Are health drinks wrecking our kids?

I am not a nutritionist. So I will not make any claims. But, as a member of the “mango people,” I would like to raise a few questions. I wonder if we have been persuaded too easily by manufacturers of health drinks for small children.

We all know that deficiencies in certain nutrients and vitamins can cause havoc. As children we learned how scurvy, caused by deficiency in vitamin C, killed hundreds of sailors on long voyages that started in the fifteenth century. We know that deficiencies in protein, iodine, and iron cause deaths and disabilities that can be prevented with the help of supplements. We also agree that for most of us, including our children, the best source of these nutrients is a balanced diet.

Yet, those of us who can easily afford to give our children a balanced diet are the ones who reach out for supplements. There is a very good reason why we do it. We are intensely aware of the impact of vitamin and nutrient deficiencies on our children's physical and mental growth. So at the first sign of a child not eating what we consider to be a balanced diet, we get worried and give them manufactured products that claim to contain all the essential nutrients that children need to grow well and to become smart. Even when they eat pretty well, we invest in these supplements. We don't want our children to fall behind their peers who are given these supplements. We believe that as educated parents aware of the critical role played by these nutrients, we are doing the right thing for our kids.

But are we? Or are we pushing the children into a vicious circle from which there is no escape? Do these very supplements prevent the children from eating a balanced diet? Why should the body process raw and cooked food for nutrients when it has been pampered with ready-made supplements? Are we guilty of not giving the body a chance to look after itself? Have we been taken for a ride by advertisers of health drinks and supplements?

Photocredit: http://www.istockphoto.com/

Maruti Suzuki’s sex change

Maruti Suzuki’s honchos have, after two years of repeated misdiagnoses, finally figured out what was wrong with their Manesar plant. It’s negative energy trapped inside. Well, that there was a lot of negative energy at that plant was well-known. So what’s new? The correct identification of the cause of the evil energy.

The negative energy came from the evil spirits that were angered by the razing of certain structures at the plant site a few years ago. To make matters worse, the plant did not have doors and windows at the right place for the negative energy to go out and for positive energy to come in. Fortunately, Maruti Suzuki’s leaders are blameless; the workers have nothing to do with it either. They are victims of this evil energy.

Once the cause was correctly identified, cure was simple. According to news reports, astrologer-cum-Vastu expert Deivajna K N Somayaji has already started the treatment. In three to four weeks the plant can function again without any problem.

This is a brilliant move by Maruti Suzuki’s management. You may accuse them of many things, but stupidity is not one of them. I congratulate them on this strategic decision and confidently predict absolute success.

My reason for such certainty, however, is not the correction in Vastu but the quiet sex change Maruti Suzuki will have undergone in the meanwhile. The plant that reopens will have a new management, a new set of workers, and the new location. No, I don’t mean Mamta Banerjee’s Paschim Bengal or Narendra Modi’s Gujarat. The plant will stay back at Manesar. Then what do I mean by a new location?

The environment around the plant has changed so much that it’s like a new location. The villages that supply workers to the plant have changed. The local politicians have changed. The Haryana government has changed. Within the plant, the workers have changed. The managers have changed.  The root cause of such a dramatic and widespread change is the horrible death of Maruti Suzuki’s HR manager, Awanish Kumar Dev.

Just as the self immolation of the Tunisian vegetable vendor Mohammed Bouazizi sparked the Arab spring, Dev’s murder within the plant altered everyone’s calculations fundamentally. Maruti Suzuki’s management realised that they couldn’t keep the plant open and risk another manager’s death. That would bring down the company. The workers realised that the game had gone from their hands. It was no longer a labour dispute that they could handle. They couldn’t expect support from the usual quarters. The panchayats around and the state politicians realised that the giant goose that had been laying golden eggs was in danger of dying. The public wooing from two chief ministers added a sense of urgency to everyone.

Maruti Suzuki has had a sex change. Deivajna Somayaji’s puja and architectural corrections will provide a huge fig leaf to hide it. The return of peace and productivity to the Manesar plant will be attributed to it. Our faith in the power of buildings to determine our fate will be reaffirmed. Everything will be well with Maruti Suzuki and Manesar. Everyone can go back to work pretending that they haven’t changed.

