Monday, April 24, 2006

The "Best" Companies

The "Best Companies" need not be the "Best Companies for YOU to work for"!

Try posing this question to a few - "Do you deserve the Best?". You could end up facing a variety of responses - most of them would be different forms of the "Affirmative"; and in some cases, the responses may not be necessarily polite or even Verbal, depending on the moods of the respondents ("How silly do you think you could ever get?"). But not many would say "No, I DO NOT deserve the Best" but for those who have gotten really serious about Self-Improvement and have decided to become Brutally Honest!

However, what evades our conscious attention is something very basic. It is the result of the human tendency to assume things and frame hypotheses by default. We normally tend to take for granted that what is best for one has to be the best for everyone else out there!
We come across this 'phenomenon', not to use a term as negative as 'Syndrome', all too often - and more so when it comes to one's all-important Career Moves! A 'Template' gets formed in our minds sub-consciously and we get into the trap of thinking 'Perfectly Logically', within the set template; and in most cases, we never get to acknowledge the presence of such a frame of mind until, for instance, something goes terribly wrong! It is then that we decide to sit back and extract ourselves from the scenario to analyse what we have been 'Tuned' to do, by default!
How many of us get frustrated on the job, in spite of being in one of the most "Enviable Positions" when it comes to one's peers? How many times have we asked ourselves, "What is the missing ingredient in my daily bread?" How frequently do we cry over the milk that keeps spilling, again and again? How often have we wanted to get back a few years and re-write our personal histories?
All that needs to be done to get out of this cycle is to realise one simple reality - "What is good for you, may not be good for me!" That precisely is the reason why one needs to think twice, or perhaps even a few times more, before one gets conditioned into applying to the "Best" companies, by default! "The Best Companies" convey the financial healths - and other parameters - of the companies in question. But when it comes to the quest to find yourselves in the "Best" place of work, it really has to be a "Match" between you, a part of the company, and your organisation, the "Whole" of your professional self. Every company has a 'soul' that is defined and formed by the thousands of people who give it its life - the onus lies on you to make sure that you would make a natural fit into the place where you would spend the majority of your remaining life time in!