There is no religion in the world which does not highlight the need of surrender to God as the first and the foremost commitment. Surrender is the simplest path to rescue, to relax, to live peacefully in life. In Hinduism, in its holy book ‘Bhagavad Gita’, Lord Krishna clearly says, ‘Abandon all your worries and just surrender unto Me’.

In Islam, a person abides by the five main Pillars of Islam; following the faith means surrendering or submitting one’s will to God. This means that Muslims in their daily life should strive for excellence under the measure of God’s will.

The Christian’s idea of surrender is the concept of surrender to God’s Will. Surrendering to God’s will results in both the surrender of our will to His, in His sovereignty over all things, in which His ways of operating and thinking prevails over humanity’s and Satan’s (Devil).

The Sikhs also surrender to God; they believe true happiness is attained by accepting and submitting to the Divine Will.

Surrendering to God means one doesn’t worry about the outcome of his/her efforts and doesn’t lose sleep if things are not going his way. Also, does not feel morose if things don’t fall into place according to one’s plan. After surrendering to God’s will one simply accepts life as it unfolds, without complaints, discontent, or resistance. God is Universe. To surrender to the universe means pushing yourself through your fears, worries and self-doubts. It means letting go of what you have studied and opening the door to new possibilities. Possibilities that are planned by the universe specifically for you.

Each one of us has a life purpose which is the central motivating aims of our life; the reasons we get up in the morning, the aim we strive to achieve. Purpose guides life’s decisions, it influences our behaviour, shapes goals, offer a sense of direction, and creates meaning. For each person the purpose is different. For some, purpose is connected to vocation, for some purpose is connected to serving society and for some it is cheating the society.

Surrendering helps us let go of expectancies so that when things don’t go as planned or expected, there is no disappointment; instead, there is hope in knowing that everything happens for a reason and has its own timing. Each event takes place at certain time and for a purpose.  A calm state of mind means that you do not become angry or upset, especially in difficult situations. This state in Sanskrit is called ‘Sthitapragya’ which means a person of steady wisdom, the one who has experienced the truth from within, one who is contended.

We fear surrender because we consider it to be somewhat meek state, submitting our power, giving up a sense of self-direction, losing the ability to choose, being enslaved etc, etc.

Surrender goes deeper than that. It is not merely a position that we take during praise and worship; it’s a posture of the heart. To be in complete surrender before God requires our utmost intensity. That everything we are, and we aren’t, every good and every bad or terrible part of us, every inch of our being put down before Him. While doing this, we become vulnerable.

Surrendering to God will deepen our relationship with Him beyond words, but it requires action from within us. It is giving what we are to Him, all the good, the bad, and the ugly. To have strong faith and knowing He will only bring about the best for us. That we are safe in His hands; we are surrounded by His energy, He is with us every inch, every angle.

The action of surrender is life changing. We will never experience more emotional, or spiritual intimacy with our Creator after we surrender ourselves, fully and completely, with our heart and soul to Him.

Gresham’s Law is a monetary principle which states that “bad money drives out good money.” In good old days i.e in 15^th, 16^th and 17^th century coins were made out of precious metal with gold, silver and other precious metals. This gave them their value. As time passed, over the years, the value of those precious metal coins increased than its face value; hence people would hoard coins and melt them and sell those coins.

Sir Thomas Gresham who was financial agent of Queen Elizabeth-1 recognized this fact; though he was not the first one to identify this monetary principle. If coins containing metal of different value have the same value as legal tender, the coins composed of the cheaper metal will be used for payment, while those made of more expensive metal will be hoarded or exported and will disappear from circulation. Sir Thomas Gresham’s illumination of 1558 was later coined by economist H.D. Macleod in 19^th century as “Gresham’s Law’.

Gresham’s law is extended to business decisions also as an analogue: in an organization when daily routine is programmed with highly amorphous and vague tasks, it only consumes time and energy of people which otherwise they could use for constructive and innovative work. The unconstructive work drives out constructive work.

The analogue is even extended to planning in organizations. When managers are forced to take string of decisions – those which are routine and monotonous in nature, the managers are hardly left with time and energy to make some considerable and meaningful decisions. This happens presumably because in as attempt of clearing their desk, managers tend to get exhausted with routine work and hardly get time to get down to serious work and unfortunately, their desks often never get cleared. In other words, you never get done the things you most want to get done, because life is a never-ending stream of disturbances.