I think hiring Deivajna Somayaji was the best ever decision Maruti Suzuki took apart from the original decision to produce cars in India at a time when the only alternative Indians had were road boats called Ambassador, Padmini, and Gazelle.

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The photograph was retrieved from:  http://businesstoday.intoday.in/story/maruti-suzuki-union-leaders-in-custody-over-manesar-violence/1/186913.html

How to have your cake and eat it too

When you pick up a packet of pasta for a carton of milk from the ‘organic’ section of the supermarket or from a health food shop, do you try to find out how many non-organic substances it may contain? Very unlikely. You trust the label, ‘Certified Organic.’ There must be a government-approved process that makes sure that only organic things get that coveted certificate and license to charge a hefty premium. You don't have to think. You don't have to ask. Someone else has done it for you.

Well, there is a process of certification. We also know that certification as organic allows the use of certain non-organic substances such as baking soda, without which you can’t make organic bread. In the US the list of permissible non-organic substances, however, grew from 77 in 2002 to more than 250 in 2012. How come?

According to a report (“Has ‘organic’ been oversized?” by Stephanie Strom) in the New York Times of July 7, 2012, Big Food has quietly invaded and colonised the organic foods space. Gradually they have come to dominate the National Organic Standards Board set up by the American government to determine what can be certified organic and what cannot be. Thus, instead of fresh food produced organically in small farms and consumed locally, Americans are now treated to countrywide brands such as Wholesome & Hearty, Walnut Acres, and Healthy Valley – all owned by Big Food that has been drawn there by the premium which discerning customers gladly pay. Giant agri-food corporations including Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, ConAgra, General Mills, Kellogg, Heinz, and Kraft have driven out most independent organic farmers after buying their brands. Those big companies shape the average consumer’s purchase decisions through influencing the certification process .

The more than threefold increase in the number of permissible non-organic substances during the last ten years closely matches the growth of Big Food’s influence in the certification process.

Big Food has its own cheaper standard products side-by-side with organic products under a variety of pastoral-something brand names. They make money through both these channels. Consumers who are tired and scared of the business practices of Big Food may think that when they buy organic milk or pasta, they support small farms. What they buy may be safe; but they might not be willing to pay a premium for those products if they knew more about the certification process.

Companies and governments exploit our blind faith in certain processes and reluctance to ask questions. They persuade us gently to do many things that we would not want to if we knew the inside story. 


Photocredit: http://istockphoto.com/

The frame is the message (2)

This is a continuation of last week’s post, The frame is the message (1).

Framing is so obvious in advertisements that it is difficult to miss it. When a mosquito repellent is advertised, for example, the focus is on the joy of sleep undisturbed by mosquitoes or freedom from dreaded diseases such as malaria and dengue. The advertiser doesn’t bring into the frame any concerns about allergy the users may have to the chemicals in the repellent. Or any other side-effect, for that matter. If we ask whether it is safe, the advertiser may tell us that millions of people have been using it for years. That doesn’t mean that it will be safe for us, but the framing is such that we assume that it will be safe for us too.

Framing is the heart of persuasion. If it is attractively presented at the right time, it can alter perceptions radically and change the complexion of the discussion. The American invasion of Iraq was, for example, framed as part of the “global war on terror.” Which right thinking individual or country can refrain from supporting this holy war? That frame was guiding the discussion so powerfully that those who questioned the wisdom of invading a country without adequate evidence of wrong doing were easily brushed aside. Those who suggested that perhaps the American love for oil might be an important factor in this invasion were laughed out of op-ed pages of newspapers.

The overwhelming power of smart framing was evident in the recent protests led by Anna Hazare against corruption. The government and the Parliament lost the game completely because the issue was framed as a fight between the people of India and the corrupt government.  It captured the imagination of a large number of people, young and old, educated and uneducated, all over the country. But this is no foreign government imposing its will on an enslaved population. This government and the parliament consist of representatives duly elected by the people of this country.  They represent the masses far more authentically than a small band of self-appointed members of “civil society.” However, Hazare’s version of the Lokpal bill was framed as Jan Lokpal bill and when it was introduced in Parliament, it was declared by the media as “people’s victory.”

