Marupiravi (Re-incarnation)

It has been raining day and night. As it continue to rain in extravagant tantrum, I stumble upon this:

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kochi/why-kochi-figures-in-lonely-planets-worlds-top-10-cities/articleshow/71769490.cms

This reminded me of K. Kunhikrishnan's talk to Malayalam writer Sethumadhavan on the significance of Marupiravi Recreating Muziris. A voyage through history mixed with myths, legends and pure fiction. The characters come and go, cutting across contours of time and space. "The novel opens with a young girl collecting artifacts at Pattanam and concludes with the protagonist hoping the granddaughter takes his writings forward. Significance? The present generation lacks a sense of history and concern for heritage. They live in a florid present without understanding the past. Author attempts to draw them to an undiscovered past, hoping that they will look at our past. Another fascinating thing is that the author has juxtaposed the past and the present with the Vallarpadam terminal symbolising the trade potential of Cochin. History is not a blind alley. It repeats, sometimes in an intriguing way. Wading through the labyrinth of history, the book recapture the past, re-construct it and take it forward. At the end of the novel.

‘എന്ന്നാലും പെട്ടെന്നിങ്ങനെ?’
‘പെട്ടെന്നൊന്നുമല്ല, നൂറ്റാണ്ടുകളുടെ സഹനത്തിനു ശേഷമേ പ്രകൃതി ഇത്തരം കടുംകൈകൾക്ക് മുതിരുകയുള്ളൂ. അന്ന് ഞാൻ പറഞ്ഞത് പോലെ കടലും കരയും തമ്മിലുള്ള നിലയ്ക്കാത്ത പോര്. കര കാക്കാൻ മനുഷ്യർ മറക്കുമ്പോൾ കടൽ അതിന്റെതായ വഴികൾ കണ്ടെത്തുന്നു.’
~ സേതു, ‘മറുപിറവി’

Problem Solving

Problems are an Opportunity to develop ourselves. Solving it involves two parts:
1) Creativity – Generate Options
2) Decision Making – Select the best options

Team decision – Ask everyone’s view/help, consider all the potential risks.

• 1. Identify the real problem

What's causing the problem
Knowing the cause is the key – At times there could be more than one cause – and at times we might have more than one effect. Eg. Beach drowning/ high icecream sale – not related but real reason is hot weather.
Get list of possible causes; find the real one and work on fixing it.

1. Asking the five whys

The problems may be like a tree, or a circle . If a circle it is not easy to break the loop. Bad manager will fix the surface problem. Good ones will get into the root cause.

2. The Kepner-Tregoe process
Situation -) Problem -) Cause -) Solution -) Select -) Risk

Find when does it happen and when it doesn’t happen? Try swaping

3. Pareto analysis
80-20 rule. Eradicate 20% problem, will save 80% cost. Find and tackle top ones.

4. Look at the whole system
Book – ‘Why things bite back?’; ‘The 5th discipline’. The illusion of control. Managers are just a cog in the machine. Stand back and try to analyze the system as a whole.
Systems = Feedback loops + Time delays

• 2. Generate Possible Solutions

1. Fast and slow thinking

Intuitive or logical – slowly nibble.

2. Brainstorming

Group brainstorming gets many ideas – write all ideas. Keep the momentum coming. Let go of ownership.
Use both sides of the brains. Some just suggest ideas, and some judge them. Let all do, everything – but in steps- first get ideas from all don’t judge. Then judge all together.

3. Mind maps
Start from middle. Use paper in landscape. Use colour. Use a white board. Use ipads. Helps note making, and explaining to others. Limitation in case you have multiple Causes and multiple solutions. – A picture.

4. Decision trees

Have timelines.

Boost your creativity
Consider reversal
Use adjective
Apply what if scenario
Sleep on it.
Combine variables – create metrics
Talk to other people
Keep going
Develop, silly, fun solutions.
Chunk up or down.

• 3. Selecting the Best Solution

1.Intuition and logic
So, the first principle is that you should think about both head and heart, both logic and your intuition, and that they should agree. If not, you need to do more thinking. One of them must be wrong. So the more you can use both halves of the equation the better. And what about you? Are you a logic person who could maybe give their intuition more of a chance?

2. How to view the options
At least ask yourself, "How do I feel about "what the numbers are telling me? "Could they be wrong?" Or are you more of an intuition type of person who could maybe benefit from doing a few numbers?

3. Rating charts
Put in tabular form and discuss with group. A comparison chart typically has columns for the strengths and weaknesses of each idea .


4. Don't settle for second best
Make decisions – Must haves, Nice to haves,

- Something that often gets forgotten is that choosing between options isn't always the answer. What if none of the options is really good enough? An example of this would be recruiting a person. What if the best candidate is okay? In fact, quite good, but not excitingly brilliant? A friend of mine calls these people the Forty Percenters. Not bad enough to fire, but not really good enough, either. Should we give them the job if we really need someone?

And if the solution that you're considering is missing even one of the must-haves, then it's not good enough and the search must start again. even if one of your candidates has all of the must-haves, they might still not be good enough because they have very few of the additional nice-to-haves. And this is something that you have to decide, ideally before your interviewing process.

5. Risk analysis

It will almost always be the case that the more risky options will have higher payoffs, because you wouldn't consider a more risky option unless it was higher paying.

the easiest way to allow for risk in your calculations is to multiply the value of the expected outcome by the risk. The expected value is the amount you'll get if you succeed multiplied by the probability.

6. Team decisions

The wisdom of the crowd – Better to consult, more people you ask, better answer.
Involve as many people as you can in your decisions, especially if they involve judgment or estimation of numbers. But make sure that they either don't confer or if they do, that you don't get risky shift. Counter this by having a black hat wearer, asking everyone what they think, and having a separate section on what might go wrong.

7. Sensitivity
Sensitivity is the risk that your estimates are wrong, and to what degree that matters.

8. The sunk cost paradox

The time you've put into relationships, the time you've put into projects, the money you've put into advertising and marketing. If it's not working, you should cut your losses now. The correct decision-making process is to think only about going forward starting from now. What's the cost of the time and the money that I need to put in and what's the benefit that I will get out?

Only what will happen going forward is what matters.

9. Framing – subconscious and deliberate
The word framing comes from our frame of reference. We can't help seeing the Sun set from our frame of reference, even though we know the Sun isn't moving, it's the Earth that's rotating really. And in the same way, we look at things from the point of view of ourselves, or our department, or our organization, or our country, and this can bias our decision making and perhaps make us take the wrong decisions.
Look for neutral words.
Always compare options using the same way of measuring them. For example, either looking at the chance of success, or looking at the chance of failing
when we frame options we have to make sure that we don't compare gaining in one option with losing in another, because the losing one will tend to have more weight and especially so if you're a risk averse person

10. Four simple rules for decision making

1) Does’nt really matter: If the decision is very close, then it doesn’t matter which option you choose. – only tragedy is if you don’t choose any. - The two paths that your life will take are going to be different, but both will be fine, so it doesn't matter.
2) Toss a coin but be prepared to ignore: because they're equal, then just get the coin out and do it. - And the weird thing is, that as the coin is in the air, you sometimes find yourself hoping for one of the options. In which case, ignore the coin and choose that. Or, once the coin lands, you find yourself either glad or disappointed, in which case, ignore the coin and choose the one that you've discovered that you really want. If you feel no emotions as the coin spins, or your emotions continue to pull you in both ways equally, then go with the coin.
3) Take the simplest solution:
4) Delegate the decision. - whatever happens, you want them to be motivated to carry out the decision, so give it to them if you're 50/50 about the choice.

11. Consider implementation
Always consider the implementation as well as the solution itself.

Transformation

Transformation is good for companies, and people that go broad, move fast and renew often, priorities health and keep stretching the aspiration. Transformation is an intense, well-managed, organization-wide program, to enhance performance and boost organizational health. The result should always be measured.

1. Go big, Go broad. The most successful transformations are often the broadest and impact the whole business;
2. Move Fast, Renew often.
3. Embrace Organizational Health
2. Stretch your aspirations. Targets should be stretching to drive success.

Coaching Employees through Difficult Situations

Have you ever had to provide coaching to an individual who can't take criticism, or inherited an employee who seems to continually make the same mistakes on the job? Part of growing as a leader is learning how to successfully tackle these and other challenging situations. In this course, leadership consultants Lisa Earle McLeod and Elizabeth McLeod help new and experienced managers address some of the most frequent coaching challenges. Using scenarios, Lisa and Elizabeth demonstrate how to motivate employees who have been demoted or promoted, as well as how to effectively coach employees who have big egos or simply don't want to be coached. In addition, they share strategies for using supplemental resources to further your coaching efforts.
Learning Objectives:
• Define coaching.
• Describe the foundation for successful coaching.
• Explain how to coach someone who is older than you.
• Articulate how to coach someone who makes excuses.
• Identify how to coach poor performers or bad communicators.

• 1. Foundations for Successful Coaching
What is coaching?

- Coaching is not cheerleading; it's leadership. And it's not about standing on the sidelines, and barking orders. It's about teaching skills and improving mindset to make meaningful improvements in performance. It's easy to walk around, putting out fires and directing behavior, but coaching has a bigger longterm payoff. Coaching will give you a much more resilient and confident team, and a team that can function even when you're not there to call the shots.

