Attack of the Herd Brains

Yesterday, I watched “I, Robot” fully anxious with excitement of
watching a sci-fi movie. Having written read many sci-fi short stoies
and written one or two odd sci-fis myself, I was really looking forward
to see a creation of none other than Issac Asimov himself. I’m pleased
to say it was the best movie I’d seen this season. I have grown to
dislike what I’d call “franchised movies”, like Spiderman, which is made
to satisfy a different audience than movie goers. Hence a typical movie
goer would never get the same sort of satisfaction as a regular movie. I
subscribe to my good friend Karthik’s taste of having a complete story
in those 2 hours. That’s the beauty of “I, Robot”. The screenplay and
the cast seemed to gel perfectly. The “Minority Report” style art
direction didn’t fail to enthrall yet again.

Yesterday, Dinky brought his camera along and considering the beautiful
campus of Infosys, the shutters went chanting ‘Click’, ‘Click’,
‘Click’…all the time. Apparently, Abeer who was supposed to be in Pune
(Peoplesoft financials) is now here in Finacle for the past 10 days! The
other surprises of the day were Aby’s call for his laptop buy and
Shine’s messenger buzz.

Today’s meat for discussion would be the typical ‘Herd Brain’ of most
MBAs. Yes, the so-called poised and enterprising tribe that emerges out
of premier B-schools every year. Almost every one of them are hung up on
getting tasks higher up in the value chain. The motto is to get there
and get there faster. The operational part is usually “uncool” for this
band of ego-driven megalomaniacs. Sadly this is a mentality that is
implanted in their heads at a much early stage; at the stage of being
“aspirants”. It could may well have been their only sane reason to do
MBA too! The implication is that this vast majority of “aspirants” serve
as a very effective myth propaganda machine and it gets to….you know,
a vicious circle. The problem is so crucial that he next Scot Adam’s
strip might be focused on a “Herd Brain” type of character.

I believe that the media also has a lot to do with this. Every single
business magazine that the MBAs or “aspirants” lap up so fondly brings
out many success stories with a sharp stereotype. There is no past for
that stereotype and he is the best in breed for that functional area and
his present job is anything but operational. He might be still doing
operational but that isn’t sexy enough for lack of precious column
space. And of course he would be covered in the riches of Arabia, curvy
pouting bombshells and would hop the globe as matter of routine. Nobody
mentions how obsessed he was (and still is) about the details of the
companies operations and how hard he worked till he was familiar with
every aspect of it. He was not always the “finance” guy or “marketing”
guy till now. He was the “everything” guy.

I feel today’s MBAs are not obsessed with the area of a company’s
operation well enough. They are too impatient to let the natural
evolution to happen. It’s this preconceived mindset that characterizes
the Herd Brain and ultimately dooms it to oblivion.

Next time I’ll write about Sodipodi and Gimp, the tools of a Linux
Artist.