Major changes initiated by the leadership in some organisations fail to excite many employees because of poor or no framing.  Employees don’t do things they are asked to because they don’t see why they should. Or they comply reluctantly merely because of penalties. Poor framing is the villain.

If Anna Hazare can unite millions of Indians with wildly diverging views and goals through brilliant framing, why shouldn’t corporate leaders do so with their employees?

Photo credit: www.adsavvy.org

Steve Jobs, a super persuader?

Perhaps it is silly to ask if Steve Jobs was a super persuader. He came from nowhere and walked into the sunset not as a shrewd peddler of a bunch of overpriced i-products, not as the CEO of a highly successful technology company, but as a great human being who changed the world, as an extraordinary visionary who made the world a better place.

People who worked for him found him a dictator and a hard task master. He micromanaged his company like a jealous mother-in-law. He didn’t spare even a small fraction of his substantial personal fortune for philanthropy. No other person in living history, other than Princess Diana of UK, however, stole the world’s heart the way he did.

A more sensible question then is, ‘Why was Jobs a super persuader?’ To answer it let me take you to my home village in Kerala in 1991. That year, I brought back to my village a young maid (let’s call her Leela) my mother had hired to stay with me and my wife in Hyderabad and look after our young kids.

A few days later my mother came to know that Leela had taken her younger sister to the only beauty parlour in a town about ten km away and blew Rs 50 on some facial treatment. Mother was furious. Leela’s family was so poor and had so little to eat that she shouldn’t have wasted money like this. Did she think she was an apsara? Beauty parlours were for rich women who had nothing better to do.

I also found Leela’s behaviour inexplicable. What would she get from a one-off visit to a beauty parlour? Wasn’t it a senseless waste of her hard earned money? In rural Kerala twenty years ago, a visit to the beauty parlour was like air travel, a luxury reserved for the rich. But I defended her decision because she had every right to do what she wanted with her money. Of course, mother was not at all convinced because Leela’s family could have eaten well for a week if she had bought food for the money she burned at the parlour.

When I look back at that episode, what strikes me is how little we know about what really moves others. Perhaps poor Leela derived more joy from that single sitting in a beauty parlour than she would from a sumptuous meal at a fancy restaurant. Or from buying a week’s supply of food for the whole family. We don’t know.

Strangely, people don’t know their inner motives well enough to tell us even if we ask them earnestly and they are willing to open up. That is why extensive market research often fails to identify what customers really want and what makes them truly happy. We tend to judge others by our norms, our values. We may be broadly right, but rarely do we hit the bull’s-eye. If they have no choice, they may buy our products. We think we have persuaded them. But we are wrong.

Steve Jobs figured out what really moved people. He didn’t have any faith in market research. He wondered how people could talk about something they had not experienced or they didn’t even know was possible. Jobs could touch a spot somewhere in us that was inaccessible to research, to logic, to articulation. Once he touched that spot, we couldn’t resist him. It was almost like turning the ignition key of a car. The engine hidden under the hood can’t help roaring into action.

We knew his prices were atrocious; but we justified to ourselves that they were worth it. We would queue up to buy his products. We may explain our behaviour by saying that Jobs had style, taste, and an extraordinary sense of design. The fact is that we fell for him when there were other products which would do nearly everything that his i-products did for a much smaller investment.

Steve Jobs was a super persuader because he could touch a spot that we ourselves didn’t know we had somewhere in us. He was intuitively persuasive. Perhaps there won’t be another Steve Jobs because what he did was not born of education or reasoning.  

Photo credit Steve Jobs by Robert Galbraith/Reuters; Young woman after beauty treatment - http://www.istockphoto.com/

God’s own Ponzi

If gods can cure your diseases, give you babies, and help you pass exams, why can’t they help you make money? This is the question Ashok Jadeja, a homeopathic doctor and a member of the Sansi community in Gujarat asked.