A foundation for successful coaching
1. Empathy
2. Accountability
3. Understanding
• 2. Situational Scenarios
Coaching someone who is older than you
1. Validate the other person
2. Compliment them
3. Build your own credibility – Don’t get defensive
4. Deal with the original issue
Coaching when someone is passed over for promotion
1. Address the problem proactively
2. Put yourself in their team
3. Validate the other person
4. Give opportunity to grow
Coaching someone who has been promoted

1. Validate the other person
2. Raise awareness between past role and present
3. Coach
Coaching someone who didn't get enough training
Training is skill based; coaching is for personal development
1. Let them know you want to help them to be successful
2. Offer additional training
3. Position yourself as the coach

• 3. Attitudinal Scenarios
Coaching someone who makes excuses
• Open with a question
• Acknowledge the pattern of excuses
• Reinforce the importance of positive behavior
Don’t debug every excuse, but the habit.
Coaching someone who doesn't want to be coached
Successful coaches offer support, are trusted, take things one step at a time.
• Establish yourself as a supporter
• Make one suggestion
• Offer a compliment
Stay respectful and offer support
Coaching someone who has a big ego
People do not need to accurately assess themselves in order to imrove
1. Acknowledge something positive
2. Frame improvement as good to great
3. Get agreement to a tactical next step

Coaching someone who can't take critique
• Begin with a compliment
• Give an example of what good looks like
• End on a positive

• 4. Behavioral Scenarios
Coaching someone who is a poor performer
Ask to improve one specific important skill – eg. Efficiency, Skills are not linear.
Coaching someone who is a bad communicator
• Share one strategy
• Provide a relevant example
• Offer a winning strategy
Coaching someone who keeps making the same mistakes
Break down skills into manageable tasks.


• 5. Ongoing Coaching
Suggesting resources
• To do skills training
• Relationship development – Peer coaching
• Require self study – Every Friday 2 hours study, and share with others.
When to give up on coaching – R.O.C – Return on Coaching
Don’t let sunk cost let you make wrong decision . Measure ROC
1. Manageable steps
2. Tools
3. Clear expectations
4. Feedback
5. Outside training
6. Internal experts
You have got only one you, Make sure you are spending your time wisely.

• Conclusion

- If you take nothing else from this course, know this. Coaching doesn't always have to be a formalized 12-step process with a lot of deliverables. - No, it doesn't. Effective coaching can be short, intentional conversations you have with your team during day to day business. - It takes some work from you on the front end, but when you do this well, your time investment pays off 10 fold down the road. - Use coaching as a way to build those soft skills, and increase the confidence of your team. - So they can operate smoothly and efficiently when aren't there to hold their hand. - If you want to learn more about coaching or even get coached by us, you can follow us on LinkedIn or connect with us through our website. - Coaching is about having lots of meaningful conversations, and, yes, sometimes they're challenging conversations. - But it's an investment you make over time, and one with big payoffs in the long run.

Let your life fall into your hands - Recognise and greet it

Do not try to save
the whole world
or do anything grandiose.
Instead, create
a clearing
in the dense forest
of your life
and wait there
patiently,
until the song
that is your life
falls into your own cupped hands
and you recognize and greet it.
Only then will you know
how to give yourself
to this world
so worth of rescue.

~Martha Postlewaite

Building Self-Confidence

Confidence is crucial to personal and professional success. People who aren't confident tend to miss out on new challenges, relationships, and opportunities. The good news is self-confidence is self-perpetuating; once you develop it, confidence can buy you from one situation to the next. In this course, author and educator Dr. Todd Dewett shares simple and practical techniques to build and maintain self-confidence. He teaches you how to own the situation, embrace your imperfections, and take action to move forward. Then he covers how to sustain your confidence, interaction after interaction, by aligning with the right people, maintaining a positive perspective, and putting together a plan.

Build confidence

- Here's a question. What do you do with a valuable asset, like a home or a car? You protect it and invest in it when needed, right? Self-confidence is one of your most precious assets, so you have to protect it and invest in it correctly. This course will help you do exactly that. You'll learn to own your situation, embrace your imperfections, define a new path forward, and you'll learn how to embrace positivity. All of that means stronger self-confidence.

Own the situation
- The first step towards improving how you handle self-confidence involves learning to own the situation. This just means you'll strive to understand and except the fact that ultimately you are responsible for how you feel about yourself. Sometimes a similar reaction happens but in the opposite direction. You find yourself questioning your abilities, but instead of feeling self-pity or some other negative thought about yourself, you look at others. Maybe you decide you feel this way only because of your abrasive colleague, or that completely unreasonable boss, or maybe that client who is never happy. That's called blame, and blaming never solves anything. It does, however, give you an excuse to not fully own your contribution to how you feel, so be careful. All right, to own your situation means that you must embrace a policy of personal responsibility. Know that you are driving progress in your life. This approach ensures that you are your biggest advocate for change and improvement, and that your growth isn't really dependent on others. Excepting this idea seriously increases your odds of maintaining strong self-confidence over time. However, I do want to remind you to be careful. Taking ownership and being responsible does not mean that you should blame yourself or be overly critical of yourself. No self-pity allowed. When your self-confidence takes a hit, never begin by thinking that you are the one and only reason for what happened. Remember, that every outcome is the result of multiple factors, you're only one. Besides, if you overindulge in negative thoughts about yourself, it becomes easier to make the same choice in the future. Okay, you've accepted responsibility, and I do know that can feel like a burden sometimes. So, I want you to do two quick things. The first is to acknowledge your self-worth. You are valuable, you're a unique person with a lot to offer given all of your experience, education, and training. You work hard, you're creative, you're a good colleague, and you've had a few recent wins at work. It only takes a couple of minutes to remind yourself that no matter how the current situation feels, you are a highly value-added person who will bounce back. Second, you must commit to getting stronger. I don't want you to believe in personal responsibility without also spending some time thinking about how you will work to maintain a healthy level of self-confidence. This means a focus on the behaviors that will help you achieve this goal. Every great goal needs a clear plan, so now it's time to start working on yours. There you have it. Stop looking elsewhere so you can look right in the mirror at yourself. When you really own how you feel, remember your self-worth and commit to getting better. Well, that's when you're ready to start building more self-confidence.

Embrace the imperfection
- All human beings are deeply imperfect and yet most of us spend a lot of energy denying it. I understand. We don't wish to be defined by failure or to have people think about our imperfections. True, but carving out time to think about this reality, and how to use it, is actually essential for strong self-confidence. There are a few things that make all of us human. We all breathe, we eat, we grow mentally and physically and yes, along the journey we all experience challenging learning moments. It's expected. I mean, sure when a mistake happens it hurts for a while, but don't forget that this has been experienced by literally everyone around you. Step one is to be honest about your imperfection. I know you've worked hard. I appreciate all of your degrees, promotions and accolades, but accomplishing all of those things wasn't easy, wasn't it? Of course not. Along the way you made a few mistakes and experienced one or more failures. That's normal. So next it's time to realize that mistakes are a potent fuel that drives your learning and growth. Any form of mistake or failure is really just a type of feedback pointing you in a more productive direction, if you're paying attention. The process goes like this: You create an error or some type of setback, you then experience negative feelings, this is followed by critical feedback, whether that's from an upset client or your boss, and this, of course, creates even more negative feelings. Predictably, self-confidence sinks. Okay, now what? It's time to make a choice. You can put this incident in the back of your mind and ignore it or you can make the choice to allow this incident to become a genuine learning moment. However, do keep things in perspective. Some skills matter more than others, so when you make a mistake, whether that has to do with your understanding of a particular software program or maybe presentation skills, who knows, you should try to make amends. But then you have to ask yourself these questions. In general, how important is this skill for professionals? More specifically, will this skill be important for your career in the next few years? Finally, is there anyone on the team who's better suited to handle this issue because of their skill set? If the issue is important and you personally will be required to master this skill, well, it's time to start thinking about the right educational activities. If however, the skill is of minor importance and you really don't expect to rely on it, well, then there's no need for a plan. Just move forward and use your limited skill building time on areas that really matter. Sometimes being face-to-face with our imperfections hurts self-confidence, but now you know they can actually become catalysts for stronger self-confidence. So the next time things don't go quite right choose to smile and start thinking about what you can learn that will help you next time.

Articulate a path forward
- When you find yourself not feeling confident, don't wait long before you choose to do something about it. First, give yourself a deadline, a time when you will stop accepting your current level of self-confidence and begin working on ways to improve the situation. Think in terms of hours or days, not weeks or months. Second, you have to make a plan. Let me share a simple structure that will be helpful. It's all about goals. Goals work because they direct and focus your attention on outcomes that you value. If you want to think about building self-confidence, let's think about levels of goals. You want to get back in the business of achievement, but you need an approach that works for someone who's struggling with self-confidence. So let's start small. First, consider a classic small win. A small win is an easily-definable task to be completed that you don't expect to be particularly difficult. This is the equivalent of getting back on your bike after falling off. It's a small step that puts you firmly back on a path towards being productive and feeling more self-confident. It could be as simple as a goal to end the weekly management meeting on time for once, or maybe you need to reconnect with someone in your network. Just remember, defined, simple, reachable. That's a solid short-term win. After a few small wins, you'll be ready for the smart goal. As most of you already know, that stands for specific, measurable, aligned, reachable, and time-bound. If you're not familiar with the idea, you can spend just a few minutes on the internet to find plenty of quality descriptions, but the point here is that we're getting larger in size and you're working on them over the course of many months, or maybe a year or more. But we're not quite done. After a few small wins and a good smart goal or two, then it's time to remember the biggest goals. Some people call them BHAGs, or big hairy audacious goals. But to keep it simple, I'll just say, don't forget to dream. When confidence takes a hit, we can become too worried and too risk-averse. Those big long-term goals can feel daunting, and somehow outside of our reach. But they're not. So dream, dreams tap our imagination and help us feel purpose. Listen, no matter why it is that you find yourself questioning your confidence, you can take steps to improve how you feel. Start right now. Admit you need a plan. Grab a small win, define a few smart goals and don't forget to take time on occasion to dream. That's a productive path forward that's very likely to boost self-confidence.

