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.

Can Money Buy Happiness?

An old question has some new answers....

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/08/23/happiness_a_buyers_guide/?page=full

Places from Our Past

It was a hot, muggy day in August of 1993 when Prasad, my older brother, rented a Pontiac Grand Prix from Buffalo, N.Y. to drive me to State College, where I was to pursue my master's degree at the Pennsylvania State University. I was brand new to this country and immensely pleased to be here. As soon as we entered the city, he drove into the university to look at the campus. I had seen nothing like it ever before. In the campus, in addition to department buildings and library, there was the Beaver stadium that could seat close to 100,000 spectators for a football game, an ice cream shop called the Creamery and a museum of fine arts! There were more than forty thousand students in the campus with over three hundred just from India. I had no difficulty finding a couple of roommates and renting an apartment at the Heritage Oaks. Although I had a tough time adjusting to the rigorous academic routine at the campus, I enjoyed my stay and have some delightful memories from my time there.

A couple of weeks ago, exactly sixteen years after my first visit to the school with my older brother, I took my family to the Penn State in a minivan! We toured around the campus, stopped next to the Nittany Lion statue to take pictures, revisited the classrooms in the Hammond building, walked along the main street and later drove to the Heritage Oaks to look at my apartment. We immensely enjoyed this short trip to my life in the past as a college student.

Nearly eight years ago, my wife, Prema, and I took a long train journey from Chennai (India) to New Delhi and from there on to Roorkee, a small village at the foothills of Himalayas to visit my undergraduate college campus. There I showed her my hostel rooms, the main building, my engineering department and the recreation theater called the Hangar. Both of us loved the trip to Roorkee, and Prema was quite impressed by the beautiful campus.

From Roorkee, we traveled further up north, to the city of Mussoorie, to participate in the graduation ceremony for the Indian Administrative Service officers, where my younger brother, Jagan, had successfully completed his orientation course and was preparing to launch his career working for the Indian government. Mussoorie holds a special place in our family because my dad, and a couple of other uncles, had lived and studied there before beginning their careers with the government. In Mussoorie, I imagined my dad living in the hostel, eating at the mess, waking up early in the winter months for the mandatory exercise sessions or even playing chess and table tennis with his colleagues. The mere thought made me want to go back thirty years and be a part of his life then.

I am a sucker for nostalgia and have always enjoyed thinking about my days from the past. But there is something special about revisiting a place and also sharing that experience with your family and friends. During such visits, the mere sight of an ice cream shop or a bookstore can bring back fond memories and overwhelm us with a sense of joy.

Have you been to a place from your past lately? If not, I strongly recommend that you do.

Stress and the Daily Rut

I have this mild obsession with stress and its effects on health that I have found hard to explain. This article in the New York Times seems to explain why:

• Stress rewires the brain to think sinister thoughts that might not be real.
• In most animals, the calming effect overcomes the stress response of fight-or-flight once the danger has passed, but the overactive human mind extracts phantom threats and keeps us stressed longer than we need to be.
• Laboratory tests show that chronically stressed rats lose their cunning and instead fall into rote response.
• A goal-directed behavior, as opposed to habit-based living, is a sign of mentally healthy, stress-free life.
• Once in a rut, people default to habits that dig people deeper into rut.
• The brain is a very resilient and plastic organ.
• Thankfully, taking vacations and living in a stress-free state improves our ability to innovate.

For more, click on the link and explore: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/18/science/18angier.html?em

The Calming Effect of Social Gatherings

Last weekend I had the opportunity to visit a small town in Illinois called Danville . I was there to attend the wedding reception of my wife's cousin. I felt a bit nervous and unsure about this trip because I was pretty sure that I would walk into a hall full of strangers and be forced to socialize and make small talk. Frankly, I was not in the mood to do that. Just two days before the trip we had had another round of layoff at work (third one this year) and been informed that there would be significant changes to our reporting structures. I was also contending with a rather complicated commercial settlement issue with one of our suppliers from China, which ran into several millions of dollars. I called up my boss during the drive to Danville (on a Saturday afternoon) and and talked to him for nearly an hour, just pouring my guts out, complaining about the stress that we are having to go through in this economy.

But the experience at the wedding reception did me a world of good. The bride's dad is a rich doctor who had invited his colleagues and other Indians that he had met during the course of his stay here in the United States. There were nearly 300 people in the reception, most of whom were retired or past their prime age and had seen their fair share of success and riches. They drove luxury cars and wore expensive jewelery, but mostly talked about religion, politics and the lives of their own children, who invariably lived very far away from them. They were liberal with compliments for my children. When we complained about how difficult it was to raise two children under five, they reassured us that things will get better and we have to enjoy this stage of our lives. After dinner, there was loud, fast paced Punjabi music that had the sixty-year-old grandpas and grandmas dancing with a devil-may-care attitude. I danced, too, and felt both tired and exhilarated. We all slept well in the hotel room that night.

The next day we visited the couple at the doctor's place, where we entered a world or riches and opulence. The house had tall cathedral ceiling and the curio cabinets in the living room were filled with hundreds of jade statues and expensive collectibles that they had acquired from their travels around the world. But the part that impressed me the most in that house was the three-season's room that had been converted into a puja room. The ceiling windows bathed the room in bright light and the pictures and statues of gods shone beautifully. It struck me that the doctor had built this room to withdraw from all the opulence that surrounded him and enter a haven where he could think and meditate on things that are not materialistic. In this, he was exactly like the other older folks that I had met the previous night. For them, years of hectic pace and anxiety had left an empty shell that they were trying to fill with thoughts and opinions that were well beyond the realm of their immediate life.

During my drive back, my wife and I talked at length about the people that we met there at the wedding reception. We told ourselves that such a life of withdrawal and otherworldly thoughts is in store for us as we get older. This thought was not scary, but somehow reassuring. It reassured me that all my anxiety about work and financial security is transitory and meaningless and will not mean much in another fifteen to twenty years. I had a very pleasant sense of calm overcome my stress and insecurity. Being a part of a social gathering has its own pleasure and we need to seek it actively, even if it causes nervousness and seems overwhelming at first.

'Tis Nothing Good or Bad....

One nice thing about life is that the stuff that gives us joy and happiness is often found for free. The website ted.org is one such example. In here, many eminent scholars and scientists talk to us about their research and simply give away all their important findings for no cost at all. Dan Gilbert, a Harvard psychologist, is an expert on happiness and also a great presenter of new ideas. His book Stumbling on Happiness is a bestseller that deserves a space in every bookshelf. This talk (click on the image to see the entire talk) is really good and his findings are both simple and profound:

• Happiness can be synthesized.
• Synthesized happiness is as good as natural happiness.
• We all suffer from Impact Bias, where we incorrectly ascribe exaggerated amounts of happiness to an imagined future state.
• Accept the things that you cannot change (freedom to choose is the enemy of happiness).
• Having a lot of choices is not conducive to finding happiness.

Enjoy this talk. I am sure you will have a new perspective on happiness after listening to this one.