These words have been immortalized in India by Capt. Vikram Batra (PVC). What an incredible context it was when he used them.

 

But these words were not uttered by him first. They were used by a soft drink company, Pepsi, which wanted to sell its cola using these words. What a dramatic difference in the context of the two. But then, this is what made me reflect on them today – the importance and power of these words in our day to day life in many different contexts. Like onion which is present in any dish that we like, we speak about them not only for things that we like but also for many other things.

 

General tendency that we have is to keep asking for more of what we like or what we believe will make our lives easier and better. Most of us believe that ‘more’ of good things will make our lives happy, easy and better. Nothing illustrates it better than a gathering of friends who are drinking together. Almost everybody who enjoys his drink will keep asking for more, even if it is with some reluctance. Only a few would be firm enough to say that they are done after having what they feel is just right for them. And the people who keep having ‘more’ face consequences of the same – and the people who were able to resist ‘more’ end up enjoying more at the cost of others. In my view this tendency of ‘dil mange more’ or its consequences are not limited to cocktails alone. In different ways it is applicable to almost everything – however innocuous it may appear. While in India in general we have this thought for most aspects of our lives, developed countries have started to see through the dangers of this philosophy. Indian private sector is now thinking of the same in some aspects though most managers, being Indians, still resist the idea of ‘not’ having more. I shall try to explain my thoughts by giving few examples from social, professional and personal lives on this issue.

 

There’s a raging controversy these days about tussle between the judiciary and executive about the shortage and appointment of judges to higher judiciary and even in the lower courts. If the Chief Justice of India says that we have shortage of judges in various courts then I’m sure it is true. It is his duty to raise alarm bells for this burning issue. We need ‘more’ judges to give speedy and timely justice to the citizens of this country. But is that all? So simple? Even the people who have not had any brush with the judiciary would know that in India justice and litigation moves at snail’s pace.  Sometime people spend their life time in jails on false charges and by the time they are proved innocent they end up spending more time in jail then the punishment for the crime committed. Delivery of justice to the people of India is not slow only due to paucity of judges, but also because of the process of justice delivery in India. Before asking for ‘more’ have we ever thought if we were using our existing resources well? Have we thought if we can use them better? Can we remove some redundant processes? After all, what we require is speedy delivery of justice. ‘More judges’ is just one of the ways to achieve that. Has our judiciary started thinking of other ways to achieve the objective? There was some forward movement when the present government started removing many antiquated and redundant laws from the statute. But as any corporate executive would know, available resources are always less than what we feel are required. Challenge is to become more efficient ourselves, while still asking for ‘more’. So Sir, while we ask for more judges, let us also work on war footing to see if can do with lesser of them by improving efficiency of the system.

 

General perception about strength of a country’s defence forces is that more the better – More men, more aircraft, more ships etc. But as Israel showed in Yom Kippur war which it fought against Egypt and Syria together, it was not the number of soldiers but the quality of equipment, aircraft and of its soldiers that mattered more. Slowly the world is recognizing this concept and the size of defence forces is getting reduced for many countries, including the big ones like the US, Russia and China. But does reducing the size mean they are lowering their guard? No way. They are getting more powerful, stronger, organized, destructive and technologically advanced.

 

India is a poor country. Many people go hungry even today. We need more food grains, pulses, fruits, vegetables, poultry etc. Quite obviously, gap between requirement and availability is substantial. We need more. But is that the only solution? In our country, despite many people going hungry we have a situation where tons of food grain gets destroyed due to poor storage, weather, distribution and transportation. We have huge quantities of fruits and vegetables that get spoilt because of lack of cold chain and good transportation. Some estimates say that between 20-30% of our food items get destroyed. In this scenario do we only need to focus on ‘more’? Are we missing the objective somewhere? Is the objective to feed all mouths or to produce more? Once the clarity comes that real objective is to feed people and producing more is only one of the ways to do it, the blind urge for ‘more’ will reduce. Rightly so. Produce more, but be more efficient in managing what has been produced. ‘More’ alone is not a solution. In fact sometimes, ‘more’ may not even be required.

 

While this thought was brewing in my mind for some time, immediate trigger for me to write was a discussion at my work place on manpower. Generally in the organizational context operating managers guard their flock well. Not only everyone is ‘useful’ for them, most of them are stretched for their time and work and for anything additional that the organization may require to be done there’s one easy solution – get more people. More people you have with you, stronger you are in the organization. There’s hardly a thought that more people means more seating, more training, more infrastructure and more supervisors. I generally see two types of managers – one, who are constantly asking for ‘more’ manpower. And second, who believe that in the interest of the organization we should have least manpower. So, on one hand we have more number of people than we ideally require to finish a task and on the other hand we have lesser number of hands to do the same task. While the first situation results in higher expenses, clutter, redundancies, layering and more supervision resulting in poor quality, second situation means that the staffing is inadequate, people overworked and unhappy, again resulting in poor output. Except for few organizations, focus is hardly ever on the task, right processes, technology, better output and manpower suited to the same. Generally in Indian context, at operating level at least, tendency of asking for ‘more’ is overwhelming. And at management level many people think that manpower can be cut by a fixed percentage without having any adverse impact on the system. With operating managers there’s a belief that more people, more resources, higher salaries and bonuses are sure recipes of success. In fact, often I have observed that ’more’ people create more layers, supervisors and approvers, ‘more’ controls, even more cumbersome processes, more inefficiencies, poor output, appointment of consultants, more expenses and more pain. Manpower is often seen in terms of head count and its impact on expenses rather than the task, requirement, best processes, output required, positive and negative impact on business.

