Driven by ambition.. but

Guided by values.. this is what this MBA experience is teaching me. i dont know if this program found me or i found it, but in the end the find is worth it. be it the combination of search for my passion with sophisticated management tools and matrices, or the juxta-positioning of making money with doing good in the society, the experience could not have been closer to a perfect balance.

the idea i want to highlight today is the importance of keeping a slow and steady pace, to have your eyes firmly set on your goal, but without losing sight of the path taken and the potential obstacles in it. it is good to be driven by emotions, but it is ignorant behaviour to follow the herd and not pay attention to facts indicating a fallacy in what drives your emotions.

For example, the tendency of bunking a class. Someone wants to bunk the class, some more join his herd. the herd gets bigger and so does the adhesive pull of the herd. no matter the attendance policy of the administration, the potential action, the low marginal advantage of missing class, and the bigger disadvantage of bring rude to a fellow human being, the loved or hated professor.

On a bigger scale, i came across the example of why NASA's Challenger mission failed. on the one hand, there was scientific and logical evidence of flaws in the design which predicted the accident with enough accuracy. engineers said that weather conditions below a certain temperature would lead to the rubber rings in the rocket launchers to burst, thereby causing a possible explosion. however, the pressure to launch was building up. the mission was being followed keenly, with live telecast of the launch being planned across the country's educational institutions. In fact, the above mentioned conclusive evidence led to postponing the launch couple of times, but the effect did not hold on, and the pressure of expectations caught up again. and in the end the launch led to killing of 7 astronauts and it was a pity that ambition had to take precedence over safety of lives.

and perhaps on the biggest scale so far, ambition drove the world into a global financial crisis. the sub-prime bubble burst, leading to a credit crunch, severely affecting demand and supply equilibrium all over the world, sending the world into the worst recession ever. this was driven by the ambition of cleverly making money by betting on a risk someone else had already taken. everyone was doing it, so why should i be the one to not take advantage of this windfall? there was enough evidence about the incapability of the borrower to repay his loans, about the gaping flaws in the financial cycle based on ignoring the lop-sidedness of credit rating of borrowers, of disassociating debts with liabilities to pay it back. of basically warming your hands off the fire burning on someone else's firewood. the result as everyone knows, shook the entire global economy and to such an extent that the struggle to revive continues.

the bigger the ambition, the bigger are the chances to get blinded by it. although it is also true that higher the risk, higher is the gain, but then for the gain to be realized, the ambition-holder has to sustain the risk, and not at the cost of someone else. courage cannot be borrowed, and neither can rewards.