Once he got a clear answer, he decided to try it out. And what an incredible success it was! As a humble channel of this awesome supernatural power, he is reputed to have made about ten billion (yes, billion) rupees in a matter of six months when he was arrested in June 2009.

He dressed himself as a godman and sat outside Sansi community’s Vahanvati Shikotar Matadi Temple in Ahmedabad.  After a few days he let the devotees know that he had been blessed by Matadi who instructed him to work for the benefit of the members of the community through tripling their money. If they deposited money with him, Matadi would triple it by evening.

No one believed him. But then some women decided to try it out. They offered small amounts such as Rs 100 in the morning. When they returned in the evening, they couldn’t believe their eyes. The godman pulled out from Matadi’s box three times the amount they had offered in the morning.

Soon the news of Matadi’s running miracle spread throughout the community.  Now not just a few women devotees but men of all descriptions including lawyers and doctors approached him with cash offerings. Jadeja, who had by now been rechristened Ashok Maadi, gradually raised Matadi’s ‘processing’ time from eight hours to twenty-four hours, two days, three weeks, and finally a month. He and his associates encouraged the devotees to re-offer the money and triple it again while the going was good instead of taking back and spending it. This made sense. As a result, very little money that was offered once went back to the ‘devotees.’ Jadeja invested most of the money in gold and real estate in Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Maharashtra.

Meanwhile, CDs on the wonderful boon given by Matadi to her chosen servant were developed and circulated widely. Within weeks news spread to neighbouring states. Apparently Matadi decided to help not only members of the Sansi community but also any devotees who approached her through her humble servant, Ashok Matadi.  Members of his family and a few members of the community helped him accept money by manning the crowded cash counters.

What we find here is a lethal combination of god and mammon.  Both attract deep-seated devotion that shuts out reasoning almost completely.

We have plenty to learn from Jadeja’s way of working. He started out with small confidence building measures to get people to believe his impossible promises. He involved nearly all members of his extended family and many members of his community in his scheme and shared his booty generously with them. Thus they all spoke in one voice about the magical power of Matadi so that the illusion could be maintained. Jadeja also exploited the persuasive power of example. When you find that your neighbour has got something wonderful, you don’t want to miss out. You brush aside any questions your mind might raise.

If this is the way people are persuaded to do even silly things, why is it that in the corporate world we attach so much importance to logic and reasoning?

Photo credits: www.columbia.edu (Vahanvati Shikotar Mata) & www.indianexpress.com (Ashok Jadeja)

The born-again Maharajah

The Maharajah of Air India Ltd has been AIL-ing for years. Quite like many of the erstwhile princes who had been stripped of their privy purses in 1971, Air India’s Maharaja has been shrinking into a shadow of his former glorious self. Many pundits have been predicting his death for years. The latest predictions came recently when the national carrier couldn’t even pay salaries to its employees on time. Air India has been a perfect example of a white elephant maintained with taxpayers’ money to give joy rides to politicians and bureaucrats and their acolytes.

Let me make a prediction in an entirely different direction.  This terminally ill loser is going to be born again.

I am no civil aviation expert. On what basis, then, can I make this prediction?

Well, an interesting news report in the Times of India of August 27. Entitled, ‘Air India’s new boss turns down Rs 70 lakh club membership,’ the report by Saurabh Sinha says that Rohit Nandan, the new chairman and managing director of Air India has decided not to renew his and his top aide’s membership (about USD 75,000 each annually) of the “ultra-prestigious” Willingdon Club of Mumbai. Air India’s top guns have nearly always been members of this club. 

Nandan is doing other crazy things too. On his first visit to Mumbai as the chairman and managing director of Air India, he chose to stay in a company-owned guesthouse rather than at a five-star hotel. The report also says that he has asked his office not to block a business class seat for him when he travels on business. He would travel in the economy class and move into the business class only if unsold seats were available.