Manage your context
- Understanding self-confidence requires you to think about how you interact with your environment every day. Think about your major social interactions at work. The truth is that you bring as much positive mental energy to the office as you can, but then during the day, some people improve how you feel, and well, others don't, so let's think about how people affect you. Here's what I want you to do. Make a list of the people you see the most, regularly, every week. Now, split that group into two by creating a net positive group and a net negative group. The positive list is full of people who tend to be congenial and helpful, while the other list is populated by people who cause you excessive stress due to negative chemistry or behaviors. Now, I'm not naive, I know you can't completely control who you see and when, however, when you scrutinize your work, the meetings and all the other interactions, you're likely to find opportunities to increase the time you spend with the positive folks and decrease how much you give to the more negative people. Remember that how you feel is an asset, so you have to learn to protect it. Next, think about using your time more strategically. Again, just to keep this simple, think about your most important tasks every week, the tasks and projects that are vital to the team or viewed as important by your boss or clients. Then you have the easy stuff, the boring data manipulation, the paperwork, the drudgery. Turns out, people often take refuge in the smaller, easier tasks because they're easy and they won't cause a headache. Unfortunately, that typically means you get behind on the work that matters. Here's what you do. Always start the day with meaningful work, not the easy stuff. Real progress first, easy tasks later. And then, for at least one week, I want you to keep track of how much time you spend on really meaningful work versus easier, more routine aspects of the job. A strong majority of your time should be spent on things that matter. Just becoming aware of how you allocate your time will help you shift in a productive direction. Okay, the last tip I have for you is to invest in how you present yourself. There's a connection between our self-confidence and our daily attire and grooming. There is no perfect solution here, but generally, people feel better when they invest time to look better, however they might define that. For one person that might be shaving and wearing a tie, and for someone else, maybe it's a new hairstyle or an amazing pair of shoes. The connection is real, so take a minute and think about how you want to look. Ready to get started? Alright, name the one person with whom you should interact with less next week, and the one task that's taking up too much of your time. Start planning now to address these issues. Soon enough, you'll have optimized the context around you, making it easier to build and maintain self-confidence.

Feed your positivity
- Being positive is hugely important. When you feel positive, everything else somehow seems easier and more manageable. As your belief in your ability grows, so does your self-confidence. So your goal is to be thoughtful about how you intentionally feed your positivity. One classic and very effective practice is visualizing your achievement. For any professional, this is a behavior you should engage every day for just a moment or two. Find a quiet place and then identify one or two goals, things you begun but not yet completed. Now imagine yourself getting to the finish line. See it as if you're watching a movie. Wrapping up the final details, turning in the work, or nailing the presentation. Imagine that smile on your supervisor's face. See yourself looking and feeling great. Now that's definitely worth 30 seconds of your time every day. Another great tip involves how you choose to think and talk to yourself when your self-confidence feels threatened. When one of those moments arrives, I want you to be ready. Here's a quick checklist to keep you thinking positive. The first step is to recognize what it is you're feeling and thinking. Admit it, your confidence is shaken, it happens. Next, remind yourself that this feeling is temporary, it'll pass. Then, clearly state that whatever it is that made you feel this way does not define you. Now, continue by reciting a few of your recent highlights, the wins, the happy customers, the promotions, and so on. This is good evidence that you clearly add a lot of value. Run through that script once or twice, and your self-confidence will swing back in a positive direction. One of my favorite positivity tips is to connect with someone who lifts your spirits. We all know this person. They might be someone you admire, someone who makes you laugh, or a kind voice who is always uplifting. Call them and check in for a few minutes. You're not looking for counseling, just a fun, lighthearted exchange. You see, when you proactively connect with this type of person, tension quickly fades away. They help you remember to seek and embrace positivity, and your self-confidence gets an instant boost because this person so clearly believes in you. So take time to connect. One last thought, as you begin to recover from a moment that shakes your self-confidence, remember the need to celebrate. Successful actions that move you away from a negative space should be celebrated. Maybe it's just a small internal congratulations you offer yourself, or possibly a coffee drink from your favorite cafe. Keep it small, but do it. Each time you take steps past a mental impasse towards a healthy mindset, that next small win or that next big goal, that's something worth celebrating. Follow these tips and you're likely to stay positive. And you can start right now. Can you name one clear way you will boost your positivity in the next few days? Sure you can, and now you're on your way.

Put together your plan
- Okay, so we've set the stage for building your confidence and offered tools for you to use, but how do you bring the new, confident you into the world? I want you to do three things. First, you need a small win. What one thing can you start doing now that will boost your self-confidence? It might be choosing to attend a particular meeting at work, or choosing to not attend. Or it could be as simple as reaching out to bring someone amazing back into your life. Nail one small win to help you light that fire for improvement. Next, I want you to talk to your mentor. If you don't have one, you should make it a priority. I want you to confess to them that you struggle with this issue. Explain why to the extent that you're clear about how you're feeling and ask for their thoughts. Then, be quiet and listen. Many times, even with sensitive issues like self-confidence, their wisdom might save you a lot of time. Finally, consider adopting one small new behavior to reinforce your new path. It's like a symbol for letting go of the past. Who knows? Maybe you'll finally switch from your day planner to a digital calendar. Well, then tossing that old thing in the trash can symbolize that the past is gone. Another great example is changing your work routine. Routines eventually become ruts. So one nice symbolic way to embrace a new path is to change your routine. For example, you will no longer eat lunch at the same time every day in the same place with the same people. It's time to mix it up. In the end, while it's true that self-confidence is somewhat driven by your personality, it's vital to remember that it can also be viewed as a skill. Give this advice a chance and start building that skill today. Good luck.

Finance & Accounting - The Shifting Mandate

Three decades ago, we celebrated when the Trial Balance, and Balance sheet would tally. We would manually write Journal Entries, Post Leaders, create Trial Balance and Balance Sheet. Generation today, might not even know what tallying a Trial Balance or for that matter what even a Trial Balance is, except for something that they would have studied in some accounting book. A typical accounting office was filled with books, papers, files and dust.

With Technology, and ERP's in place, slowly, things started getting automated, and the number of books and papers around started reducing. Office became partially paperless; outsourcing, offshoring, and shared services started becoming very popular. ERP's like JD Edward, SAP, Oracle, People soft took care of Accounting, there were Data storage systems like Hyperion, Crest etc. and reporting tools like COGNOS, Essbase. This enabled moving activities to a central location, as businesses started growing global and so was born shared service centre.

I ) Shared Service Centre's:

During initial days in setting up of SSC (Shared Service Centre), the main objective was Cost Reduction. SSCs since then have evolved and focus has shifted from cost reduction to best-in-class unit within an organization. Best-in-Class includes rendering service with efficiency improvement, automation of processes, Service Level Agreement for various processes and become a strategic value/finance partner for the company. The 3 main phases of SSC are as under:
Phase I - Setup and stabilization phase - during initial 1-2 years company will have 10-15% of cost savings due to consolidation of resources, giving up space at each Business Unit (BU), multitasking of resources among others.
Phase 2 – Development Phase – during 3-6 years of functioning of SSC there will be further cost saving of almost 15-20% (hence by end of 6th year of SSC the total cost saving will be in the range of 25-35%). Further the below benefits will accrue to the organization as a whole; Greater knowledge of processes and improving the activities for increased efficiencies; Turning data into analytics for the organization to take informed decisions (like spend analytics, supplier groupings, reduced procurement cost, improved coordination among BU’s); Better productivity and stronger controls (mitigation of risks); Sharing of best practices.
Phase 3 – World Class Operations phase – from year 7 onwards, the SSC will function at the best in class level. This will involve, automation of processes, real time dashboard of health of SSC, contribution of SSC towards organizational goals, integration of all functions to work seamlessly. Additionally the SSC and organization can have following achievements; SSC able to generate revenue by charging to BU’s for the services provided; have a robust SLA in place which measures the performance; Can be spin-off as a separate entity and provide service to larger industry; Should be able to cater to international BU’s (global scale of operations); Digitization of work flow (paper-less processing); Robotics Process Automation.

II) Outsourcing: Make or Buy:

Examining the relevant costs of keeping activities in-house versus outsourcing, organisations capitalise on the expertise of another company that is more efficient, effective, or knowledgeable at performing a specialized task that is peripheral to the firm's core business competencies which help them to focus on strategic revenue-generating activities. We have global firms, providing specialized services in implementing new technology, managing change, even for the Finance and Accounts activities both onshore and offsite, rendering the book closure with improved quality and timeliness. This do come with knowledge "give-away", confidentiality issues, limited flexibility, reduced quality control and lessened process control to name a few.



