Got an Interesting Problem?

About three months back a supplier brought a rather knotty problem with several hundred thousand dollars of adverse impact to our business and dropped it on my lap to resolve it with a tight deadline. They threatened to exit the business and stop shipment if I did not find a solution. For some reason, which I don't think I understood very well at the time, I procrastinated the work and ignored to look into it just because the supplier demanded a solution from me. How dare they threaten me, I told myself. The problem had been festering for over seven years and they wanted it resolved within a few weeks! I was angry and not interested to look into the problem. Nobody makes me work at their pace, least of all a supplier.

But this subject bothered me frequently at work. I hated their email reminders. I become a tad nervous and anxious whenever I thought about it. And I soon came to the realization that it was worrying me enough that I needed to do something about it.

Over the weekend, I reluctantly sat with the laptop and opened their Excel sheet and started to pore over their data. It was a jumbled mess. There were 156 different part numbers, with all kinds of information on inventory, demand and forecast. The supplier wanted a price increase to compensate for their loss, allegedly due to our lower demand. A classic case of asking for price increase without understanding the real problem.

I did my own investigation and tried to find the root cause. I looked up a number of Excel functions over the Internet to become more efficient with data processing. Soon I became excited by the better understanding I had of the problem as well as a number of "cool" functions and operations that I was learning within Excel.

I came to the realization that the supplier's original thesis that our demand was lower than forecasted proved to be incorrect, but the real underlying root cause was that their material replenishment system was out of whack. The inventory value in terms of raw goods, work-in-process and finished goods were all inconsistent. I was delighted by the finding. I started slicing and dicing the data in a number of different ways. I loved to use all the Excel functions that I learned recently then. I was in a state of "flow." I soon gained a thorough understanding of the problem. Every few minutes I would think up of another interesting question and go back to their data to see if I could answer it per my own theory. It worked every time!

That Monday morning I sat down and drafted a real stinker and sent it back to the supplier denying them of their price increase but to instead fix their own material ordering system that was broken. It felt sweet hitting the "send" button on that email. The supplier went silent and stopped bothering me!

As I reflected on it, I realized that I was initially anxious because of my ignorance and a general diffidence in my ability to solve a problem that had been festering for nearly seven years. But my fear and anxiousness slowly melted away as I started to gain a better handle on the problem.

At work, we are happy precisely because it presents us with difficult problems for which we are to find solutions. There is great happiness to be experienced in traversing the path from ignorance to knowledge when we solve problems, no matter how overwhelming it seems at first.

Recently Venkatraman Ramakrishnan made a very interesting statement about "expressing genuine interest" in a problem, that made me think about this as an essential ingredient to experiencing happiness.

"What leads you to work with young scientists, and how do you spot the potential in them? How do you motivate young people to pursue research?

I think it’s important to give young people the freedom to follow their ideas, and pursue their interests. I’m very grateful to have had many brilliant students and post-docs who have worked with me. Potential is often hard to spot, but a key factor is whether they express a genuine interest in the problem, and how they have thought about it."

VENKATRAMAN RAMAKRISHNAN (Noble Laureate 2009, Chemistry, as quoted in The Hindu)

Happy Days Blog (The New York Times)

We don't find the treasures that lie right in front of our eyes until we fully understand what is it that we are looking for. The Happy Days Blog in the NY Times is one such example. Although I have been reading the Times for a long time now, I did not realize that it has a blog dedicated to finding happiness!

I serendipitously found an article titled The Joy of Less by Pico Iyer, which I liked a lot. In it Iyer talks about finding happiness by letting go of all materialistic things, almost to the extent of turning into a monk.

Then a few days later I read Daniel Goldman's interview with "the happiest man in the world," -- a tibetan monk named Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche. In the article, Goldman talks about both eastern and western practices and tools for seeking happiness and refers to a researcher's finding that people are happy when they are “positively engaged, goal-directed, enthusiastic, and energetic.” This theory of working towards a goal seems to be essential for finding happiness. Today, in the corporate world, we are encouraged to have Specific, Measurable, Ambitious Realistic and Time-bound (S.M.A.R.T) goals to work towards. I have always wondered why people talked about work as being essential for happiness, until this statement about goal-directed living suddenly seemed to explain it.

As I continued to browse the Times after reading this piece, I realized that both Pico Iyer and Daniel Goldman are contributors to the blog on happiness. The introduction to the blog resonates very much with the theme of this blog --

"The severe economic downturn has forced many people to reassess their values and the ways they act on them in their daily lives. For some, the pursuit of happiness, sanity, or even survival, has been transformed.

Happy Days is a discussion about the search for contentment in its many forms — economic, emotional, physical, spiritual — and the stories of those striving to come to terms with the lives they lead."

I realized almost immediately that I had found my treasure trove. I promptly bookmarked the link to the page and encourage you to do so as well.