Tag: Ashok Malhotra

Turn The Bus – A Gig, A Holarchy, or a Holacracy?

This blog explores alternative organization designs such as holarchies and holacracies that promise new types of organizations – that are perhaps more aligned to their contexts, innovative to the boot, and that create value for their stakeholders. My experience with Turn The Bus has offered visceral encounters that enrich my understanding of the theory and […]

The Arena and its Shadowy Warriors: Exploring Self and System dynamics through Macbeth

Introduction By now, many of you may have seen “The Tragedy of Macbeth” by Joel Coen, starring Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand – a brilliant film that does immense justice to one of the best Shakespearian plays ever. This film is aesthetically rendered in black and white noire, situated in haunting and surreal sets (designed […]

What may crawl beneath the façade of growth and aspirational purpose?

Introduction The movie, Nightcrawler, was released in 2014, and terrified US and other audiences across the world, revealing how sensational and bigoted journalism thrives on its equally bigoted, racist, classist, and terrified middle class audiences – in many ways the two feed on each other. Nightcrawler pays homage to the middle class audiences, who consume […]

The Tale of Two Speeches and Two Americas

The Tale of Two Speeches and Two Americas Is Democracy being reduced to meaningless hyperreality – a simulacrum for the monkey mind of the common man entrapped within a world that is increasingly virtual, untrustworthy, unsafe, lonely, and ambivalent?   The Context & the Divide This blog leverages textual analyses of two speeches given by […]

Typologies & EUM – A theory in making

Introduction As Ashok Malhotra aptly puts it –“If structure follows strategy, then strategy follows identity…”   Many of us who are deeply influenced by Ashok, and who work in the OD space, emphasize on the Identity processes within the firm while working with on its culture, or its strategy and its design. A key resource […]

Exploring Modernity & the Networked World – Inspired by ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’ by Shoshana Zuboff

This blog is inspired by Zuboff’s work on surveillance capitalism and seeks to bust two myths that the modern man or woman unconsciously subscribes to, and in this process remains blind to processes of manipulation and tyranny of systems. It exposes the tension between the world of belonging and the world of networks, offering questions and even hope on how we can self-author our individual and collective lives.

Exploring the E in EUM

Exploring the ‘E’ After, you have understood the ABCD of EUM Framework …   Introduction   This blog is meant for friends, associates, and clients that are somewhat familiar with the EUM framework and have worked with me, and several others over the last two decades. The EUM framework, and its associated tools as well […]

The Tyranny of Positive Thinking in Indian Corporations … Manipulating Optimism within, but without Faith

This blog explores and critiques the impact of positive thinking and its many derivatives on leaders and managers in India. I believe that the ideological stances and axioms behind positive thinking, positivist psychology, and its cruder interpretations by consultants, management gurus and coaches, create a set of complex defense process that not just isolate and alienate the human being, but obfuscate various ways in which corporate capitalism manipulates, and oppresses all its stakeholders.

The Case of ‘Sibling Rivalry’ versus ‘Competitiveness’

The Quintessential Indian Manager – A EUMian Perspective Bed Time Story # 11     Part 1 The Story … Ravi pushed his chair back on a hot May afternoon in western India and sighed … The antiquated AC, crookedly nestled on one top left corner in a large cabin, wheezed and grunted as it […]