III) Changing Technology - Upgrade:

The current business environment is complex and uncertain. Yet in the midst of it, many enterprises are finding and harnessing opportunities to compete and grow. This is having a particular impact on CFOs and their teams. Given all the M&A activity, boards are insisting that finance expand its focus and priorities beyond the bottom line. Boards expect CFOs to become strategic partners supporting enterprise strategy and driving growth – while managing risk and compliance, market volatility, and creative destruction. And they are seeking ones who embrace new ways of working. F&A teams across industries are combining digital technologies and analytics with new skills and capabilities to turn finance into a strategic partner. This empowers workforce, rethinks compliance, and delivers accurate forecasts and performance insights that shape business decisions. Digital and Analytics, Business process automation and robotics, Machine languages - help access state of the art techniques. Today, AI can review large data sets to connect the dots, identify patterns,and easily produce results and new intelligence. With AI performing more time-consuming transactional work, F&A teams can use the analysis and insight to get better outcomes. This is augmented intelligence – where the combination of human with machine intelligence delivers real business results, such as growth, profitability, competitive advantage, and customer satisfaction. AI can take on transactional work and elevate F&A personnel in areas like invoice exceptions in accounts payable. While robotic process automation (RPA) is effective at rules-based, high-volume automation, such as supplier invoice and receipt matching, there are exceptions where a bot can't finish the job. By analyzing structured and unstructured data, both internal and external, AI also surfaces insights that can make decisions more accurate. With a centralized data foundation, different functions and people work with the same, consistent data sets. But you also need people with data engineering and master data management skills to create and maintain the pipelines going into the lake so that your data is clean and comprehensive. AI bias can creep in when decisions made by AI reflect the conscious or unconscious values of the people who designed it or data it's based on, for example, when finance teams make decisions on customers' credit or payment terms. Applying AI to F&A creates new demands for teams with both business and technical skills. People need industry and functional knowledge to provide essential context and review algorithms. Advanced teams are even hiring behavioral scientists and anthropologists. But they also need technical skills, such as forecasting, data scientists, and engineers, analytics, design thinking, and agile programming. Once you have the right people, they need the right infrastructure to work with. With easy access to intuitive technology at home, a workplace with outdated, clunky systems won't encourage them to stay.

Rather than redesigning entire systems and processes, you can take a modular approach using pretrained AI accelerators. Find solutions that use insights unique to your industry and can plug and play into core business processes to improve experiences, accuracy, and efficiency at previously impossible speeds. Anyone who has deployed a large-scale, transformative financial system such as Workday Financial Management will tell you about the pressure they faced to prove the business value of the investment. So what do you need to get the full benefits of your Workday Financial Management solution?
1. Focus on speed from the outset: Your leadership team will no longer wait 12 to 24 months for payoff. They need to see it now. But you should plan this payoff well ahead of any investment. It can't be an afterthought.
2. Align platform design to your business needs: Powerful platforms can only prove their worth if they're designed to meet your business' needs and are based on your team's skills.
3. Focus on quick implementation: As soon as you design your solution, you need to have it up and running quickly.
4. Look outside the business for expert skill sets: We all have skills shortages in the workplace – getting the right talent can be time-consuming and costly. Identify the gaps you have and ways to fill them. Harness the existing talent, and help them grow, by providing necessary training.

The Workday EIB (Enterprise Interface Builder) is an easy to use tool, not needing any coding that supplies users with both a guided and graphical interface which can supplement programming and is not a replacement. Developers use EIBs to insert simple components into their larger code and for recording different types of data. The two primary options are outbound EIBs and inbound EIBs. An outbound EIB withdraws data from a specific source and then saves extracted data for further use or sends it to be processed. The majority of outbound EIBs use FTP (File Transfer Protocol) to transfer data. An inbound EIB rather than using FTP, transfers data directly, are extremely simple to use and have friendly interfaces that are modeled on familiar items, like spreadsheets which allows for quick adoption. Along with this, one might need to have support from 3rd party, cloud connect, and a bit of manual intervention too; but the use of devises which was equivalent to a weapon for an accountant like calculators and macro enabled spreadsheets, has been considerably reduced.

Maximizing the benefit of your Workday investment does not need to be complicated. The Cloud Based technology, help you access the data on your go, even on your mobile. No more papers, sleepless nights to get your Balance Sheet right, have different systems for ERP, Consolidation of reports etc.; you can have all under one roof, easily accessible from anywhere at anytime; even linking HR and Finance data.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness - Arundhati Roy

After 20 years of her Booker winning debut novel, here is her second; where the narrative spans across decades and locations, but primarily takes place in Delhi and Kashmir and characters run the gamut of Indian society including an intersex woman (hijra) Anjum, a rebellious architect Tilottama, and her landlord who is a supervisor in the intelligence service. The two central stories never convincingly come together.

Anjum a muslim, has both male and female genitals, but was raised as a boy, she is born as Aftab, the long-awaited son of Jahanara Begum and Mulaqat Ali. . In her adolescence she leaves her family to live as a woman and joins a haveli filled with other intersex and trans people. They are a collective and family and become even more so when Anjum adopts an abandoned child named Zainab. When she takes this three-year old girl in: “Her body felt like a generous host instead of a battlefield.” It’s so beautiful and moving the way this individual whose family feel disgraced by her and who is scorned by the majority of society finds a way to pour her love into caring for someone instead of allowing herself to be crippled by being branded as a hijra outcast. However, we quickly learn that in her later years Anjum leaves her haveli called Khwabgah (the House of Dreams) to live in a graveyard where she gradually establishes a home for herself and eventually forms a community of individuals displaced by social conflict. She has a wonderfully unprejudiced view when taking people in stating: “I don’t care what you are… Muslim, Hindu, man, woman, this caste, that caste, or a camel’s arsehole.”

On her visit to a Gujarati shrine, Anjum gets caught in a massacre of Hindu pilgrims and subsequent government reprisals against Muslims. She is anxious about the future of her own community, especially the new generation. Zainab is brought up at Khwabgah and later goes on to become a fashion designer who marries Saddam.

Roy introduces a dizzying array of people all connected with particular political movements, social clashes or devastating disasters. These centre largely around a location of vast protest called Jantar Mantar. In the centre of this vast amount of voices of dissent, a baby is abandoned and kidnapped. Who this baby is, where she came from, why she was left and what happened to her is gradually explained over a few hundred pages. But built around her story are the tales of people still caught within the repercussions of Partition, national/religious battles and especially the conflicts within Kashmir, the northernmost part of the Indian subcontinent. The novel mostly focuses on a group of people who knew each other in childhood and worked together in a theatrical production in their youth, but have gone on to take different sides in the political struggles.

There is no grudging marriage of art and politics in her work; as John Berger, one of her longtime interlocutors and a formative influence, wrote, “Far from my dragging politics into art, art has dragged me into politics.” Roy’s work conveys a similar spirit. She is a great admirer of the world. Her strongest writing is always at the margins of the main story—the pleasure of finding “an egg hot from a hen,”. From the fine-grained affection that stirs her imagination springs an ethical imperative—after all, how can one appreciate the world without desiring to defend it? And it must be defended not merely from war or political calamity, but from that natural, more insidious phenomenon: forgetting. This is the literary tradition that Roy belongs to—and that was intimately transmitted to her by Berger and her other great friend, the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano (she has called him her twin), for whom the great tragedy of humanity wasn’t that we die or suffer or make each other suffer. It was that we forget. And because we are so prone to forgetting—because it is so easy to make us forget—we accept the conditions of our suffering as inevitable and cannot fathom alternatives. (“The world, which is the private property of a few, suffers from amnesia,” Galeano once said. “It is not an innocent amnesia. The owners prefer not to remember that the world was born yearning to be a home for everyone.”)

Tilottama (With shades of her) is a student at the Architecture School who is estranged from her Syrian Christian mother - Mariyam Ipe.
Tilo becomes friends with three men - Musa Yewsi, Nagaraj Hariharan and Biplab Dasgupta whom she meets while working on sets and lighting design for the play Norman, Is That You? directed by David Quartermaine. Nagaraj Hariharan, Cast as Norman in the play. He later becomes a top-notch journalist who works in Kashmir. Tilo marries Naga as suggested by Musa for strategic reasons and later abandons him. Musa Yeswi (Commander Gulrez) Musa is a reticent Kashmiri man who is classmates with Tilo in Architecture School and her boyfriend. Musa later returns to his homeland to become a militant and fight for Azadi. Musa marries Arifa and fathers Miss Jebeen the First. Biplab Dasgupta - Biplab was to play the role of Garson Hobart in the play Norman, Is That You?. He later works for the Intelligence Bureau as Deputy Station Head for. Biplab secretly loves Tilo and rents her room after she walks out on Naga.

The author weaves together a dazzling narrative nearly as complex as the reality of the fallout of the bloody partition by forcing her characters through themes of Hindu nationalism and Kashmiri separatism and exposing them to atrocities like the 1969 Gujarat riots, the most deadly incident of Hindu-Muslim violence since the 1947 divide, until the 1989 Bhagalpur riots.

It charts their various romances, quests for revenge and how they’re helplessly drawn into conflicts that seem to have no end. The story goes all over the place. There is near-total confusion about point of view.

A poem tucked into the pages of Roy’s novel seems to encapsulate the author's own intentions: “How to tell a shattered story? By slowly becoming everybody. No. By slowly becoming everything.” As was true of The God of Small Things, there is more than a touch of fairy tale in the book’s moral simplicity—or clarity, if you’re feeling charitable. Consider the book’s dedication—“To, The Unconsoled.” Note the cover photograph, a grave, and the setting: The story begins and ends in a graveyard. It tours India’s fault lines, as Roy has, from the brutal suppression of tribal populations to the 2002 pogrom against Muslims in Gujarat. Roy has imagined an inverse of the Garden of Eden—a paradise whose defining feature, rather than innocence, is experience and endurance.

The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton - whodathunk

Have been thinking about Sun and Moon always, especially today morning, and therefore this book captivated me.

