there's Ramlinga raju in everyone of us

[rockinkrishh]

Interesting read......circulating in IIMC alumni e-group.


With the carefully constructed, politically well-managed, legal defence-team endorsed admission of unprecedented fraud, Ramalinga Raju ushered Satyam into the Corporate Fraud Hall of Infamy. Well, our beloved nation has "arrived", yes?!

53,000 job-holders, and countless others dependent on a company that has surely reached the end of the road in its current form, have nowhere to turn. There's anger and there's indignation, much as there was when the Enron bubble burst. And like that unfortunate event, this too will be forgotten in due time.

The tragedy of the inevitable return to "business as usual" is that it is not, as is commonly assumed, an affirmation of the fact that time heals; in lies in that fact that we collectively return, like hamsters, to a wheel that we willingly turn, with ever greater speed, surely to suffer more reversals such as this one in future. We lead terrible lives, caught as we are in this web of mediocrity. We are capable of better.

If any one of us dismissed the Satyam debacle as an isolated manifestation of uncommon greed, let's think again. We as a race make Enron and Satyam possible. We planted the seeds when we fudged our first expense report; when we conned a friend, when we made someone a "chootiya" and took pride in the fact. It is never a matter of degree - there is no such thing as 10% or 50% dishonest.

I believe that we tragically attach value - not to smartness in and of itself, which would be good - but to relative smartness instead. The value system that eulogises the smartness of one relative to another engenders a need to be one-up on the other, and to the extent that we are victims of this core belief, there's a Ramalinga Raju in all of us. When you are caught in the competition game, there's no line that you won't cross. If you aren't a Raju yet, it's because you didn't have the opportunity, or were fortunate enough to be too "dumb" to miss it.

Honesty is profitable, in the long run. And the honesty has to be uncompromising if it is to be. What they don't teach you in management school is that uncompromising honesty attracts derision, and it is valuable just for that reason. It is the habit of the mediocre (and it doesn't matter that mediocrity hides in a presidential or vice-presidential corporate garb) to make fun of the uncompromising.

The next time you pass off a personal dinner as an official one, steal a hotel towel, or recognize revenue that's truly not there knowing you won't get caught - beware. That your action is small does not matter. The cause of big crime is the small one that doesn't get caught.