Nandan is giving up some of the perks of office which his predecessors enjoyed as a matter of routine. No one would criticise him for enjoying the perks he is entitled to. But by voluntarily giving up some of these goodies because of the financial mess the company is in, he is clearly sending out a new and authentic message of change to several stakeholders. When he tries to persuade thousands of employees of this emaciated company to make sacrifices and to work differently, he will have Hazare-like credibility leading to tremendous persuasive power. If he can match his credibility with brilliant ideas, the Maharajah is bound to rule the skies again.

Giving up privileges in difficult times is not something that occurs to many leaders. It was, for example, widely reported in newspapers that on November 19, 2008 the CEOs of Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors (Robert L Nardelli, Alan R Mulally, and Rick Wagoner) flew into Washington, each in his own luxury corporate jet. Their mission was to beg the House Committee on Financial Services for an additional $25 billion to save their companies from bankruptcy. The members of the committee were furious although there was nothing irregular about CEOs of such global companies using corporate jets rather than commercial airlines. The three auto companies did get money from the House Committee not because those CEOs were persuasive but because their bankruptcy would have had serious consequences for American automobile industry.

Coming back to Air India, if there ever was a chance in recent years for the Maharajah to be born again, to get back the royal robes, the time is now. Rohit Nandan is shaping himself into a super persuader. If he can’t manage the transformation, let’s build a mausoleum for the best loved Maharajah. 

A Glove Story

In The Heart of Change, John P. Kotter and Dan S. Cohen reproduce a story (‘Gloves on the Boardroom Table’) told by Jon Stegner, most probably the CEO of his company. He was concerned about the wasteful purchase practices he had observed in his company with several plants in multiple locations in the US. He was convinced that reforming the purchase procedures would save something like $1 billion in five years. He was also certain that this would not happen unless a large number of people, especially those at the top of the organization, changed their mind set.

But he didn’t give up. Instead of making PowerPoint presentations about the wasteful purchase practices in the company, he quietly asked one of his summer interns to study how many different kinds of gloves the company was buying and how much it was paying for each. This was one item that all the company’s factories were using in large numbers.

The student did a thorough job. She found that all the factories put together were buying 424 different kinds of gloves. She collected a sample each and put on it a tag that displayed the price the factory was paying to its supplier for it. When the project was over, it was discovered that one factory would pay as little as $5 for a pair of gloves and another factory as much as $17 for the same kind of gloves.

One day, Stegner had the 424 pairs of gloves sorted by which factory they came from, and displayed along with the price tags in the company’s boardroom. Then he invited all the division presidents to visit the boardroom. They couldn’t believe their eyes. They walked around the large table shaking their heads. They looked again and again at the gloves from their own factory. They could see for themselves the wide variation in the prices they were paying for the same gloves.

Stegner adds that it’s one rare event when no one had anything to say. They just bought the idea that the purchase procedures in the company had to be revamped.

Stegner followed this up with the travelling roadshow featuring the display of these gloves. It was sent to every division and every plant. With this he persuaded a large number of managers in his company to rethink radically the way they were buying not just gloves but other things too.

***      ***      ***

Words are no doubt powerful in the game of persuasion. Clever use of words can frame proposals in a way that overcomes the target’s resistance. But words can rarely match the power of action, of demonstration, to wow the target. We need to ask ourselves if don’t often take the easy route of talk rather than action and demonstration when we are faced with challenging persuasion tasks. If we try smart, we may be able to come up with something dramatic even in apparently hopeless situations.

We, the Pharm Animals

This week let me share with you my short article that appeared in Economic Times Corporate Dossier of July 8, 2011 under the title We, the Pharm Animals 

Most of us do our  best to stay clear of two places: the court and the jail.

The court is where we’re supposed to get justice. But the brand of justice it dispenses is tied to evidence.  Because wily lawyers can emasculate evidence in devious ways, the guilty often walk out with a DGP Rathoresque smirk and, at least occasionally, innocents get gavelled on the head.

As penetrating legal jargon is harder than entering Fort Knox, we are at the mercy of lawyers if we are unfortunate enough to have to deal with the law court either as a plaintiff or as a defendant.  In legal battles, which enter a cycle of rebirths at higher and higher levels sucking in more and more money, the lawyers are invariably the winners. Our savings suffer all the collateral damage. Naturally we want to avoid the court.