“The proper way to understand any social system was to view it from above.”
― Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries

There is certainly a lot to like about Eleanor's novel. Its structure is fascinatingly clever and reminds me a lot of the way Nabokov divided Ada, or Ardor. Part 1: 360 pgs, 12 chapters Part 2: 160 pgs, 11 chapters Part 3: 104 pgs, 10 chapters; Part 4: 96 pgs, 9 chapters; Part 5: 40 pages,8 chapters; Part 6: 26 pages, 7 chapters; Part 7: 13 pages, 6 chapters; Part 8: 10 pgs,5 chapters Part 9: 6 pgs, 4 chapters; Part 10: 6 pgs,3 chapters Part 11: 4 pages, 2 chapters, Part 12: 4 pages, 1 Chapter. The first chapters are endless with one-line introductions - the last chapters are shorter than their introductions. This gives The Luminaries the shape of a golden spiral. It also acts like a spiral – or, to keep up the celestial theme, a black hole, stripping out information as it goes. Everything fits perfectly, and this perfection entwines with the story which starts out as a confusing mess but ends with all the answers. Another interesting fact is that this story takes its focal point in Walter Moody, but at the same time it's not at all about Walter Moody. It is set in New Zealand among gold diggers; however, very little of the story deals with actual gold digging. With its exotic and varied cast of characters whose lives all affect each other and whose fates are intricately entwined, amounts to anything like the moral and emotional weight one would expect of it. The Luminaries is replete with diggers, businessmen, politicians, Chinese miners and dispensers of opium, ladies of the evening, to use the appropriate Victorian vernacular. Twelve men meet at the Crown Hotel in Hokitika, New Zealand, on 27 January, 1866 (Mercury in Sagittarius). A thirteenth, Walter Moody, an educated man from Edinburgh who has come here to find his fortune in gold, walks in. As it unfolds, the interlocking stories and shifting narrative perspectives of the twelve--now thirteen--men bring forth a mystery that all are trying to solve, including Walter Moody, who has just gotten off the Godspeed ship with secrets of his own that intertwine with the other men's concerns. The plot winds through time, conveying the reader through the perceptions of a dozen characters.The way that tale is told changes throughout the book, moving from a story told by insiders to an outsider, to the narration of a series of connected events, finally ending with its beginning.

The characters were based on star-sign attributes. The story in The Luminaries is seasoned with astrology but not overwhelmed by it. It is beautifully structured around stars and destinies among stars. Twelve of Catton’s characters (the twelve men interrupted by Walter Moody) represent the signs of the zodiac; another seven represent planetary bodies (Moody is Mercury, for instance). As mentioned in a comment in Goodreads:

"Te Rau Tauwhare (a greenstone hunter):Aries the Ram thrusts forward, discarding the past except as a symbol of what has been overcome. Fearsome, single-minded Aries! This book does not fall under the sign of Aries; it is invested in the past, it is enchanted by it. The past is such an important part of the novel that the narrative continues after its climactic resolution with a series of escalating chapters that take the reader back to where it all began. The Luminaries' characters live under the shadow of their own pasts, they judge others by their past actions as well. Aries is well-represented by Te Rau Tauwhare, a Maori greenstone hunter.

Charlie Frost (a banker):Taurus the Bull is a sign of love, in all of its strength and awkwardness, its earthiness and purity. Obstinate, strong-willed Taurus! This book has a strong Taurean influence: it has at its heart a passionate and moving story of star-crossed lovers, determined to persevere, blind to reason - two parts of a whole that yearn to merge. Taurus is represented - poorly - by the aloof banker Charlie Frost.

Benjamin Lowenthal (a newspaperman):Gemini the Twins, sharp and cutting, a sign of the mind, of the air. Impulsive and restless Gemini! This book has a marked Gemini influence in its clever narrative voice, one often sidelined by description and dialogue yet still distinct, full of wit and sly innuendo. Gemini's influence is even stronger when considering the almost dizzying ingenuity of the book's look-at-me structure and its increasingly cheeky chapter introductions. Gemini is represented by Benjamin Lowenthal, a Jewish newspaper editor and a character in need of richer development.

Edgar Clinch (an hotelier):Cancer the Crab moons about in its shell, moody and self-absorbed, yet caring and loyal to the end. Complicated, sensitive Cancer! The Crab has little to do with The Luminaries, except when looking at the novel in general terms. A strong and thick hardcover book, a complicated structure, a soft heart lurking within. Cancer is well-represented by the hotelier Edgar Clinch.

Dick Mannering (a goldfields magnate):Leo the Lion sits back, the very image of self-satisfaction, a magnet to lesser men, a sun that would have the whole universe revolve around it. Confident and surprisingly generous Leo! The heavy-lidded sensuality of the Lion holds court throughout The Luminaries, its beautiful imagery and its rich descriptive prowess openly displayed; well-hung Leo also clearly influenced this book's impressive length. Leo is represented by Dick (lol) Mannering, a goldfields magnate.

Quee Long (a goldsmith): Virgo the Virgin is the sign of this reviewer. It is the most wonderful sign imaginable: critical yet fair, judgmental but only in the most loving of ways, altruistic, well-read, self-sacrificing, practically perfect in every way, the Mary Poppins of the Zodiac. All must bow to the wonder of Virgo! The Virgin is terribly represented by Quee Long, who is about the opposite of any decent Virgo. For shame, Eleanor Catton, you have betrayed the Zodiac with your libelous portrait of a so-called Virgo!

Harald Nilssen (a commission merchant):Libra the Scales is a sign of beauty, and much like Beauty itself, displays both grace and superficiality, charisma and vanity. Lovely, indecisive Libra! Libra's scales are seldom in balance; this sign seeks to make things equal and often fails. And so it is with the author of The Luminaries, a Libra on the cusp of Virgo. Her favorites among the novel's astrological characters are dynamic and richly developed; those less-favored are given mere cameo appearances. But don't look for fairness from a Libra - look for beauty! And there is much beauty within the pages of The Luminaries. Exquisite prose, gorgeous imagery, lovely moments within its lovely love story; the beautiful mind of its author, yearning to be recognized for its brilliance - and rewarded by the 2013 Man Booker Prize. Libra is represented - perfectly - by Harald Nilssen, a commission merchant.

Joseph Pritchard (a chemist): Scorpio is the Scorpion, and the Eagle as well. It soars above the earth and lives in its holes. This strange sign is the Investigator of the Zodiac and is also its greatest conundrum - secretive to its core, yet suspicious of secrets in others; dark and unyielding; often cold yet deeply sexual. Mysterious, obsessive Scorpio! The Luminaries is intimately connected to the Scorpion, in its basic nature as a Mystery Novel and in its refusal to solve certain mysteries, to keep them shrouded in ambiguity. The Eagle dislikes having to explain itself. Scorpio is represented by Joseph Pritchard, a chemist and a perfectly executed character who is left almost entirely off of the page. Perhaps Catton feared the perverse potential lurking within him and so curtailed her exploration of his depths. I also felt the Scorpio influence upon this novel's villain, the dark, manipulative, unknowable Francis Carver.

Thomas Balfour (a shipping agent):Sagittarius the Archer shoots an arrow into the future, his true place; Sagittarius the Centaur gallops quickly, heedless of those too simple and slow to keep his pace. Strong-willed, independent Sagittarius! This sign's influence on The Luminaries is striking: it has no patience for readers of the idiot class. It makes scarce concessions to those longing for explanations or a simple plotline; it will give you the opportunity to come into its world and be surrounded, enveloped... and it will leave you behind if you are unable to keep up. Sagittarius is well-represented by Thomas Balfour, a shipping agent.

Aubert Gascoigne (a justice's clerk):Capricorn the Sea-Goat: "still waters run deep" was surely coined for this sign, one whose stable and inhibited surface appearance belies the complicated ambitions within. Patient, resourceful Capricorn! A courageous introvert, a fastidious intellectual, virile yet chilly, dignified and aloof and rich with hidden depths. The novel The Luminaries was born under the sign of Capricorn. The novel's birth sign is represented - perfectly - by Aubert Gascoigne, a justice's clerk.

Sook Yongsheng (a hatter):Aquarius the Water-bearer abhors restrictions and eschews barriers, seeking the enlightenment beyond, traveling the stars without and within, ever in search of wisdom. Inventive, rebellious Aquarius! A shallow reviewer of the novel would find little influence from the Water-bearer as the book is a carefully constructed puzzle rather than an ingenious invention, a mathematically mapped-out pièce de résistance rather than a spontaneous improvisation. But dig deeper and you shall find the sublime Aquarian ruling an eerie and haunting love story, one full of unexplainable visions and brazen leaps of faith. Aquarius is well-represented by Sook Yongsheng, a Chinese hatter and lover of opium.

