Category: Features

This book explores the lives of the many different sorts of Briton who went to India: viceroys and offcials, soldiers and missionaries, planters and foresters, merchants, engineers, teachers and doctors. It evokes the three and a half centuries of their ambitions and experiences, together with the lives of their families, recording the diversity of their work and their leisure, and the complexity of their relationships with the peoples of India. It also describes the lives of many who did not fit in with the usual image of the Raj: the tramps and rascals, the men who ‘went native’, the women who scorned the role of the traditional memsahib. Below is an excerpt from the book. Read on!

Salvation for Doyle came three years later with his marriage, after which his army report rated him as ‘regular, good and temperate’. The agent of this remarkable transformation was his wife, Margaret, the daughter of John O’Brien, another Irish soldier in India, a private in the Madras Fusiliers whose regiment had been sent north to help counter the Rebellion of 1857.* O’Brien was part of the relief force that arrived too late to save the British in Kanpur (Cawnpore) although it did manage to reach the besieged city of Lucknow. Badly wounded in the shoulder during the conflict, O’Brien decided to retire on his pension to Bangalore. Although the subsequent Doyle-O’Brien marriage might have seemed a purely Irish union taking place in a tropical ambience, this was not in fact the case. As the registry records demonstrate, John’s wife, Matilda, was an Indian girl who at the age of thirteen converted to Christianity a month before her marriage. Billy Connolly’s reaction to the news that he thus had Indian forebears and probably – given that Matilda had several siblings – a large number of Indian cousins, was both charming and bemused. Although the comedian still felt he was a ‘Glaswegian, Scottish person’ – large, white and hairy – he was ‘very proud and happy to be part Indian’ as well.
As Connolly’s story suggests, much of Britain’s relationship with
India, especially at a personal and popular level, has very quickly been forgotten. One cannot help wondering why his maternal grandmother, to whom he was very close, never told him that her own grandparents had lived in India and that her mother had been born in Bangalore; if she had been ashamed to admit her Indian ancestry, she could have left that bit out. The story also indicates how much of the British-Indian relationship, again at a personal level, was accidental. Most British people did not go to India to conquer it, govern it or amass a large fortune there. When Daniel Doyle enlisted in the 3rd Battalion of the 60th Rifles, he did not know that he would be sent to India and spend half his active life there as a soldier who would never be called upon to fight a battle. Like private soldiers, many British women and children lived in India by accident, without having chosen to do so; chance or unexpected circumstances had brought them there. If we look merely at Connolly’s own profession, the theatrical, we find a good number of future actors living fortuitously on the Subcontinent: a list of those who were born in India, or went to school or spent parts of their youth there, would include Vivien Leigh, Merle Oberon, Norman Wisdom, Lindsay Anderson, Spike Milligan, Tom Stoppard, Felicity Kendal and Joanna Lumley, many of whom will appear later in this book. If we examine an even smaller profession, that of writers, we find that Thackeray, Kipling, Saki, Orwell (and Orwell’s second wife, Sonya) were all born in India.
The British in this book lived in India from shortly after the death of Queen Elizabeth I until well into the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, a span of some three hundred and fifty years. Life for them was very different – and was led very differently – in diverse ages, just as it was in Britain. For nearly three-quarters of that time British settlements – and later possessions – were administered by the East India Company (EIC); for the last ninety years of the Indian Empire (1858–1947) they were under the direct rule of the British government. All divisions by ‘period’ are artificial and prone to generalization, but perhaps one can divide Britain’s time in India roughly into thirds. The first (and largest) had its share of war and violence, especially on the west coast, but was mainly a matter of small enclaves concentrating on trade. The second, stretching from the 1740s to the 1850s, was a period of conquest and expansion during which the East India Company, one of several rival European entities, emerged to become the paramount power in India. The third (and shortest), ending in 1947, was an era of consolidation and subsequent withdrawal. Yet even these divisions would need to be divided into contrasting subdivisions. As at home, the behaviour of the British in India was very different in the Regency period from what it was in the more earnest years of the early Victorians.

The British in India makes a highly original and engaging contribution to a long an important period of British and Indian history.

Is there a way to influence people without pushing data and analysis on them? Is there an effective way to drive change in an organization? Yes, through stories. Stories at Work will teach you how to wrap your stories in context and deliver them in a way that grabs your audience’s attention. Read an excerpt from the book to know more!

This book is designed to take you from being a believer of the power of stories to a seasoned user of stories in business, first by introducing you to the various elements of story work and then sharing with you the process you can use to unlock this enormous potential.
However, to do that I must first shift a belief most people have about stories. Imagine that you are one among ten people sitting in a conference room waiting for a very important meeting to start and someone in the room says ‘let me tell you a story’. Pause and think about what would be the first thing that would go through your mind. Take a minute.
If you are like 95 per cent of the 1500-plus senior leaders that I have run into during my workshops, your first thought would be along the line—‘why is he wasting our time’, ‘it’s time to be serious’, ‘what an idiot’, ‘has he not prepared for this’, ‘how long will this take’ or ‘why do I have to listen to it’. Very few of you, the 5 per cent, would say ‘I want to know what he has to say’ or ‘I hope it is interesting.’ That is the barrier stories face in business.
Most of you who have been in sales, and many of you who have not, would have at some point in time in the past been told by your boss ‘Kahaani mat batao!’ (Don’t tell me a story), when you were genuinely trying to explain the real reasons behind why something didn’t happen. Most people label stories as being made up, something to be used for entertainment or something usually for children.
While this myth will surely be shattered as we journey through the book, it would be useful to introduce you to my definition of business storytelling. Story is a fact. What we will do is wrap it in context and deliver it with emotion.
You might ask, ‘Can’t stories be created or made up?’
Of course they can, but not in this book and definitely not in the world of business. ‘Can’t I borrow from mythology?’ Of course you can if you have a huge memory bank for mythological stories and know how to connect them to business. But not in this book. In this book, and in the work I do, we will stick to stories being facts. After all, the currency of business is fact.