The trouble with jails is that they give us a forced holiday but won’t let us enjoy it in peace even if we have a discounted 2G licence in our pocket. Unless we belong to the super-privileged category called political prisoners, the jail brings us nothing but bugs and bad company. Not surprisingly, we shun the jail also with all our might and moolah.

But there is a rather dangerous place we sleepwalk into: the hospital. We are like farm bullocks that walk to the yoke raised by their master and allow themselves to be tied to it as if it were the most natural thing on earth to do.

“Infections acquired in health care settings are,” says a 2002 WHO report, “among the major causes of death and increased morbidity among hospitalized patients.” Yet, we rush into those very places even when we don’t need to or we have better options.  We now take it for granted, for example, that hospital is the ideal place for a natural biological process like childbirth. (Soon we may be persuaded to go there for conception too!)

Are we being conned into such blind faith in hospitals by smart ‘pharmers’ – medical professionals who have their services to sell and pharmaceutical companies that have their products to sell?

What are the compelling arguments in favour of hospital births? There is just one: if there is a complication, a well-equipped hospital with a team of doctors can deal with it far better than a midwife at home.

Of course. There is no need to debate it. The life of both the mother and the baby is precious. So we must leave them in the hands of professionals in a good hospital if we anticipate any complication. But why take a pregnant woman to that dangerous place if she is healthy, the pregnancy has been normal, and a natural birth is expected?

The pharma community has persuaded us to do precisely that by clever framing. They ask: “Do you want to take a risk with the life of the mother or of the baby or both?” When that question is so framed, none of us have the guts to say, ‘I do’ because the ‘risk to life’ does not appear to be a distant possibility but an immediate threat. So it unnerves us unlike the risk of fatal cancer from smoking or cardiac arrest from gorging on junk food. We scream, “No, no! We don’t want to take any risk. Let’s take her to hospital.”

Once a perfectly healthy pregnant woman is admitted to hospital, she is treated like a patient and monitored closely. She and her folks are made to look at the natural process of giving birth (which millions of mammals go through successfully every day without any monitoring or assistance whatsoever at whatever place they consider home) as a tension-filled, high-risk drama rivalling the capture of Osama bin Laden. The fear that anything can go wrong any moment makes the process tricky because no one, especially the woman, can relax.

To prevent anything from getting out of hand and possibly to justify expensive hospitalisation, most obstetricians strike without giving the natural process a chance to succeed. In an article on this topic in The Economist (‘Is there no place like home?’ March 31, 2011), the writer says, “Hospital births are more likely to end in Caesarean sections, and to involve episiotomies (cutting the perineum) and epidurals (which increase the odds that the labour will require forceps, which can tear the perineum).” Not at all surprising. Once you involve a professional, she has to demonstrate that you’re lucky she was around.

What if we frame the question differently? How risky is it for a healthy woman expecting a healthy baby to give birth at home with the help of a trained midwife? There is research data, but, as The Economist article points out, home-birthers and hospital-birthers gather and interpret data differently. Each group comes out with data that supports its position. Obviously, the better funded hospital-birthers with the trump card of horrible but unspecified risks to mother and baby, have been winning.

Healthy babies will continue to be born in homes of the poor and those who are far from hospitals, but we, the pharm animals, will troop into hospitals firmly believing that nothing could be safer or more natural. Together the medical professionals and the pharmaceutical companies seem to have done a fine job of mass persuasion.

IIM Prof in Sexual Assault Case

Are you shocked? I would be if I saw a headline like that in a newspaper or on a television screen. But why should we be shocked? Aren’t IIM profs human beings like everyone else? Don’t campuses provide professors with plenty of opportunities for sexual assault?

When the former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn was arrested in New York for attempting to rape a hotel chambermaid, the whole world was shocked. Why? Aren’t IMF chiefs human beings like everyone else?

Sexual assault by anyone is an unpardonable crime against the dignity of human beings. But isn’t our shock in certain contexts unreasonable? Illogical?