Cowell Devlin (a chaplain): Pisces the Fish, Pisces the dreamer, the last sign and the oldest. Pisces yearns for escape, in dreams, in drugs, in art, in the dark damp spaces. Elusive Pisces, the sign of self-undoing! I had a Piscean experience when reading this novel. It was my go-to book for a certain period of time, a little bit nearly every morning and every afternoon, for almost 3 months. I escaped into its depths, it was my sweet sweet drug and I fear that I am suffering from withdrawal. This lengthy review was an attempt to live in it again. Alas, now even this review is over. Pisces is represented - rather poorly - by Cowell Devlin, a chaplain. "

Another set of characters is associated with heavenly bodies within the solar system.
Walter Moody: Mercury
Lydia (Wells) Carver née Greenway: Venus - Crosbie Wells widow and Frank Carvers girl friend
Francis Carver: Mars - Captain of a ship Godspeed- Man at the heart of all these strange occurrence
Alistair Lauderback: Jupiter - Crosbie Wells half brother
George Shepard: Saturn - Lawman
Anna Wetherell: The Sun/The Moon - Prostitute helping Lydia in her new venture - Arrested for trying to kill herself
Emery Staines: The Moon/The Sun - The missing Man who pop us and is sentenced to jail

A bit on the plot:

A couple of weeks earlier to the 12 people meeting, a hermit named Crosbie Wells was found dead in his cottage, and a not inconsiderable fortune soon after. Around the same time, a young woman (Anna Wetherell) was found unconscious from opium (Ah Sook is the dealer) in the road, apparently having tried to commit suicide. Through acquaintance with each other, each of the twelve men discovered that he was somehow connected to these events; so they decided to gather together in this room to discuss what may have happened, and what could be done. We never find out, how the central murder happens, or whether Staines get shot for real, or its a supernatural occurrence, we can piece together our own thoughts, theories and observations. At the end of the day, when all the intrigue, violence, and greediness around gold is over, it's really the love affair between Anna and Emery that emerges as having been central all along. Whodathunk (Who would have thought?) At the end of the day, it all comes back to relationship. - Love will keep us together. But this might be annoying to some and hence not equally loved by all readers; after all the suspense, drama and thrill the expectations would have been different.

The Luminaries – an upside-down, southern hemisphere kind of a place with its own astrological calendar that casts its own kind of influence, its own light. The clue is in the title, after all, and in the confusing frontispiece that the publishers might have made more of, to alert the general reader to the fabulous trick of the book they hold: that this great, intricately crafted doorstopper of a historical novel, with its portentous introduction, astrological tables, character charts and all the rest, in fact weighs nothing at all. Even before we know the "why", the title tell us the "Who"

Bleachers - John Grisham

Oops my 'Bibliophile' has no books by John Grisham, Really? Can easily remember having read at least five - One a huge collection of short stories, trying to recollect the name. Let me check it out.

Was attracted to him when just out of school, on taking commerce - on knowing about a great writer - who was an accountant turned lawyer cum writer; eventually turned out to be a politician as well. For me he was a self made, complete family man. Most of his books were legal thrillers.

Another reason I was attracted to him was on reading that Grisham was converted to The Presbyterian Church. Let me check out for the books of his that I have read, meanwhile on the one in hand now - 'Bleachers' - meaning 'a cheap bench seat at a sports ground, typically in an outdoor uncovered stand' is not from the legal genre but one of his passions from childhood day - American football (Rugby).

The book focuses on whether the famous Eddie Rake, former coach of the Messina High School football team, was loved or hated by his former players. When the story begins, most of the 714 football players Rake had coached in his 34 years at Messina High School return to the town for the funeral of the legendary coach, a man both beloved and reviled. Among them was Neely Crenshaw, born in 1969, is a high school All-American quarterback, who has been Messina High School's 'golden boy,' expected to lead them to the state title. Neely was a highly recruited quarterback with a golden arm, fast feet, plenty of sizes, maybe the greatest Messina quarterback ever. When Neely was younger and playing football with his friends, a man watching him approached Neely, saying "You're going to play football for the Spartans." Crenshaw suffers a career-ending knee injury on a late hit,
and subsequently drops football for the real estate business.

In 1987, after trailing 31-0 at halftime to East Pike, and crippled by a broken hand, the gutsy quarterback rallies the Spartans to a 34-31 victory for Messina's first state championship in seven years, achieved without the assistance of coach Rake. His hand injury is caused when Neely punches Coach Eddie Rake in the face, after Coach Rake backhands him, causing him to break his nose. Neely Crenshaw had decided he would never meet Eddie Rake during his lifetime.

Rake ends his career with 418 wins, 62 losses, and 13 state championships. During a grueling unsanctioned Sunday morning practice in 1992, Messina player Scotty Reardon died of a heat stroke. Rake's brutal training methods are called into question and the superintendent of education, who also is Reardon's uncle, fires Rake.

In a letter revealed at Rake's funeral, the coach states the two regrets of his life were losing Scotty Reardon and for striking All-American quarterback Neely Crenshaw at halftime of the 1987 championship game against East Pike. He was laid to rest next to Scotty.

At the funeral, Neely ends up forgiving coach after all those years of debating whether he likes or dislikes Eddie Rake. There was no proper way to decline a eulogy.

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Games are for ever or not; one playing it is not forever. But playing it - the teachings of the Coach are for ever - It included:
1) Fear is inevitable, and it is not always bad. Harness your fear and use it to your advantage.
2) Pick yourself up, set a goal, work harder than everybody else, stick to the basics, execute perfectly, be confident, be brave, and never, never quit.

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Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? - Jeannette Winterson

| Creative work bridges time because the energy of art is not time-bound. If it were we should have no interest in the art of the past, except as history or documentary. But our interest in art is our interest in ourselves both now and always.

For a Happiness Always! person, the title was enough, for me to want the book; though not in complete alignment of my thoughts, was curious to know what it was all about.


| Pursuing happiness, and I did, and still do, is not at all the same as being happy—which I think is fleeting, dependent on
circumstances, and a bit bovine. The pursuit of happiness is more elusive; it is life-long, and it is not goal-centered. The pursuit isn’t
all or nothing —it’s all AND nothing. Like all Quest Stories.

Jeanette Winterson comes of age in a home deprived of happiness or joy. Her life with her adoptive parents was often appalling, but it made her the writer she is. Her mother constantly tells her that “the Devil” led her and her husband to “the wrong crib” when they selected Jeanette at the adoption society. Mrs. Winterson, who is obsessed with End Time and the coming of the Apocalypse, emotionally abuses Jeanette and forces Mr. Winterson to dole out physical punishments. Jeanette is often locked outside of the house and left on the street or sent underground to the family’s claustrophobic coal-hole. Though Jeanette’s childhood has a few bright spots—she does, for a while, enjoy the “exciting” tent revivals of her family’s church, and she finds refuge, solace, and kinship in her intense love of books and literature—she is mostly miserable. She’s unable to make friends, fearful of abandonment, and constantly suffering under her parents’ abusive ways.

| We were matched in our lost and losing. I had lost the warm safe place, however chaotic, of the first person I loved. I had lost my name and my identity. Adopted children are dislodged. My mother felt that the whole of life was a grand dislodgement. We both wanted to go Home.

At fifteen, Jeanette falls in love with an older girl from church, Helen. When Mrs. Winterson discovers the relationship between the two girls, the Wintersons and their church force Jeanette to undergo an exorcism, which leaves both her and her parents emotionally scarred. When Jeanette pursues another romantic relationship with a classmate named Janey a year later, she is kicked out of the Winterson household and begins living in her Mini Cooper. She is taken in, eventually, by the head of English at her junior college, the kindly and eccentric Mrs. Ratlow, who coaches Jeanette through her Oxford entrance exams and eventually helps her to secure an offer of admission. At Oxford, Jeanette is frustrated by the patriarchal nature of the university, but her love of reading and books deepens, and she feels the world opening up to her. After a disastrous trip home at Christmastime after her first term at school, Jeanette parts ways with her mother, never to see her again.

| I am interested in nature/nurture. I notice that I hate Ann criticizing Mrs. Winterson. She was a monster but she was my monster.

The narrative flashes forward to the year 2007—Jeanette, now an acclaimed and world-renowned writer, is struggling in her life, as the demons of her past have finally caught up with her. After the dissolution of a tumultuous romantic relationship, Jeanette attempts suicide—she fails, and realizes that she must begin to confront the “creature” within her, the scarred and angry version of her younger self, who has threatened her all her life.

| Mother is our first love affair. And if we hate her, we take that rage with us into other lovers. And if we lose her, where do we find her again?

After a period of healing, Jeanette, with the help of her new partner Susie, embarks on a journey to find her birth mother. Jeanette has found her birth certificate while cleaning out her father’s home after the death of his second wife, and the discovery has sparked new questions about her heritage. Jeanette, Susie, and Jeanette’s social worker Ria encounter a series of brick walls and red tape as they negotiate the distant and unhelpful government agencies which keep the truth of Jeanette’s past and the identity of her birth parents just out of reach. Eventually, through a combination of sheer will and intrepid detective work, Jeanette discovers the identity of her birth mother—a woman named Ann S. who lives outside of Manchester—and reconnects with her.
The book ends with Jeanette having found some measure of peace in her reconnecting with Ann, though she is still uncertain of both how she feels about her birth mother and what her own future might hold.

| I understood something. I understood twice born was not just about being alive, but about choosing life. Choosing to be alive and consciously committing to life, in all its exuberant chaos—and pain.

The book made be curious to know more about the writer as well, as this book had connections to the earlier one, and had not read autobiographical novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. These two books are called silent twins, separated from Oranges by a quarter of a century, she speaks more frankly and accurately about the traumas she endured.

| We have a capacity for language. We have a capacity for love. We need other people to release those capacities. In my work I found a way to talk about love—and that was real. I had not found a way to love. That was changing.

“When people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read at school because it is irrelevant,” she says, “I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language — and that is what poetry is.”

