Light never travel straight in corporate because ……

It is a well-established fact in physics that light travels faster than the sound and that is why we see lightning well before we hear the sound of thunder during rainy days. Does the above property of light have any meaning or sense to the corporate man?

Truth alone can give light to us. That is simple philosophy. In a metaphorical sense, truth means light and light means truth. Since the truth being light, truth always travels very fast as per the above law of physics. Only after the truth being traveled to the other end, the details and discussions about truth would normally happen.

The people in the most corporate world generally discuss any controversy or complain or scam or scandals surrounding someone in the organization with great passion and interest. They also engage in such discussion barring space, time continuum of the corporate and would formulate various hypothesis and probabilities about the same incident/episode. Unfortunately, most of such discussions about the incident will be purely from the point of view of assumptions and speculations rather than fact-finding or about the truth.

The truth always travels fast and goes away. What remains is only the sound (noise) otherwise called as gossip and various imaginary postulates of people about the truth. Hence more often the discussions will be about each one's version of the truth and not about the truth. It is true that people also spend less time in verifying the truth.

It is a practice that most individuals in the corporate carry some ‘identity descriptions’ about others. It is very strange that instead of carrying their own identity card, they carefully and consciously carry the identity descriptions of others purely created by them. When a controversy or scandal surrounds someone, each one in the organization busily engages invalidating the ‘identity definition’ that they have created about such people. People will be focused more on proving their point of views and proving the image that they have created about the person than about the truth.

In the ecosystem of the heavy competition, when people constantly engage in validating own points of view, the truth has to travel away from the scene as fast as it can, otherwise, it would suffer greatly at the hands of these people. Maybe because of the above fact only, the truth travels fast and escapes from the scene whereas the sound (discussion about the controversy) remains for long or would disappear very slowly.

Corporate employees need to be taught to carry own identity card than others and also must be told to update own identity through the process of periodic auditing and introspection. Otherwise, they would be always carrying a frame in search of a picture. Whenever they find a picture, somehow they try to fit the frame into the picture to complete their mission.

The HR needs to be very sensitive about the psychology of people in the corporate and must train them accordingly.

Dr S Ranganathan