The reason for such shocks is our expectations based on statistics. None of the several hundred professors who have worked at IIMs during the last several decades or are currently working there have been arrested for sexual assault. This zero incidence of sexual assault or arrest for sexual assault so far by IIM professors conditions our mind to rule it out in future. If an incident occurs, it goes against our expectations and we are shocked. But that it didn’t happen in the past is no reason why it shouldn’t happen in future.

The way statistical probability persuades our mind to adopt certain inconsistent and unreasonable attitudes is amazing. If I have intestinal cancer and my oncologist cheerfully assures me that I have a 65 per cent chance of surviving it, I feel happy. But do I have any reason to feel so? The doctor is giving me probability based on historical records. About 65 per cent of the people whose intestinal cancer was diagnosed at a particular stage of growth and treated survived. While such numbers are useful to identify any patterns in the past and to plan in general for future such as estimating demand for certain types of treatment, does it mean anything for me as an individual with intestinal cancer? None at all. Can’t I be part of that 35 per cent on death row as easily as part of that 65 per cent? Even if the survival rate is 99 per cent, why shouldn’t I be part of that 1 per cent? History helps only when the probability is hundred per cent. I know I will die because everyone who is born dies.

But we like to look at the sunny side, almost always irrationally. Otherwise why would we buy lottery tickets when we know that we don’t have even one-thousandth of one per cent chance to get any of the major prizes? Somehow we hope we will be part of that laughably negligible minority.

This shows that we are not creatures of reason but of hope, hope of the most unreasonable kind. Advertisers understand this and play on this. When they say, buy this soap or that shampoo and get a date with Kareena Kapoor or Aishwarya Rai, we go ahead and loosen our purse strings. 

Big Bang vs Tinkering

The Indian government has been reducing the subsidy on fossil fuels a little at a time over the years.  Each time there is a tiny cut in the subsidy, there are angry protests accompanied by strikes and stoppage of public transport. Destruction of public property by protesters is not uncommon in some places.

The media report that the government is planning to withdraw the subsidy completely and allow domestic fuel prices to float with international prices. Having decided to eliminate subsidy, what strategy should the government adopt to persuade the public to accept it? It has two broad options: follow the existing practice of gradual reduction until full elimination in a few years or remove the subsidy at one go. Which is the better option?

If every price rise is accompanied by protests and strikes, isn’t it better to have a big price rise that removes the problem permanently? The protests should die down after a while just as they do after every small increase.

Let me stick my neck out and say that the policy of a gradual withdrawal of subsidies is superior to a sudden, single-stroke withdrawal in getting the buy-in of the public. Here is my reasoning.

We take small changes and shocks in our stride. We quickly adjust ourselves to the changed environment, which then becomes the default. Although it is true that every price rise provokes public protests, it is rarely that the government is forced to roll it back. The protests lose steam quickly because the vast majority of the public is not badly thrown off balance by a minor change. They may be extra cautious for a few days in the use of fuels and then fall back to their old ways.

If, however, the change is massive, the public response will be very different. A larger number of people would actively join the protests because they will all be deeply affected by the big jump in direct and indirect expenses. The government may be forced to roll back the price increase. It may even fall.

The only context in which a major change for the worse is accepted is when there is a palpable crisis. The year 1991 was one such for India. When it suffered the indignity of having to take gold to London and pawn it there to borrow money, the country became ready to embrace big changes in the way it was managing itself. In the absence of a perceived crisis, attempts at major changes are almost certain to fail especially when they affect a large number of people.

Companies know this very well and increase prices in a way that people don’t notice. When they want to raise the price in a competitive situation, for example, occasionally they retain the price and external dimensions of the pack but reduce the weight or the volume of the contents slightly. It is rarely that consumers check whether a familiar pack contains 350 g or 375 g.  I am reminded of the way American Airlines is said to have saved $40,000 a year by removing just one olive from every plate of salad it was serving on its flights in 1987. Apparently no one noticed the change until the story came out much later.

Are you aware of any big bang corporate change strategies? How did they fare? 