Born in Manchester to a seventeen-year-old factory worker and adopted by the Winterson family —a devout Pentecostal Evangelist Christian couple with no children of their own— six months after her birth, Jeanette Winterson was raised in Accrington, a manufacturing city in Northern England. A prolific writer, Winterson is the author of over twenty-five books of fiction, nonfiction, and literature for children. She is married to Susie Orbach a British psychotherapist, psychoanalyst, writer and social critic.

| Happy endings are only a pause. There are three kids of big endings: Revenge. Tragedy. Forgiveness. Revenge and Tragedy often happen together. Forgiveness redeems the past. Forgiveness unblocks the future.

Sale wars: Online vs offline

All Financiers are busy running Festival Schemes for Dealers, Customers. Products are being sold, both online and offline at discounted prize -
One, brands realise that disruptive pricing for just one channel affects overall sales. Two, no one wants to take any chances given the weak consumer sentiment.

The online market place is ready & already have penetrated, not only the big sellers like Amazon and Flip-kart, but also with many householders turning online marketers, with various modes of sales, including whatsapp.

The Offline is trying to survive by approaching the customers, brands & The Government through various legitimate forms of protests with the help of Associations, Meetings. Malls, the modern temples are loosing prominence. Though we do find crowd there, fifty percent of them are window shopping.

The GDP growth slowed down to 5% for the quarter ended June 2019. Two ways to beat any slowdown are mobilizing investments and stimulating demand. The sales during the festival season, would increase manufacture and thereby growth.

The e-commerce giant Amazon already launched robots in its warehouses 5 years back in 2014. These robots do most of the tasks, from sorting to picking and stacking. The company has used more than one lakh robots, mainly in the US. These great selections of Amazon’s robots are developed by a US firm known as Kiva Systems. Amazon later on funded and acquired this company. They further name it as Amazon Robotics.

Flipkart employed 340 little orange cuboids as robots to its current fleet of 110, they call them bots or perhaps automated guided vehicles (AGVs), those transfer products within a fenced location bereft of humans. These robots are carrying anything with them, from publications to appliances to mobile phones.

In India, collaborative robots known as Cobots are increasing as automating tasks are human-intensive, tedious, and repetitive.The motion of the Cobots is similar to an automatic traffic management process and is handled by machine learning algorithms.

It’s evident that data science and artificial intelligence are the talks of the data for the e-commerce industry and Indian e-commerce majors are engrossing the benefits of AI right from customer segregation, sales, and delivery to after-sales and further recommending products to the customers.

Hope this sales war boost the economy - and the offline marketers are able to cope up by undoing and redoing to cope up with time.

Balance Scorecard Vs. Objectives and Key Results - BSC Vs. OKR

Both are focused on objectives — broad goals designed to propel the organization forward — and metrics (called Key Results in the OKRs field and measures in the BSC) that gauge your success in achieving the objective.

The Balanced Scorecard is a strategic performance measurement and management framework developed by Robert Kaplan and David Norton. Its objective is to translate an organization’s mission and vision (implement strategy) into actual (operational) actions (strategic planning)(Performance measures).

| If you Can't measure it, you can't manage it.

Used for managing strategy - The balanced scorecard (BSC) is a strategic planning and management system that organizations use to:

- Communicate what they are trying to accomplish
- Align the day-to-day work that everyone is doing with strategy
- Prioritize projects, products, and services
- Measure and monitor progress towards strategic targets


The system connects the dots between big picture strategy elements such as mission (our purpose), vision (what we aspire for), core values (what we believe in), strategic focus areas (themes, results and/or goals) and the more operational elements such as objectives (continuous improvement activities), measures (or key performance indicators, or KPIs, which track strategic performance), targets (our desired level of performance), and initiatives (projects that help you reach your targets).

The balance within:

As the name suggests, the equilibrium or balance is an important principle in the balanced scorecard model. There must be a balance between the short-term and the long-term objectives, financial and non-financial criteria, leading and lagging indicators and external and internal perspectives. It is about cohesion in which an improvement in one perspective must not be an obstacle in another perspective.
This cohesion is reflected in the model through the mutually connected arrows between the four perspectives viz:

1) Financial: (How do we look to our shareholders) often renamed Stewardship or other more appropriate name in the public sector, this perspective views organizational financial performance and the use of financial resources. Examples of performance measures would include profitability, Return on Investment, Revenue growth etc.

2) Customer/Stakeholder: (How do customers see us) this perspective views organizational performance from the point of view the customer or other key stakeholders that the organization is designed to serve. Examples of performance measures would include customer satisfaction, retention, acquisition and market share.

3) Internal Process: (What must we excel at) views organizational performance through the lenses of the quality and efficiency related to our product or services or other key business processes. This would cover three business process area viz.
i) Innovation identifying the needs of the customers;
ii) Operations viz supplementing financial measures with quality, technological capability and redirecting cycle time to build long term strategy and
iii) Post sale services involves adding value to the product by getting feedback

4) Organizational Capacity (originally called Learning and Growth): (Can we continue to improve and create value) views organizational performance through the lenses of human capital, infrastructure, technology, culture and other capacities that are key to breakthrough performance. It covers categories like Employee skill sets, information system capabilities, Motivation and organisational alignment.

While financial perspective looks at the past, Customer, Internal business process and Learning and growth focus on the future.

Based on an analysis of its internal strengths and weaknesses and external opportunities and threats, the firm determines critical success factors (CSF's) for each of the four perspectives. Each factor is assigned a measurement unit. Linking the four scorecard perspectives eith the firm's strategy requires the use of three principles:

1) Cause and effect relationship - It can be hypothesized using if-then statements. Example - If the firm improves its training program; its business process will be improved, it will boost customer satisfaction; greater customer satisfaction will increase sales, increased sales will improve financial results.

2) Outcome measures (OM) and performance drivers (PD) - OM is Historical or lagging indicator and PD is leading indicator.

3) Links to financial measures.

The implementation of the Balanced Scorecard can be carried out in different manners.

Broadly, this could include the following steps:

- Set up a vision, mission and strategic objectives.
- Perform a stakeholder analysis to gauge the expectations of customers and shareholders.
- Make an inventory of the critical success factors
- Translate strategic objectives into (personal) goals
- Set up key performance indicators to measure the objectives
- Determine the values for the objectives that are to be achieve
- Translate the objectives into operational activities.

When it was developed it was used primarily as a measurement system – helping organizations balance financial and non-financial indicators. It has evolved over the years, and we’ve seen the creation of Strategy Maps, and the linkage of the Scorecard to risk, budgeting, and other key facets of the organization.

Both are subject to 'interpretation' by practitioners and academics." Executes are less interested in academic understanding of the concepts, but more in solving real problems, doesn't matter under what buzz word the solution comes.

OKR (Objectives & Key Results) has risen to prominence over the last 10 years The development of OKRs is generally attributed to Andy Grove the "Father of OKRs", who introduced the approach to Intel during his tenure there and documented this in his 1983 book High Output Management. Google's success in it's implementation have prompted start ups to use OKR's.

OKRs suggest a goal setting approach with ambitious, qualitative Objectives that are made measurable with the help of Key Results.

An Objective is simply what is to be achieved, no more and no less. By definition, objectives are significant, concrete, action-oriented, and (ideally) inspirational. When properly designed and deployed, they’re a vaccine against fuzzy thinking—and fuzzy execution. Qualitative descriptions of what you want to achieve.

Key Results benchmark and monitor how we get to the objective. Effective KRs are specific and time-bound, aggressive yet realistic. Most of all, they are measurable and verifiable. You either meet a key result’s requirements or you don’t; there is no gray area, no room for doubt. At the end of the designated period, typically a quarter, a regular check is done and grade the key results as fulfilled or not.
Where an objective can be long-lived, rolled over for a year or longer, key results evolve as the work progresses. Once they are all completed, the objective is necessarily achieved. KR's are a set of metrics (quantitative) that measure your progress towards the Objective

| “If it does not have a number, it is not a Key Result.”

OKRs can be two things, committed or aspirational.
Committed ones are like their name suggests—commitments. When graded at the end of a cycle, a committed OKR is expected to have a passing grade.
Aspirational ones, on-the-other-hand, are sometimes called stretch goals or "moonshots." The pathway to an aspirational OKR is expected to be forged since no one else has gotten there before. They also may be long-term and live beyond an OKR cycle or even be transferred between team members to stretch employee engagement.

An advantage of OKR is, the shorter cadence. As things are changing faster than ever, it’s vital we have metrics that allow us to be agile in our approach.

One common reason for weak OKR results is people's tendency to confuse achieving the Key Result(s) with achieving the Objective. Instead of chasing the Objective, they chase the Key Results. That's what's called "surrogation" - confusing what's being measured (the 'O') with the metric being used ( the KRs). OKR's are not task lists, there should not be too many objectives, and it should not be in isolation but aligned.

Days Without End - Sebastian Barry

In 'Days Without End', Sebastian Barry presents us with Thomas McNulty, looking back as old man, who flees to Canada in mid 19th century and then America to escape the Great Famine in Ireland . In the US, Thomas is many things, at the beginning, having teamed up with a boy named John Cole, he is a dancer, rigged out in women’s clothing to entertain miners starved of female company; a so-called “prairie fairy”. But when the bloom of youth departs the pair at 17, they volunteer for the US Army and join the Oregon trail to California. A brutal raid on an Indian settlement follows, there is an orphanage on fire – the transformative effect of such destruction on its participants is memorably captured. There are increasingly complex interactions with indigenous communities, the development of Thomas and John’s relationship and sexual attraction, Thomas albeit briefly and in clandestine fashion, Thomasina with John act as parents to a Sioux child, Winona, who has been wrested from her family.

