My Appraisals

During one appraisal, my Superior told me that he would rate me “3” out of “5”, i.e. “Meets Requirement”. I thanked him and asked him why this was the case when all projects were completed with profits. He told me that I do not see the big picture.

So, I stopped watching movies on the TV and only watched movies in the Theatres. In Bangkok, someone told me about IMAX. I was absolutely delighted to find myself in IMAX as I was only used to seeing movies in 70mm. Now, this screen was at least 5 times that size (larger).

With supreme confidence, I sat for my appraisal that year with my superior. I was lucky that my superior had not changed during this period. Even before he could speak anything, I told him that I had watched all the 3 movies that IMAX shows. I also told that I could not see any more than the 3 movies as the other productions were still in progress.

Believe me, I got “5” out of “5” in that year’s appraisal.

Elated at having created such a wonderful formula, I continued my practice and each time I met with success. However, this was becoming expensive year after year as the cost of movie tickets kept rising at alarming rate. One day, I saw an advertisement on the way to the office. It was an advertisement for “BIG TV“. This gave me a brilliant idea. On returning home, I found out the mechanism and procured a BIG TV connection within a week. And I stopped going to Theatres and was back to watching the TV.

That year, I was again in an appraisal meeting. This time it was a new boss. After the ice-breaking talks, I told him that I watched BIG TV regularly. I also told him that everybody in the house has watched BIG TV after they found me in one of the programs. Just to clarify, if he did not know the history, I told him that not only me, everybody in our house saw the big picture.

Again, believe me, I got a “5” out of “5” in that year’s appraisal.

Gradually, I discovered that BIG TV was actually owned by Mr. Anil Ambani. This was a great revelation for me simply because Mr. Ambani had saved so much of my money without any impact on the result. For me, this was supreme business model, absolutely tightly coupled with a social cause. As I was in any case involved in projects for Reliance, I gave it all to make the best systems possible for our team. As this was a big challenge for us, we all resorted to applying our brawn instead of our brains. We used to sit by our systems 24 * 7 and bring it up when it went down.

The appraisals results did not change.