Intuitively Rational: On Leading Fearlessly and Thriving

By Rajeev

This book speaks about leadership. Its woven like a story around one mans (Mike) personal journey filled with loneliness, anger and arrogance about his own capacities. An act of providence brings him face to face with two enigmatic people, Bodhi and Athena and what follows is an intriguing and an emotional roller coaster ride for Mike. The interaction is far from easy as he keeps bouncing between extreme emotions of guilt, sadness, regret, sheer joy, euphoria and enlightenment.
As a reader, you may identify yourself with Bodhi, Athena or Mike or a composite blend of all three personalities. Throughout the book, you will find only subtle hints to facilitate a process of new actions, new outcomes and hence new learning. Fearless leadership, being comfortable with ambiguity, and creating a meaningful life are all states whose switches are controlled by our belief system alone. Intuitively Rational could possibly become your flashlight in the dark and a reliable companion as you move along your very own Figuring-Out journey.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jul 21, 2014
• ISBN: 9781491873328

Rajeev

Rajeev is the founder and President of Dynalead, a Leadership & Strategic Management Consulting Company that uses a ‘Systems’ approach to solve Business & Leadership challenges. Rajeev grew up in India and experienced all the hues and shades of life from abject poverty and tough early years, to success as an officer in the Indian Army (former Lieutenant Colonel) and an eventual career as a senior Rocket Scientist. These are the forces that shaped his life before coming to the United States. He has more than 20 years of diverse experience and he holds a Master’s degree in Management and Systems Engineering from MIT Sloan School of Management & School of Engineering. As part of his program at MIT, Rajeev also chose to pursue course work in General Management and Public Policy at Harvard Business School and the Kennedy School of Government. He also has a Graduate degree in Space Engineering & Rocketry and an Undergraduate degree in Aeronautical Engineering from India. He travels extensively, is married and has one son.

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© 2014 Rajeev. All rights reserved.

Cover page art work by: preeti kathavate

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse  07/17/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4918-7331-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4918-7332-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014905067

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

Dedication

Preface

THE END

Chapter 1    The Beginning Of The End!

Chapter 2    Gap Of Pretence

THE JOURNEY

Chapter 3    Are You Theoretical Enough?

Chapter 4    New Semantics & Collabonizations

THE BEGINNING

Chapter 5    Synalysis: Unifying The Paradox!

Chapter 6    The Beginning Begins!

Bodhi’s Poem

Dedication

To Anjana my Grandmother for nourishing my soul!

To Gauri Bai, for being the cradle of my life!

To Sanju my kid brother for loving me beyond words!

To my son Siddhant for his fearless resolve to follow his own path!

To my wife Alpna, for sweating it out and standing by me while I was busy experimenting & dancing with the clouds of creativity!

And to the sheer joy & bliss of being one with this lovely CREATION!

Preface

T HIS IS A book about paradoxes and an ode to the duality we see everywhere. It is about just being and in that process of being, discovering the true riches of life; both material and spiritual. This book is not about spirituality for I am no Guru or purport to being one. Or perhaps it is a spiritual book and I do not have to be a guru to speak of spirituality. The truth might well be that anyone and everyone could speak of spirituality and the mundane in the same breath. Maybe the mundane is spiritual after all and vice versa. I have been writing and editing this book for a longtime and now I could no longer hold it captive in the jumbles of my neurons. This book was simply bursting out of every pore of my body and I realized that now was the time to dress it up with alphabets. To many, the contents may seem like principles of leadership or management of life and work. The demarcations could appear blurred and if they do then that is how it is meant to be for you. If they don’t appear smudged and in case you care about treating them as separate entities, that is your prerogative as well. Leading, Managing and living are all discrete, a continuum or a little bit of both; that is for you to figure out. The words in the book are intended to excite both an inner and an outer dialogue to facilitate the process of figuring it out.

Honestly, my teaching assignments and workshops weren’t pulling the crowds that made economic sense. People found it too hard and the level of abstraction too high, to see linkages between Just Being and making profits, earning fat bonuses and running a Company. Quite often someone would walk up to me at the end of my workshop and remark, This is awesome’ but tell me, how is it connected to the success of my business? I would smile back and say Well, if you cannot see it so, then perhaps that is your truth and you better stick to it. If you don’t see it, it just isn’t there and it is meant to be so.

What you don’t believe in is what you don’t get to see.

To see it, you need to make it happen in your mind first and then it shows up in reality. What you don’t believe in is what you don’t get to see. Initially I started to write about the duality and paradoxes of leadership. As it slowly took shape, I suddenly found that leadership is merely a linguistic garb that our actions adorn when an individual interacts with his or her environment in a particularly profound manner. The plot and its characters simply popped out and I found myself typing feverishly. Many ideas were mere scribbles on tissues and scraps of paper that were subsequently inserted as text.

The title of this book reflects its innate theme. The duality that we confront in our work, our homes and in our personal lives plays out the way we wish to play it. It is always a matter of choices and the probability of the future unfolding in the manner it eventually does, is hardwired in the Now. Some people term it as spirituality while some call it the probabilistic nature of the quantum world. Either way, it doesn’t really matter. One may choose to live a life of fear or in the other extreme, live an unmindful and a reckless life. Both ends of the spectrum are but a demonstration of our linguistic ability to put it into words. In the mind, there are infinite choices and outcomes; some dark, some bright and some anywhere in between. The world we live in and the things we create are the manifestations of our beliefs, which in turn are implanted by our surrounding structures. One feeds into the other and eventually a time comes when the distinction as to what feeds into what bears little significance and consequence. For all that really matters is the resultant outcome in the present, which interestingly triggers a new set of actions and illuminates newer beliefs and structures.

There is an uncanny circularity or tautological connection in the world we live in. The mystics call it the karma (what goes forth comes back), the rationalists and the systems thinkers term it as the effect of the feedback loops. The truth of what it is doesn’t really matter for it just is. Motion did not wait for Newton to reveal itself. The laws of conservation did not wait to manifest and show themselves till the physicists and the mathematicians said it was so. Nature always revealed itself to what we enquired into using whatever tools we had. In many ways, our tools limit our discoveries but that does not limit the possible choices the world has to become. It simply waits for us to come up with new tools and ways to give it a new face. It then becomes what we make of it. That is all there is.

The network effect of humanity acting in coherence or incoherence is reflected in the institutions we build, the monuments we construct, the paintings we paint, the science we use, the values we exude, the leaders we choose and the people we are. These are all connected and are the same, differing only in look and feel. We have reasons earmarked for our seeming differences and it is important to us to have these reasons (for why we are different). We find refuge in geography, history, culture and language, least realizing that these are merely islands of mental constructs in the continuum of life. There was a time when earth was bound in one land mass (the Pangaea) and then came the drift we now know as the continental drift. Similarly, much before we drifted in our minds and hearts we were all bound together at creation (considering that we all began our world from a size of 10-33 centimeters). With time we discovered that we could be in many places at the same time and all the other possibilities break down at the moment of observation. But then in the same breath we also found that time is only a construct of the human mind and it exists only because we think it does.

The duality and paradoxes are not the cause of concern. But the world we live in abhors or shuns paradoxes and duality as it shakes the very foundations of being certain. The fight or flight instinct that we inherited from our foraging times, triggers the Amygdyla and instructs our bio-chemistry to respond with bursts of Cortisol and an adrenalin rush. Our social conditioning epitomizes certain types of personalities and to some extent idolizes some of them. This book is neither about ignoring