It is so easy to get stuck in routine work; this fact makes most managers forget that there is world of possibilities out there. Organizations must therefore give time to their employees for new experiences and creativity. Only creativity can fuel business. Managers must therefore set their clear boundaries.

Carl Sagan – the man behind the popular television series “Cosmos” says “Science arouses a soaring sense of wonder. But so does pseudoscience. Sparse and poor popularizations of science abandons ecological niches that pseudoscience promptly fills. If it were widely understood that claims to knowledge require adequate evidence before they can be accepted, there would be no room for pseudoscience. But a kind of Gresham’s Law prevails in popular culture by which bad science drives out good.”

So Gresham’s law sums like this: if bad and evil is not kept under check, it will drive out good.

]]> https://drvidyahattangadi.com/greshams-law/feed/ 0 https://drvidyahattangadi.com/both-the-jekyll-and-the-hyde-live-in-us/ https://drvidyahattangadi.com/both-the-jekyll-and-the-hyde-live-in-us/#respond Sun, 12 Jul 2015 00:49:51 +0000 http://drvidyahattangadi.com/?p=2575 Both the Jekyll and the Hyde live in us

The theme of the novel of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is about the duality of human nature. The foremost question from millions of years intellectual people have asked, if people are born good or evil, has been subtly responded by the author Robert Louis Stevenson in his novel ‘Jekyll and Hyde’. The author is able to show his readers that humans aren’t born inherently bad or good, they are born with both traits. He has brilliantly separated the good, Dr. Jekyll, and the bad, Mr. Hyde. In every human one of the traits can be overpowering. All through the novel it is hard to imagine Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde being the same person because of their stark differences. It is apparent that Mr. Hyde is full evil, but what isn’t as detectable is that, Dr. Jekyll, who is suppose to be completely good, has those devilish desires which can’t be fulfilled on his own. He knows that everything he feels isn’t right but innately there is a desire to find out about some of the wicked things he’s been told not to do his whole life. This leads to the creation of Mr. Hyde who releases the devilish instincts inside Dr. Jekyll.

There are people in the world, (you might be one) who had the most terrible childhoods: filled with abuse, neglect, bewilderment, and poverty of all kinds, but, they seem to have emerged as strong, capable people who find the good in life and have built on it.  By virtue of their innate make-up of mind, they have grown as stronger human and have made the most of it. Though their childhood has been greatly impacted by the bad, they do not let the bad defeat them.

Then there are other people in the world those who had the best advantages in life, they had and have every luxury at their disposal. They are offered care, support, continuous opportunities, but they seem to do so little good with it.  By virtue of their innate make-up, they are inclined toward doing what is bad. Their bad character defeats the good character in them.

Perhaps because of the battle between good and bad in our character, we get attracted to the opposite of what we are.  Don’t we often see, a nice guy, falling for a nasty female? Could it be that a nice person gets attracted to a Hyde in the opposite person which challenges the Jekyll in him? The lust you feel for someone different not only adds an element in your life that was previously missing, but it also adds to the challenge of it all. It is certainly one explanation for why the sweetest of girls end up with the biggest jerks around. And, the good guys follow the devilish girls. The challenge of conquering the heart of someone very opposite than what a person is adds to the passion, which sometimes gets mistaken for love.

Edward Hyde is not a separate personality living in the body of Dr. Henry Jekyll. “Hyde” is Jekyll’s hidden personality, which acts on unspecified urges that would be unseemly for someone of his age and social standing in Victorian London. Jekyll does all of that bad work combination of sadism, sex, torture as Mr. Hyde. Jekyll did not create a potion to remove the evil parts of his nature. He made a potion that allowed him express his urges without feeling guilty and without any penalty of tarnishing his good name. That’s also why he names his alter ego “Hyde,” because Hyde is a disguise, to be worn and discarded when not required. An alter ego is subconsciously a person’s second self, which is believed to be distinct from a person’s normal or original personality.

This novel is able to explain why good people do bad things. Even the best people want to know how far they can push their boundaries and what they can get away with. The creation of Mr. Hyde was Jekyll’s way of doing the bad things; Jekyll disguises as Hyde and releases his inner demons. I think to find an all-good human is an illusion. Therefore, Jekyll says at one point “man is not truly one, but truly two.” This dialogue of Dr. Jekyll clearly defines that there are two personalities inside of people and we need the one to balance out the other.

