Dilemma or Choice?
1. Work-life balance.
2. Start up environment vs Corporate environment.
I want to maintain a work-life balance. This thought has become so ingrained in me that I am feeling a sense of guilt if I work hard (well, work long hours). I am busy and slowly extending my work hours without even realizing the passing of time. I am glad that way. But I am missing out on my hobbies and other activities. The books are slowly collecting dust. (As of now there is exactly 2.234 millimetres of dust…). I am not keen on watching movies on HBO/Star movies/laptop. Fitness centre has become a weekend affair. Room is not so clean anymore, as washing the clothes has become a weekend affair too. I am logging my daily activities to see where I can fit some activities/hobbies. As long as I have this sense of guilt, there is scope for work-life balance. The key for work-life balance is to maintain a high level of productivity during the 8 hours of work. Working towards that…
I was working in a start-up environment before ISB. There was very little bureaucracy. Things get done faster. But in Corporate environment, if you make a request, you have to expect that the other party will come back with a way to turn down the request. Then you have to employ your convincing skills to get past the first-level road-block. You can call yourself lucky if there are no further road-blocks. Things like getting PCs, purchasing softwares, hiring resources are also made inefficiently formal! For each decision you make, you need to pursuade so many other parties. Justify your actions. Sometimes, these things kill the initiatives. I am just adapting to the change. The problem is complicated because of the stagnation layer prevalent in big companies. The people in the stagnation layer might have been stars once, but they have stopped learning long back and are not stars anymore. They are getting paid for their past laurels, at the expense of new and raw workforce. Some of the organizational inefficienceis originates from the insecurity felt in this stagnation layer. When your team/BU is different from this ‘corporate’ environment, you have to face the threat of being labelled as “incompatible” or “rebels”. This threat is amplified when your “incompatible” approach looks promising to yield impressive results! Interesting…
I am also slowly building rapport. Investing time and energy on colleagues too.
Superb Wording, Bharani…”Stagnation layer”…have seen this in action before…this is new for you since you’ve been an All-Star
with the Belgian start-up before ISB…
The work-life balance is a major sucking point for me…thanks to the half-day skew…need to resolve this going forward…
-Vineeth.
Comment by Vineeth Kumar — July 14, 2006, Friday @ 8:59 am
“the other party will come back with a way to turn down the request” This is so true.. either they will pass the buck or turn it down and delay it as long as possible.. Very frustrating at times.. I never worked in a start up env.. may be someday I shuld to get a f eel of it
Comment by Anuj — July 14, 2006, Friday @ 10:39 am
And the whole point of creating stuff like Business Units was to give u a small-company-within-a-big-company feel. But i never felt that in either of the companies i worked with .. U wont believe it - but the company i work now(It’s a fortune 100 company), there’s an approval process for getting stationery items too - (i.e u route a request thru u’r manager for procuring a stapler and five notepads) .. Hmmmm, shud work in a start up some day !!!
Comment by Karthik — July 14, 2006, Friday @ 11:13 am
That was a beautiful write up! good going. I am surprised though. I am a new economy kid working in a old economy company.
Its frustrating at times coz of the lack of dynamism in the organisation and also too much of petty politics as junta are working at the same place and almost same work etc for 20+ years. Agreed. Any company which is large will have its own set of problems. But I liked to believe that new economy companies must be all “kewl et flat”. But guess they just “seem” to be so!
Comment by Pradeep Kumar — July 14, 2006, Friday @ 8:38 pm
Vineeth, I worked in Cognizant for 3 years before that and I was aware about this stagnation layer
Anuj, Karthik..”Go..take the risk @ some point of time..It is worth it”. I will have to postpone that for few more years..
Thanks Pradeep. When a company gets bigger, it is always tough to provide the same environment as before. Doesn’t matter if it is IT company/ Automobile company…Decentralization, Business-unitization are all ways to provide the start-up environment. But it is too difficult in reality. Lot depends on the mindset of people at the appropriate level…
Comment by Administrator — July 15, 2006, Saturday @ 2:40 am