The Bob Biswas Paradox: Do you really know your employee management lessons from” Kahaani the movie”

“Nomoskar, Main Bob Biswas Dr Ghosh ?”
“Yes”
“Ek Minute”
Shot rings out

(Image Source: Balcony beats)

This was a brilliantly shot scene from the movie “Kahaani “where a down and out under performing insurance agent is actually a very good contract killer. The character played by actor Saswata Chatterjee was so scary and so real that I suddenly feel that could have been anyone. This was not Antonio Banderas from the movie ’Assassins’ who spotted long hair and a funny accent. Bob Biswas was someone who could be living in my neighborhood or a passenger in your bus or a colleague sharing a cubicle.



(Bob Biswas clips from Kahaani: Source You Tube)

There is actually a scene where his boss gives him a hard time on his sales number; I wonder if he knew his true identity he would have thought twice before bringing the numbers up. This actually brings me to a question; do corporations really know their employees?

Let’s look at some real life examples.

Satish Gupta was a technology expert with Infosys, the Bangalore based IT giant. He was young, intelligent and respectable. Infosys also prides itself as being a value driven organization and have good checks and balances to get the right people on board. But in 2011 Satish Gupta shocked the nation by murdering his wife. This was not a spur of the moment action, but carefully planned and orchestrated. Did anyone see this coming?

There have been many such cases where the employers have no idea who their employee really is, unless and until he is discovered. But the challenge is that almost 90% of such employees go undiscovered.

I remember many years ago when I was still a college, a very high profile under world shooter was arrested. He had been masquerading as a school teacher for almost 5 years before the police caught hold of him. The shooter looked every part like the school teacher, he wore thick glasses, had a beard and wore Kurta and trousers with a Kohlapuri chappal. Hard to make out who he really was until the cops got a tip off.

Today as more and more people enter the services sector it is becoming increasing difficult to find out who an employee really is. There are many Bob Biswas’s among us and we would never know the truth about them.

So is there something we can do to identify these individuals among the crowd.
These are some ideas that I have that can be implemented.

1. Schools and colleges should play greater attention to psychographic evaluation and counseling of all students. This is to identify is there is any hidden anger or psychological issues with the individual.
2. Recruiters while recruiting should also make this mandatory, in my 12 years as sales and marketing professional I have never gone through an evaluation.
3. Organizations themselves should have such evaluations during the annual appraisal cycles. Not only does this help the individual it also helps the organization is identifying employees that are stressed out and need counseling or more emphasis on work life balance.

There could be many other techniques and I would welcome your suggestions on the same.

Till then Nomoskar.