Recently, I watched a conversation with Lt. Gen. Kanwar Jeet Singh Dhillon in which he described an unusual situation. His wife accidentally heard of his death not once but twice in his life. When the second incident occurred, he was a commander in Kashmir and his family was living in a military base near Ranikhet in Uttarakhand. His wife heard the tragic news around midnight. The next morning, she knew that the families of other soldiers at her post would come home to comfort her. However, she was sure of one thing. As the wife of her commander, she did not want to be seen as a weak or broken-hearted woman in front of her husband’s junior colleague’s family. So in the morning she combed her hair, dressed up, and prepared to meet her visitors in a dignified manner.
Recently, I watched a conversation with Lt. Gen. Kanwar Jeet Singh Dhillon in which he described an unusual situation. His wife accidentally heard of his death not once but twice in his life. When the second incident occurred, he was a commander in Kashmir and his family was living in a military base near Ranikhet in Uttarakhand. His wife heard the tragic news around midnight. The next morning, she knew that the families of other soldiers at her post would come home to comfort her. However, she was sure of one thing. As the wife of her commander, she did not want to be seen as a weak or broken woman in front of her husband’s junior colleague’s family. So in the morning she combed her hair, dressed up, and prepared to meet her visitors in a dignified manner.
Questions have persisted in the corporate world since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. Is work a primarily personal activity or a primarily social activity? In this context, the above video can serve to remind the corporate world what the fundamental nature of work is. There is a gender.
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Questions have persisted in the corporate world since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. Is work a primarily personal activity or a primarily social activity? In this context, the above video can serve to remind the corporate world what the fundamental nature of work is. There is a gender.
This video reminds us that work in the Indian Army is very much a group activity. Not only fellow soldiers, but even their families with whom they live on post, are an integral part of the military’s larger work culture. So even in her saddest moments in her life, Lieutenant General Singh’s wife knew that she too had onerous duties to fulfill. She is responsible for keeping morale high throughout her garrison.
Evolutionarily, work has never been an individual activity. For hundreds of thousands of years, hunting has been the main occupation of humans. And hunting was always carried out in groups, with equal participation of men and women. What is interesting is that those who hunted alone or who did not join a group on a hunting expedition were usually outcasts from that group.
However, one area where individualism is the norm is the education system. This system has created an environment in which each student can compete with their academic ability. Success in the classroom occurs when you beat others in the exam race. Any kind of collaboration while running a project or creating an exam is called “copying” and is considered unethical and even illegal. Most of the time, collaboration and winning as a team are not on the syllabus in our education system.
How do we turn students who have been trained to be highly individualized into corporate citizens who act as true team players? The answer may come from rice farming.
Because rice cultivation requires standing water, a complex irrigation system, including water drainage, must be maintained every year. One farmer’s water use affects the yield of the farmer next door. Therefore, rice farmers need to work together in a cooperative manner. Rice farmers regulate water use and track everyone’s labor contribution. Wheat, on the other hand, is a crop that does not require much water or irrigation. Wheat farmers will have far less need to share water. Planting and harvesting rice requires half as much labor as rice. How does this agricultural scenario affect each farmer’s behavior?
The test case is China, where the Yangtze River separates wheat growers in the north from rice growers in the south. Research has shown that in the south, where rice is grown, water has to be shared among different farmers and they have evolved into a much more cooperative society. Rice villages established strong norms of reciprocity to cope with labor demands that are twice as high as those for dryland crops such as wheat. Meanwhile, wheat farmers in northern China grew more individualistic. They turn out to be as individualistic as people in Western countries, which happen to be primarily wheat farmers.
A key question facing corporate leaders is whether they can build successful organizations with more “wheat farmers” or “rice farmers.” To create more farmer-type corporate citizens who are more inclined to collaborate, organizations must develop an environment where cooperation among employees is essential to each individual’s ultimate success. Unfortunately, over the past few years, workplaces have typically become less collaborative in nature due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
With many employees working from home, a new individualistic narrative of work is emerging. With many employees switching off their cameras and participating in virtual meetings, building camaraderie and emotional connections among team members has become an extremely difficult task. This is extremely tough for new talent who joined the corporate world in the last few years, both before and after the pandemic. They have not yet had the opportunity to abandon the “wheat cultivation” orientation in their education and adapt to the “rice cultivation” demands of the corporate world.
Post-pandemic, work has returned as a social activity in manufacturing and service sectors. However, in knowledge industries, work has not yet become a fully social activity. It’s time for industry leaders to learn the ropes from rice farmers and even from the Indian military on how to create a truly sociable and appropriately cooperative work culture.