A group of Oglala Sioux stalk Thomas’s company for miles across the Missouri Breaks, terrifying them and then shocking them with a sudden display of compassionate hospitality; but a brief period of co‑existence yields to more bloodshed, to raped women and children snatched or left dead. In the years immediately before the civil war from 1861 to 1865, America is shown as a country defined by lawlessness, ambition and plasticity; afterwards, it seems more hopelessly fractured, haunted by what has befallen it. What Tom has observed among the Sioux is that men can choose to dress as squaws at home but, in battle, still be warriors. This thought becomes his guide. He feels at home in a dress but, as a soldier, follows orders even when they are treacherous, learning that there are good men and bad on any side. During one of the many journeys the characters make across state lines, Thomas, John and Winona meet a Shawnee Indian, impoverished and fishing for mussels. He is unable to speak to Winona because they don’t share a common language; they are both not where they are supposed to be. Thomas's desire to dress as a woman and his maternal feelings for Winona – is set apart from his stereotypically masculine capacity for war, in part derived from his sense of loyalty to his fellow soldiers.

The novel was awarded the Costa Book Award 2016.The judges of the prize called it “A miracle of a book – both epic and intimate – that manages to create spaces for love and safety in the noise and chaos of history.”

Thomas states how “We were two wood-shavings of humanity in a rough world.” While the meaning of conflicts being fought in the battlefields remains ambiguous for Thomas, the conviction he and John feel about their desire and love for each other is certain. Tom, John and Winona survive battlefields and atrocities, trek across America’s great plains into the agonised, villainous aftermath of the war between the states. Barry makes us understand how. Grief may freeze the heart, the body be tested to extremes, but where there’s life there’s hope, and love is what makes life worth living,

The book indeed is a mix of humor and horror, blunt, with the main characters living in frontier country - writing on the beauty of landscape is a masterpiece, not just the landscape but the atmosphere as well like crossing the plane in winter - frost bites, vs. absolutely brutal slaughter of native Americans. It is completely different from romanticist Gone with the wind, though battle scenes are common, this is implicitly about ethics of war, and what it is to be a soldier. People slaughtering women and children.

There is no sense or saying what is right or wrong - author leaves it to the readers to understand and decide.

Moral complexity is enormous. ..It hurts just knowing War continues in our world.

“Killing hurts the heart, and soils the soul”.

The Human Line - Ellen Bass

Ellen Bass is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She currently teaches in the low residency MFA writing program at Pacific University.

With a deft touch and a sure voice Bass takes on many of the crucial moral issues of our times, and she delights with portrayals of life’s endearing absurdities. Offering homage to each transient moment, she reminds us to treasure the small, the plain, the surprising — those instances that lash us to The human line. (https://www.ellenbass.com/books/the-human-line/)

This includes -

Gate C22

God's Grief

If You Knew

Pray for Peace - (As below)
--------------

Pray to whomever you kneel down to:
Jesus nailed to his wooden or plastic cross,
his suffering face bent to kiss you,
Buddha still under the bo tree in scorching heat,
Adonai, Allah. Raise your arms to Mary
that she may lay her palm on our brows,
to Shekhina, Queen of Heaven and Earth,
to Inanna in her stripped descent.

Then pray to the bus driver who takes you to work.
On the bus, pray for everyone riding that bus,
for everyone riding buses all over the world.
Drop some silver and pray.

Waiting in line for the movies, for the ATM,
for your latte and croissant, offer your plea.
Make your eating and drinking a supplication.
Make your slicing of carrots a holy act,
each translucent layer of the onion, a deeper prayer.

To Hawk or Wolf, or the Great Whale, pray.
Bow down to terriers and shepherds and Siamese cats.
Fields of artichokes and elegant strawberries.

Make the brushing of your hair
a prayer, every strand its own voice,
singing in the choir on your head.
As you wash your face, the water slipping
through your fingers, a prayer: Water,
softest thing on earth, gentleness
that wears away rock.

Making love, of course, is already prayer.
Skin, and open mouths worshipping that skin,
the fragile cases we are poured into.

If you’re hungry, pray. If you’re tired.
Pray to Gandhi and Dorothy Day.
Shakespeare. Sappho. Sojourner Truth.

When you walk to your car, to the mailbox,
to the video store, let each step
be a prayer that we all keep our legs,
that we do not blow off anyone else’s legs.
Or crush their skulls.
And if you are riding on a bicycle
or a skateboard, in a wheelchair, each revolution
of the wheels a prayer as the earth revolves:
less harm, less harm, less harm.

And as you work, typing with a new manicure,
a tiny palm tree painted on one pearlescent nail,
or delivering soda or drawing good blood
into rubber-capped vials, twirling pizzas–

With each breath in, take in the faith of those
who have believed when belief seemed foolish,
who persevered. With each breath out, cherish.

Pull weeds for peace, turn over in your sleep for peace,
feed the birds, each shiny seed
that spills onto the earth, another second of peace.
Wash your dishes, call your mother, drink wine.

Shovel leaves or snow or trash from your sidewalk.
Make a path. Fold a photo of a dead child
around your Visa card. Scoop your holy water
from the gutter. Gnaw your crust.
Mumble along like a crazy person, stumbling
your prayer through the streets.

Other similar interesting ones are:

Like a beggar - In her newest collection, Ellen Bass’s deft poetic touch and piercingly intimate voice continues an ongoing exploration of life’s essential question: how do we go on? These poems vividly inhabit sorrow and suffering, yet are rich with praise, delighting in the absurdity and humor of our flawed human intelligence. Like a Beggar handles the “the hard evidence of the earth” with grace, elegantly connecting the humble to the luminous.

Saturn's Rings

Nakedness

The Morning After

What Did I Love

“The irony is that Like a Beggar is a book about riches. These are luxurious poems, full of gorgeous language; and they also 'muddy their hands with the actual,' they 'handle the hard evidence of the earth.' With great intelligence and heart, Bass wakes us up to the riches and reminds us of our better selves. The way Bass brings together the humble and the luminous in this elegant book sets it apart and makes it thrilling. Good poets help us to see the world in a new way; great ones open the mind to new ways of conceiving that world and our connections to it. Like a Beggar does this for me.”—Toi Derricotte on Like a Beggar
-------------

Mules of Love::

Balancing heart-intelligent intimacy and surprising humor, the poems in Ellen Bass’s Mules of Love illuminate the essential dynamics of our lives: family, community, sexual love, joy, loss, religion and death. The poems also explore the darker aspects of humanity—personal, cultural, historical and environmental violence—all of which are handled with compassion and grace. Bass’s poetic gift is her ability to commiserate with others afflicted by similar hungers and grief.

For My Daughter on Her Twenty-First Birthday

And What If I Spoke of Despair

Jack Gottlieb's in Love

Brooklyn - Colm Toibinis

“No one who went to America missed home. Instead they were happy there and proud." Could that be true? I too wonder as Eilis Lacey concerned about things adding up in both columns :-) and whose debit and credit columns will be affected.

A 2009 novel by Irish author Colm Toibinis the first part is a delightful picture of small-town Ireland in the 1950s. Eilis Lacey has few prospects in life; there are no available jobs and even fewer available men. So when a priest offers to sponsor her to emigrate to the U.S. Even though she’s sad to leave her mother and older sister, Rose; she accepts the invitation and migrates to America. The middle two parts chart Eilis’ arrival and settling in to life and study in Brooklyn. She’s desperately homesick. That eases up when, with the help of that same priest, she takes night school bookkeeping courses; she also meets a charming Italian-American man, Tony. All is going well until she’s called back to Ireland. She’s modest, sensible and hard-working, but she’s also got a fine sense of humour. The department store – its billing system, how the store adjusts to the times; when its savvy owner realizes the neighbourhood is changing, it begins catering to African-American customers, and it’s fascinating to see how Eilis reacts. This is the new world, with opportunities for all. There’s also a tiny scene about one of Eilis’s instructors, whose family was killed in the Holocaust. Eili and Tony's romance becomes more serious, and Tony confesses his love for Eilis, and his plans to build a home on Long Island. Then comes her return home. One day while Eilis is working she learns from Father Flood that her sister Rose has died in her sleep from a pre-existing heart condition. She secretly marries Tony before she leaves. In Ireland she falls back into the town society easily. She goes to the beach with Nancy, George and their friend Jim Farrell, who is interested in her. Eilis is forced to spend time with Jim and eventually starts a brief relationship with him. He is a local pub owner, to whom she had been attracted before immigrating to America. Eilis's mother is desperate for her to settle back in Ireland and marry Jim, as Eilis has not confided in her or her friends about her marriage. Eilis procrastinates about a return to her new life by extending her stay. She saves Tony's letters unopened thinking at times that she no longer loves him. Eventually a local busybody, Miss Kelly, tells Eilis she knows her secret because Madge Kehoe is her cousin and somehow the story is out in New York. This is the turning point for Eilis and she immediately books her return passage, telling her mother the truth about her marriage and posting a farewell note to Jim as she leaves town by taxi for the docks.

Literary fiction helps us get deep into character, to understand where people come from, not just geographically but psychologically and emotionally.

Lesson Learned: Decisions are always important, but every so often a decision so powerful will come along that either direction you take will completely alter your life hereafter. We’ve all experienced that moment, a moment where if you went down a certain path (as Robert Frost would say- “the road not taken”) our life would be different today. Some moments are just that strong; they don’t come along very often, but when they do they linger for what feels like an eternity. Sometimes something, or someone, comes along that threatens to change the game completely. Your life becomes something else, and your reaction to it may come to define the rest of your days.