In Dr. Jekyll’s case, there is too much good, he feels responsible for all his actions and he knows exactly what is right and what is wrong. He always does the socially acceptable thing and never strays away from that. With Mr. Hyde it is the opposite, he is filled with bad and does everything wrong. He experiences great joy when doing the wrong thing. Eventually the bad starts to take over and this is when Jekyll realizes how wrong his experiment was.  He becomes aware that good and bad balance each other out. Being too good isn’t always the best option, without a little bad life gets boring, which is why he wanted to create an alter ego. There has to be good to balance the bad and vice versa.

We see bad people doing more charity than the good ones in society, which is called “tainted altruism.”  The self-centered bad people do good work to get rid of their acts. They do charitable acts for their personal benefits. The world looks at such people disapprovingly.

It’s really boring to be good all the times. Doing all good work, being morally always right, showing good manners forever, being honest and constantly doing the best – all of this might drive a person mad….once in a while subconsciously his/her “Hyde” shows up. Dr. Jekyll admits that one of his flaws is tendency to be the best. Too much of good in a person challenges the wild child in him.

In the 1941 movie starring Spencer Tracy, Ingrid Bergman, and Lana Turner Dr. Jekyll’s (Spencer Tracy)  experience teaches him how evil Hyde can be: he rapes Ivy Pearson (Ingrid Bergman), who earlier expressed interest in Jekyll. Meanwhile, Jekyll is preparing to marry Beatrix Emery (Lana Turner). Over the course of the film, Hyde abuses Ivy. Feeling remorse over the treatment imposed on Ivy, Jekyll vows to never take the serum again; he destroys the key to his lab, and sends money to Ivy anonymously. You should watch the movie for the par excellence performance of the three actors.

In Bollywood a direct adaptation of Jekyll and Hyde story is a 1981 movie ‘Chehre Pe Chehra’ starring Sanjeev Kumar, tells the story of Dr. Wilson (Sanjeev Kumar) who is a workaholic scientist who feels that every human-being has an element of being an angel as well as an element of being a devil in him. That’s why sometimes even good person becomes satanic in his behavior whereas sometimes, a wicked one also becomes compassionate. He firmly believes that these two elements remain intermixed in an individual’s personality.  He tries to segregate the both personalities for which he invents a medicine to eliminate the wicked or the undesirable element, thereby leaving only the desirable or the angelic element intact. He works hard on his theory and remains busy in inventing a potion to put his theory into effect. The trouble comes when he experiments his invention on himself only. Alas, the result is quite contrary to what he had theorized. His wicked persona gets segregated from the good one but turns out be stronger than its counterpart and he is not able to eliminate it.

No one is completely evil and no one can be good at all the time. We are humans and it’s normal to have both sides in us. I think we call somebody good who knows how to control the evil instincts in him. That’s all about it.

In globalized markets successful innovation has become a key driver for revenue growth, competitive margins and, in some cases, even for survival of the business. The ability to bring innovation to market swiftly, efficiently and ahead of competitors is becoming ever more significant. An efficient product launch requires incorporating great workable strategies and coordination among multiple functional areas, including product design, procurement, planning, manufacturing process, sales and marketing. In addition, as organizations increasingly leverage core capabilities of other companies, innovation has to be delivered through virtual networks, working with partners in a collaborative environment to bring product and services to market faster, smarter and cheaper. Today’s markets are swiftly altering leaving no room to even think. Cannibalization is a glaring reality and it’s better to accept and survive with it. The CEO of Apple Inc, Tim Cook says “Better to eat your own than have your own eaten by others”. That’s Apple’s philosophy on product cannibalization.

Market cannibalization refers to a situation where a new product “eats” up the sales and demand of an existing product. This can negatively affect both the sales volume and market share of the existing product. Market cannibalization occurs when a new product encroaches on the existing market for the older product, rather than expanding the company’s market base. Rather than attracting a new segment of the market and increasing market share, the new product appeals to the company’s current market, resulting in reduced sales and market share for the existing product.

Creative destruction cannot be avoided. When Joseph Schumpeter coined this term in 1942, he was damn sure that the future is all about impatient, over competitive ‘destructive creation’.  Though, Schumpeter’s idea of creative destruction was as the renewing of society through cycle of innovations, which would lead into higher levels of economic development and welfare. He also mentioned then that creative destruction would create discomfort and loss to the existing players while newcomers would benefit and increase value creation for broader society.

