who had never done any menial labour. He was strangely reluctant to let it go.

“Well it’s like this Mister Cowasjee – I mean Mister Ardy sir, I am glad to be here and invited and all, but I really think it’s unfair sir, that I – I mean, we – have not won anything Mister Ardy. I would like to have won something, you see, Sir Ardy Sir. I mean, so many people have won, Mister Ardowasjee, and they didn’t give a prize to me, not this year and not last year and not the year before that and this is how they insult the man of the soil sir, the local boys sir, I’m saying they only put us down, sir and…”

His confidence had been rising with every word, until, with a crook of his wrist, the be-knighted Ardy extricated his hand from Sankalp’s grip and looked down the Pythagorean hypotenuse formed by the ten-inch difference in their heights and the foot-and-a-half that separated them from each other. Sankalp’s words froze on his lips.

“So you’re saying you want an award, to go up there and bask in applause for having accomplished something while a part of my team when you’ve actually done nothing all these years but lounge around and hit on unsuspecting girls?”

“That’s right, sir,” nodded Sankalp, though he wasn’t feeling quite so confident now. “You see, I’ve worked very hard sir and very sincerely sir, and I know Sir Ardius that sometimes Giri has shouted at me but he’s a jealous sort and doesn’t like that I’m so popular with the women sir. I’ve worked here a long time, you know and I think I should get some kind of recognition for…”

For a moment, Sankalp got to see the face of a man who was no longer a Senior Manager in DCTMR Bank’s finance and controls department, but of one whose ancestors had fought against the might of Greece, of Rome and other barbaric hordes in centuries gone by. He could almost feel himself standing at the other end of a sword rather than an Umbrella and smell the dust, sweat and smoke of a battlefield.

“Hold your tongue, Hold your tongue. (Ardy said),

Man of Mumbai, Man of Dombivali, my minion,

I see in your eyes the same stench of mediocrity that would take the life out of me,

A day may come when I conform to the standards of DCTMR Bank,

When I forsake my personal commitment to excellence,

And break all bonds of honour,

But it is not this day.

An hour of vanity and lies and shameless favouritism,

When the edifice of integrity I have built comes crashing down,

When I sully the honour of fourteen generations of Cowasjees,

But it is not this day!

This day I fight,

By all that I hold dear on this good Earth,”

He leaned in close to Sankalp’s ear. He smelled of what the shorter man suspected was a girl’s perfume (he was right; it was Chanel #5), and whispered:

“I bid you begone, Sankalp Sodey.”

THE END

For reference, Ardy’s speech is paraphrased from Aragorn’s famous speech at the Black Gates of Mordor in the final hour of The Return of the King.

Reproduced below:

Hold your ground! Hold your ground!

Sons of Gondor, of Rohan, my brothers,

I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me.

A day may come when the courage of men fails,

when we forsake our friends

and break all bonds of fellowship,

but it is not this day.

An hour of wolves and shattered shields,

when the age of men comes crashing down,

but it is not this day!

This day we fight!!

By all that you hold dear on this good Earth,

I bid you stand, Men of the West!!!