Murder most foul

It is not uncommon to accuse doctors of criminal negligence when their patients die. But in January 1668, when Antoine Mauroy, a mad man, was found dead in Paris, Dr Jean Denis was accused of his murder. His crime? He had transfused a calf’s blood into Mauroy’s body a few weeks before.

The medical and religious establishment in Paris was up in arms against Denis. They argued that his procedure was blasphemous because blood was the seat of the soul.

In June 1667 Denis had transfused blood from a lamb to a fifteen-year-old boy. It was successful and helped the boy live. The young physician wanted to experiment with transfusion and help people who needed blood. But the opposition was so strong that soon the French parliament banned blood transfusion. The ban was in place for almost 150 years effectively preventing any experiments involving blood transfusion.

When it was revived in England in 1818, human-to-human blood transfusion was attempted. Success was patchy because no one knew about blood groups then. It took several decades for scientists to discover different blood groups and figure out which ones matched and which ones did not.

Now hundreds of thousands of blood transfusions are done every day globally. It is such a common life-saving procedure that it is difficult to imagine that it was once treated as a sin against man and God.

What is the connection between persuasion and the early attempts at blood transfusion? There are three important lessons in the story for us.

First, it is virtually impossible to persuade people to accept or even try anything that is perceived as going against their strongly held beliefs, especially social and religious ones. According to Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, even great scientists have difficulty accommodating evidence that goes against their paradigms or deeply entrenched scientific beliefs. 

Second, in spite of such rock-solid resistance, the situation is not hopeless. But change requires time, patience, and systems. If you go in for a big bang that challenges strong beliefs, you are likely to fail. It may be wise to take one small virtually imperceptible step at a time.  After several small changes have been accepted or at least tolerated, you may find that gradually a big change has taken place. It’s like a bud that opens up in a few hours although you never see it opening.

Third, any ‘evidence’ that is in line with your beliefs is nearly always accepted uncritically. Here I should share with you a fact I’ve held back so far. Mad Mauroy was indeed murdered, but not by Denis. It was found out later that Denis’s opponents were the murderers. But the medical establishment and the public in Paris had no difficulty accepting their claim that blood transfusion led to the death. That Denis was an upstart with a humble origin also may have made it easy for the public to rubbish him.

Are you familiar with any instances where beliefs at home or at work place frustrate what you consider to be reasonable attempts at persuasion? Do share them with us.

Note: The historical facts about blood transfusion are taken from ‘Bloody victory, the evolution of a science,’ The Economist, March 19, 2011. It is a review of Holly Tucker’s book, Blood Work: A Tale of Medicine and Murder in the Scientific Revolution (W.W. Norton). If you can’t get hold of the book, read at least the review.

Carrot Halwa & Cane Soup

Agence France-Presse (AFP) reports from Milan that a clinic for premature children managed to bring down the rate of hospital-spread disease by a dramatic 30 per cent with a simple measure. Fabio Mosca, head of neonatology at the clinic, offered his seventy nurses an annual bonus of €3000 for washing their hands thoroughly each time they touched a baby. Closed circuit TVs monitored their washing to check if they followed the prescribed procedure for washing. Of course they wouldn’t get the bonus if they didn’t scrub their hands well or spend enough time washing.

Is this a case of the age-old carrot-and-stick approach to persuasion? It is. Obviously, the bonus was offered because neither repeated explanations about the importance of washing hands nor fervent appeals had persuaded those nurses to do it thoroughly before touching the hypersensitive babies. Monitoring them and penalising them for failure to wash their hands would have led to some improvement, but also caused resentment. There would have been no buy-in. Offering a bonus without monitoring compliance would have led to little improvement. It’s the combination of the two that worked.

But there are more persuasive forces at work in this act of mass persuasion. Dear reader, now let me throw you a challenge. Can you speculate on the other forces at work in this apparently simple act? Are there ways in which we can use insights from this incident for attempting mass persuasion in our companies?

There are no right answers. All views are welcome. I shall present my views after I hear from a few of you. I look forward to hearing from you.