Bright-yellow carrots are good for you!

Positive reinforcement and recognition to motivate movement in the right direction - is as old as life itself. Employees often say that the company needs to recognize their work more. Dolphins will jump with it. Whales will roll. The bigger the scope of recognition, the better it seems one has achieved in life. I also notice that sometimes even a single no-body's positive reinforcement can have a swelling effect on a well-achieved individual. However, this feeling is a very elusive one and it disappears as quickly as it appears. There are a lot of other feelings that come close but we never actually sit and observe them. Eating a nice hot meal after a rigorous mountain hike is very satisfying but hunger will strike again. Putting a Q-tip in your ear when its all ticklish. Finding a restroom on a long dreary highway with a full-bladder. Seeing a picturesque snow-capped mountain-range after a dull, arduous journey. Getting off a bus after 24 hours in it. Taking a shower after a sweaty day. Having sex after many weeks - feeling super happy and then noticing that the original feeling returns very quickly. It's the same single feeling that manifests in multiple forms. Basically, we are wired internally in a way to seek positive stroking of our egos from external sources. We like that fleeting glimpse into "feeling good" and we want it again and again and so we strive during the periods in-between. It's almost predictable and can work like a machine.

Corporate India cannot be much different. The business-gossip newspaper, Economic Times has year-end awards. Every year a high-profile jury (this year - Lakshmi Mittal, Deepak Parekh, Harish Manwani, Aditya Birla etc.) is formed to select the top winners in corporate India and awards are doled out. ET runs many photographs in its newspaper with the bigwigs and describes in painful detail the clothes they wore, what they ate and drank, where they sat and how they spoke (nothing of that is really business stuff!). The newspaper also pathetically tries to sell itself in its columns wherever possible. When I saw the pics and read all the juicy stuff much like I read the Bollywood Page 3 news, I wondered how it would be for Wall Street Journal to run WSJ Awards - we'd have Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Michael Dell, Waltons, Larry Ellisson, Sergey Brin, Larry Page and so on...get together for a cocktail party to receive the coveted WSJ Awards one evening and WSJ runs on its front-page photos of Buffett's jacket and articles describing what Larry Ellisson's girlfriend wore and what Bill Gates joked with one of the Walton lady's --- the thought itself is side-splitting funny!

Spin the globe a little more to the Russian mathematician, Grigori Perelman and you'll find that not everyone needs this public acknowledgement. Perelman who lives outside of St. Petersburg was recently offered the Field's medal for solving a 100 year old mathematical problem called Poincare Conjecture and refused it. After he solved it, he simply posted his findings on the Internet (without his name) for the world to simply go-figure. On an earlier occasion when he rejected a European award, he felt the committee was incompetent. He reminds me vaguely of Paul Gaugin's story in Maugham's Moon and Sixpence. On the other hand, Shing-Tung Yau who put the finishing touches on the solution eagerly accepted the Field medal. Everytime I have an urge to google my own name, I find myself toggling from the Perelman-mode to ETAward-type mode and I find my behavior amusing. So until my mind converts to Paul Gaugin-mode fully, I need nicely decorated, bright-yellow carrots with my name etched on it.