Stories at Work will teach you how to wrap your stories in context and deliver them in a way that grabs your audience’s attention.

What Works: Gender Equality by Design discusses how organizations can leverage findings from behavioral science research to fight gender bias in the workplace—starting with job listings. Read an excerpt from the book below.

Attracting the right people instead of managing the wrong ones is one of the most important tasks any organization confronts. This is the mantra Google lives by—or, as Laszlo Bock writes: “Only hire people who are better than you.” In an interview on the company’s hiring and corporate culture, Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman, explained that in addition to judging the technical qualifications of potential hires, a key focus at Google was to determine whether they were passionate and committed to innovation.
Surely, allowing all Google engineers to spend 20 percent of their time developing their own ideas serves as a sorting device. It attracts creative, independent minds who invent Google News, Orkut, or a social networking site. The time is not written in stone nor necessarily utilized, but it matters as an idea: “No one gets a ‘20 percent time’ packet at orientation, or is pushed into distracting themselves with a side project. Twenty percent time has always operated on a somewhat ad hoc basis, providing an outlet for the company’s brightest, most restless, and most persistent employees—for people determined to see an idea through to completion, come hell or high water.”
Not many of those “seeing an idea through to completion, come hell or high water” are women. In the spring of 2015, a gender discrimination trial brought by a former junior partner at a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley drew renewed attention to the low fraction of women in technology. While in the end a jury found against the plaintiff, the low numbers were undeniable: fewer than 20 percent in most tech companies and even fewer in Silicon Valley’s venture capital firms.
Some argue that the “tech bros” mentality of Silicon Valley keeps women out and even discourages female students from focusing on computer science. Perhaps. Surely, the male-dominated environment does not help tech firms attract women. As we know, deviating from behavior that is expected of a social category, either by others or by oneself, can be costly. A woman who acts against the norms by definition doesn’t “belong”; not surprisingly, the fear of not belonging is influential.
Indeed, research by Boris Groysberg, Ashish Nanda, and Nitin Nohria (now dean of Harvard Business School) suggests establishing belonging turns out to be a major concern of female job seekers. They report that women consider more factors than men when screening jobs; in particular, cultural fit, values, and managerial style. There is a surprising silver lining to this research, however: it carries hidden benefits for women and their employers. In follow-up work, Groysberg identifies this scrutiny as one of the key variables explaining why women transition more successfully to new companies than men. Women know better what they are getting themselves into.
The researchers analyzed the performance of more than a thousand “star” analysts working for almost eighty different in- vestment banks over a nine-year period. Analysts were labeled “stars” if they were ranked as one of the best in the industry by Institutional Investor magazine. The team was interested in better understanding whether the analysts’ skills were portable when they switched companies. It turns out most analysts lost their stardom when they changed employers unless they moved to a better firm or brought their whole team along—with the exception of female analysts. Not only had the women studied a potential new employer more carefully before joining, they had also built their expertise differently than their male colleagues.
The top-performing female analysts had “built their franchises on portable, external relationships with clients and the companies they covered, rather than on relationships within their firms.” Or as one female star analyst put it: “For a woman in any business, it’s easier to focus outward, where you can define and deliver the services required to succeed, than to navigate the internal affiliations and power structure within a male-dominant firm.”
People choose organizations based on their preferences and their beliefs about whether or not they could thrive in a given organization. Messages shape those beliefs. Consider the messages sent when Lieutenant General David Morrison stated in a video posted on the Australian army’s official YouTube channel that he was committed to inclusion. “If that does not suit you, then get out,” Morrison flatly declared. “There is no place for you amongst this band of brothers and sisters.”
Acting in response to a 2013 investigation into sexual abuse, Morrison sent a strong message. In 2014, Morrison joined the Australian delegation to the Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict in London. Speaking again with admirable bluntness, he said that armies that assign more value to men than to women and tolerate sexual violence “do nothing to distinguish the soldier from the brute.”
Will these messages attract and retain soldiers valuing equality and inclusion? Time will tell. And while actions have followed his words, we all know that talk can be cheap. When and how messages affect behavior is a large field of inquiry in itself, but experimental evidence is rare. One example, however, is encouraging.
Robert Jensen and Emily Oster took advantage of the fact that cable television became available at different times in different parts of India, allowing them to trace whether attitudes and behaviors went along with exposure to the new information cable programming provided.
They found that the introduction of cable television was associated with improvements in women’s status in rural areas, including female school enrollment, decreases in fertility, as well as reported increases in autonomy and decreases in the acceptability of beating women and son preference. The information conveyed via cable television, often through somewhat surprising means, such as soap operas, exposed rural viewers to gender attitudes and ways of life, including within the household, more prevalent in urban areas. And it changed behavior.
Sorting mechanisms are powerful and often overlooked. Those charged with attracting the largest, most talented pool of applicants should make sure they scrutinize the messages, overt and biased, conveyed in their advertisements, websites, or other communications.