 

Ask any sales manager about advertising. Every sales manager would want to have more advertising, better and expensive media and more shelf space. These are the essential tools to get higher sales. But if that was true, it was very easy for any organization to get higher sales by spending more in advertising. A true sales professional knows that ultimately it is the salesman on ground that makes all the difference. It is his salesmanship, trust and connect with the borrower, his connect with the trade partners that makes all the difference. I remember my trainee days in corporate world. VIP was the most popular luggage brand. But the dealer used to tell me beforehand that to which customer he will sell VIP and to which the lesser known competitor. Almost always it worked. While advertising plays an important role, many other factors are equally important. In fact, sometimes greater exposure in media and advertising becomes counterproductive. I remember when few years back ICICI Bank was in media very often and was probably top of the mind recall for people, it had to face a severe backlash for deficient customer service. Similar deficiency by a different bank was acceptable but not ICICI Bank. To some extent it had to pay for ‘more’ exposure to media. So ‘more’ is not a panacea.

 

Now I come to the individual. I have lived a large part of my life in north India. Generally space is not much of a constraint there. So people have large houses, large rooms, large furniture, large wardrobes, lot of clutter and surprisingly, very little vacant space. So much for ‘more’. But even then people were generally clamouring for bigger flats. When I came to Mumbai I was slightly concerned about smaller flats. But as I started living and absorbing Mumbai, I found that these smaller flats were very comfortable, efficient and easy to maintain. People never really complained for lack of space. Everything that they had in their homes was made to conserve space and homes were very comfortable. I was surprised to see one room apartments having amazing space utilization and comfort.  We can’t get a better example where ‘less’ was so efficiently used and was acceptable to people. Whereas ‘more’ of north India resulted in large houses that accumulated lot of things that were not really required.

 

Another example I can recall just now is the number of helping hands that most middle class families have at home. Often there’s one maid servant. But then it is felt that two would be better with distributed work and lesser dependence on one person – if one is on leave other can still manage the work. But then if one was on leave once a week, means one day a week, now two maid servants mean that on two days a week one of them would be on leave. Oh! the problem is still unresolved – since now instead of one day a week there was disruption twice a week. So a third and then fourth one comes. But more means more instructions, more supervision and more leaves. I have seen people speaking about getting a supervisor for them because now they were tired of dealing with so many maid servants. And of course ‘more holidays’ taken by them. Suddenly, people realize that they were better off with one helping hand only.  ‘More’ was not really a solution.

 

But then, we still say ‘dil mange more’ in many other areas of our lives – more clothes, cars, vacations, mobile phones etc. We therefore see people who keep buying clothes, have their ward robes overflowing, but still wearing those 5-8 dresses repeatedly. Do they really need so many clothes? Are they using them? Chances are that they may not remember many dresses and some they may be wearing once or twice a year only. Despite that there’s a frequent crib that ‘I don’t have anything good to wear’. This is not limited to clothes alone. As I had mentioned earlier, it is applicable to many things like furniture, mobile phones, computers etc. And more of each such thing results in clutter and sub-optimal utilization of each. Haven’t we seen houses that are overflowing with goods, all cluttered, dirty and people still using just few of the items that they have?

 

My Little Thought Of Life in this context is that while our ‘dil’ may always ask for ‘more’, while we may feel that more of something is the only solution that we have, it may not be the case. We are aware that our requirements always stay ahead of the resources that we have. But even assuming that we have adequate resources, ‘more’ may not be the right solution. And this is applicable to all aspects of our lives, whether it is national, organizational or personal. While sometimes ‘more’ may be genuinely required, whether it is the number of judges, food items, manpower and clothes, a lot can be done within the existing resources. But to do that it is essential to focus on the objective and end result desired rather than the numbers alone. If we stay focussed on delivery of justice, feeding all, giving good output rather than head count of people, dressing well rather than number of dresses we have,  we will suddenly find that we achieve better results, all across. Our efficiencies and quality will be better, costs lower, resource utilization better and less cluttered lives.

 

To my dear friends and readers I wish an ability to understand the real objectives of their desire for ‘more’ before going for it and asking themselves again if ‘more’ is the best option.