And Vijay Says…

My pal Dennis Howlett and I were discussing today morning about what makes a large company resist change. A lot of thoughts ran through my mind and I thought I better write it down . Strangely – my thoughts revolved around laws of physics when I looked for answers . No idea why , but this is roughly how I try to answer the question .

Entropy is a measure of disorder in a system . Generally, higher the entropy – the more energy a system needs to just remain a system . There is very little energy available to do something else . Remember the first law of thermodynamics – there is only a certain amount of energy available to a system . Organizations are like that too – given a certain resource level , there is only so much that can be done .

What a company stands for changes with time . Pre-IPO , there is a great focus on increasing the valuation of the company . Size of the company is small and most of the employees have stock options as their primary compensation (or upside ) . When that unity of purpose is there – everyone has the same goal for the most part . If I work in engineering and my buddy works in sales and all we can hire is one extra person – it is relatively straight forward to figure out which team gets the extra headcount .
Both of us know that if the company gets valued higher – we both will be sufficiently compensated to not worry about who has a bigger team and whose team earned more kudos .

Now let’s say the company went public and we still can hire only one person . Now the company has many goals – revenue , profit , employee morale , net promoter score and a hundred other KPIs . Every team is aligned to a subset of the goals – and only a small number of people (occasionally only the CEO and CFO) are measured on all KPIs . Compensation is now not primarily stock for most employees – it is MBO driven . So entropy kicks into high gear – a lot of energy gets spent in just keeping the company running – by optimizing across different goals . This leaves hardly any energy to do anything to move forward .

That is what makes larger companies resist change in my opinion . I think this is one of the biggest causes for innovator’s dilemma . Someone with low entropy and more energy to spare comes along and wins the market while you are fighting your inner devil (which you created yourself and sustained ) .

Physics – statics and dynamics – uses the concept of equilibrium a lot . Inertia is a big deal – unless an unbalanced external force doesn’t act on it, an object just continues to move like it always had , or will sit dead on its tracks . Organizations display this behavior in spades .

This is why incremental changes don’t always give much impact in many companies – those are easy to balance out . Often times – individuals try to push really hard to make a difference . But force is proportional to mass and acceleration . Individuals have less organizational mass and hence need tremendous acceleration to show impact . On the other hand – establishment has plenty of organizational force and just needs a tiny acceleration to provide the balancing force . So things come back to equilibrium pretty soon . Maybe there is an exception like Steve Jobs where the CEO is the individual forcing the change – but even then, we have seem the world doesn’t have too many who could pull off what Jobs was able to .

I should stop now – I am not even sure if this line of thought is useful . But I did promise my daughter that I will help her organize her toys ( does that count as decreasing entropy?) . So off I go 🙂

So India is getting a new prime minister – and he is the leader of BJP, an organization based on Hinduism / Hindutva . Now , what exactly that means gets interpreted differently based on who you ask . But given the overwhelming majority that the party got in parliamentary elections – it looks like vast majority of the population of India is leaning towards a definition along the lines of “one god , many manifestations”.

Concept of god is a complex one – there are religions that explicitly reach there is only one god , and that you are a big time sinner if you don’t agree . The treatment of god in Hinduism is interesting to say the least . The fundamental notion is that there is only one god – but that god could have many forms or manifestations . There are some 33 million gods – or 33 million forms of god – in Hinduism . The followers of these 33 million gods haven’t always agreed on whether it all converges to one central concept of god .

If I understood correctly – a triumvirate of gods (Brahma, Vishnu, Siva for creation , sustaining and destruction of life/world) were at the top of the hierarchy of gods . Entire kingdoms were formed and wiped out in India on the basis of “my god is more powerful than your god ” principle -even though there was a universal umbrella of Hinduism that covered them all .

The interesting thing about polymorphism is that once we step outside the world of religion ( I believe the right word specifically is polytheism) – it is a less contentious topic .

Nature has a lot of examples in animal kingdom – like jaguars which look black and which look spotted . I think the biological way of saying it is “multiple phenotypes within one species that live in the same habitat” . It’s a necessary result of evolution. But the moment we extend evolution to the world of religion – all bets are off . Somehow we can’t seem to take a leap from butterflies and jaguars to our own life .

The other example is programming – specifically object oriented programming . I learned procedural programming before OOP and had to be taken kicking and screaming into the new world . One of the smartest things about OOP is that you can arbitrarily define a base class to suit yourself and derive as many sub classes out of it . Or in terms of interfaces – you can have one interface and many methods . If you think of the concept of god as the base class – it becomes easy to understand that many religions can exist with their own nuances .

In programming, when you don’t like someone else’s definition of class – you can over ride it and define your own class and take it from there . I believe that if we exercise independent thought – we can decide to follow any existing beliefs about god , or create own belief systems . And for those who don’t care for the concept of god – think of some sub classes as ones that take all or partial null values . So atheists , “I am spiritual, but not religious” types et al can all be covered in this approach .

Answers are both within us and around us – whether it is about god or anything us . It’s up to each of us to decide what combination works for us .

OK – I needed to get that out of my system . I feel better already 🙂