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Book Extract

The Case of the Bonsai Manager

A manager should learn to hone his intuitive skills, because that is how he can develop to his
fullest potential.

The Case of the

Bonsai Manager
by
R Gopalakrishnan

Penguin Books India

Price: Rs 450 (Hardcover)
264 pages

here is a sort of email ID in the brain. This is what

I call the BRIM, standing for the Brains Remote
Implicit Memory.
The letter R in BRIM stands for remote.
The part of the memory called the remote memory
stretches very deep into your psyche and childhood - your
village, your grandfathers house, the smells of mothers
cooking, and the stories that granny told you. This
remote memory is very durable. That is why a
person may forget what happened last week, but
can recall early life events with great clarity.
A study of the deterioration of brain cells also
shows that the remote memory suffers less
than some other parts.
The letter I in BRIM comes
from implicit.
In the implicit memory, you hold
processes - such processes manifest
themselves as skills and habits; these are
housed in the implicit memory without your
being aware of it. When you have practiced
over and over again, then the routine gets
encoded in this implicit memory. After that,
you access from this memory without even
being aware of it: how to ride a bicycle,
how to swim or how to change gears in the
car, the kind of stuff that you do not know
that you know, and certainly, have a lot of
difficulty in teaching others.

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It is in the explicit memory that you hold facts. You know that
you know. For example, you know that you know your sons date of
birth. You know that you have to speak at a function next week.
BRIM is the common area between the remote and implicit
memory in the brain. To develop strong intuition, this email ID
must be accessed for messages stored there.

There is evidence that the BRIM exists

You know that the BRIM exists because you use it all the time.
You drive from home to work each morning, using your BRIM.
You feel expectant about grandmas food after a long time because
your BRIM has stored that experience.
When Shoaib Akhtars cricket ball comes hurtling at Rahul
Dravid at 150 km per hour, Dravid responds with his instinct.
He certainly does not estimate the trajectory by computing the
ball speed, wind direction, angle of throw and other such matters
of physics.
Art Kleiner, writer and author, interviewed two commentators
who have written extensively about the Toyata Production System
for Strategy + Business magazine. One of them, Daniel
Jones recalled, When we first visited them, Toyota
was completely incapable of articulating its first
principles. They could tell you tell the techniques
they used, but not the rationale behind them.
They had lived that way for two generations.
And they were surprised that the rest of
the world did not work that way too.
This is a great example of stuff residing
in the BRIM of the Toyota engineers.
As a matter of fact, the BRIM activity
is true not just of managers but of
all people.
An American consultant called Gary
Klein studied nurses, firefighters and
other professionals who have to make
decisions based on imperfect information
and under pressure. He refers to them as
experts. He found that when experts decide,
they do not have a systematic and logical
way of arriving at the correct option for
action. They size up a situation rapidly, and
drawing upon their intuition and experience,
they act quickly. The quality of their decisions

June - July 2007

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under such conditions of high stress could be assessed only much

later; it seemed to depend on their training and their intuition.

Instinct does not lend itself to analysis

An important feature of instinct (or intuition, I use these words

interchangeably) is that it does not lend itself to analysis. You need
both instinct and analysis precisely because they are different and
complementary. When they get mixed up, it is quite a muddle.
Philosophers say that the centre of the minds thinking is not in
the conscious process, that is why it is good to let it function in a
natural and spontaneous way. True ingenuity is manifest when the
natural functioning of the mind is not blocked by formal methods
and techniques - too much of which produce the bonsai manager.
This is illustrated by an amusing verse about the centipede.

The centipede was happy,

Quite until a toad in fun
Said, pray, which leg goes after which?
This worked his mind to such a pitch,
He lay distracted in a ditch,
Considering how to run.

Soon after I learned to play golf - unfortunately the lesson never

seems to get over - I recall standing at the first tee box at my golf
club. Apart from my group, the next group was waiting, so I had
seven pairs of eyes watching me. I knew all the right things to
be done to get a great drive off the first tee. The principles were
firmly embedded in my mind, the pictures from the golf book were
indelibly etched in the brain and, above all, I could recall all of
them with great clarity. Do you think I got a good swing?
I play tennis with a competitive guy over weekends. Sometimes,
he plays invincibly and I just cannot outplay him. During the
change of sides, I appreciate his game and inquire about what it is
that he is doing that day which makes him so good. He thinks about
it and gives me some analytical explanation. During the very next
set, his game deteriorates perceptibly!
Marlin Eller was Microsofts lead developer for the Windows
operating system during the 1980s. Stories have been written about
this successful development being the outcome of a far-sighted,
well-thought-out strategy. Marlin Eller has, however, expressed a
completely different point of view. He says that the view from the
trenches resembled white water rafting, swerving widely from one
end to another, just avoiding the rocks and keeping out of trouble!

June - July 2007

Business and psychology teacher John Eliot recounted an incident

from the 1976 Winter Olympics at Innsbruck, Austria. Alpine
skier Franz Klammer was racing against the defending Olympic
champion, Bernhard Russi of Switzerland. The accepted technique
to win was to stay low and keep the skis gliding flat in a straight
line. Franz Klammer attempted it very differently in that race. He
skated hard out of the gate and whipped around the corners wildly,

Philosophers say that the

centre of the minds thinking
is not in the conscious
process, that is why it is good
to let it function in a natural
and spontaneous way

just missing fences. His coach thought Klammer might be killed as

he veered around the sharp corners so dangerously. Klammer beat
Russi by a small margin to the wild cheers of spectators.
The cheering journalists and spectators wanted to know how he
did it and what was going through his mind as he swerved past
each of those corners. Franz Klammer simply said, Nothing.
I was just trying to get to the finishing line fast. It is true to say
that top performers perform at the magical moment with their
intuition - their own brain does not know in any analytical sense
what they did right.
There are many stories published of successful people who
probably do not quite know how they did whatever they did. The
media or some analyst writes up an ex post facto account which
makes the whole process appear orderly and systematic, even
though the reality was not so at all. The media puts a beaming
CEO on the cover and explains how he did some wonder within his
company. The magazine got a story and the CEO got an ego boost.
So here is what probably happened.
This exercise required the CEO to present what he did as the
outcome of a series of orderly thoughts and plans, which was
probably far from the reality. Upon seeing his story on the magazine
cover, the CEO may start to believe that indeed he did do it. Soon
after, his fortunes seem to head south because he begins to analyse
and present what he does intuitively. That is the reason conservative
leaders say, avoid getting on to the cover of a magazine, it can
destroy you! Perhaps such stories aggravate the ego. But it could
also be that the cover stories and awards require them to brain about
what their brain does not know. The result is that they over-brain,
and then there seems to be only one way to go: south.
R Gopalakrishnan is Executive Director, Tata Sons.
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