Organizations now not only need to integrate internally, but also externally with suppliers and customers, creating end-to-end supply chain processes and capabilities which differentiate on product and customer requirements. Successful innovation is of tremendous benefit to the organization while launching a new product. If the company can launch the product early in the market, it leads to the chance to acquire greater market share in introduction and growing phase of product life cycle management. Product launching time is also very important for success of product. Customer psychologies, customer need, number of competitors in the market, price driven by the market are most critical and important parameters for success of products. And, cannibalization is however accepted by organizations either internally or externally.

Market cannibalization can have a negative effect on a company’s bottom line, forcing an existing product’s life to end prematurely because sales shifted to the new product, rather than tapping into a new market as intended. At times, market cannibalism is used as a strategy if the company wants to increase its market share, and hopes that the introduction of the new product will harm its competitors more than it will harm itself; for example, when Apple introduced the more feature-rich iPhone and iPods that ate up sales for its lower-end iPods, including the Nano, Shuffle and Classic series. In marketing strategy, cannibalization refers to a decrease in sales volume, sales revenue, or market share of one product as a result of the introduction of a new product by the same producer. While this may seem innately negative, in the context of a carefully planned strategy, it can be effective, by ultimately growing the market share, or to please the consumers by meeting their demands. Cannibalization is a key consideration in product portfolio analysis. For example, when Apple introduced the iPad, it killed the market of the original Macintosh.

Another instance of cannibalization is when a retailer discounts a particular product. The tendency of consumers is to buy the discounted product rather than competing products with higher prices. When the promotion event is over and prices return to normal, however, the effect will tend to disappear. This temporary change in consumer behavior can be described as cannibalization. Though, in business this concept is known by different names in sales and marketing. What is happening in e-commerce? Some companies intentionally cannibalize their retail sales through lower prices on their online product offerings. More consumers than usual may buy the discounted products, especially if they’d previously been secured to the retail prices. Even though their in-store sales might decline, the company may see overall gains. The game of ‘volume’ leads to increase in sales with help of e-commerce.

Cannibalization happens even when companies – particularly retail companies, open shops too close to each other, in effect, competing for the same customers; e.g Nike or Bata having many outlets in an area for shoe markets. Cannibalization becomes an important issue in marketing strategy when an organization aims to carry out brand extension. Hindustan Lever’s Lifebuoy soap’s brand extensions are Lifebuoy Plus, Lifebuoy liquid and Lifebuoy Gold, since these brands have been positioned at different segments. Similarly, Amul butter, Amul ghee, Amul cheese, Amul chas and Amul chocolates are various brand extensions of regular Amul Brand. Companies make brand extensions in the anticipation that they can earn on the equity of the successful brands. Normally, when a brand extension is carried out from one sub-category; e.g. Marlboro Gold cigarette to another sub-category such as Marlboro Light, there is a possible occurrence of a part of the former’s sales being taken away by the latter. However, the strategic intent of such an extension is to capture a larger market share of a different market segments.

Kodak is best known for photographic film products. Its famous USP is “Kodak moment”. During most of the 20th century Kodak held a dominant position in photographic film, and in 1976, had a 90% market share of photographic film sales in the United States. Kodak was synonymous with the film. Do you know that Kodak had to struggle financially in the late 90s, as a result of the steady decline in sales of photographic film due to market transitioning to digital photography? But, despite having invented the core technology in film, as a turnaround strategy, Kodak focused on digital photography and digital printing. The lesson is that cannibalizing one’s own products can be a good thing, if it allows a business to prevent competitors from doing so. A good business is the one which can take flexible decisions and flexibly spin.

Marketing is all about reaching out to customer the maxim “When you are in Rome, speak Roman” describes fact of marketing. Despite having multiple laundry brands such as Cheer, Daz, Dreft and Tip,  P&G successfully introduced a custom laundry brand in India called Tide Naturals. It’s a unique product that suits the needs in the Indian market. P&G makes sure that when they enter a market, they adopt marketing approach that suits the local’s taste and tradition. They adopt appropriate yet diverse strategies. They realize that if they use the same marketing vehicles and distribution arms it’s hard to bring new benefits to different customers. By introducing Tide Naturals they cannibalized their existing laundry product’s market share.

The fact is companies must come to grasp with their cannibalization concerns, because getting overly defensive can restrain powerful growth strategies. If an opportunity is large enough, somebody is going to find a way to grab it; it is therefore a smart move to seize the opportunity than the competitor does. In the long run, survival matters.