Domain

Explanation

Confluence?

• Dictionary:

1. A meeting place of two or more flowing streams
2. Coming together

• The 21^st century is no longer ahead, it is happening right here right now
• In this age of attitude & technology, where individuality, uniqueness & gadgetry have never been emphasized more
• We go about our separate ways & styles
• Yet,
• In daily living, we often find overlapping or common concepts, behaviour, manners, styles & actions with others whom we have never been acquainted with
• Others in totally different environments, different circumstances, different situations & different contexts with different difficulties, different perspectives, concepts & ideals
• Fighting a war is like surviving the competitive business world
• Surviving the competitive business world is like conducting & funding a research project
• Conducting & funding a research project is like cooking & running a kitchen
• Cooking & running a kitchen is like fighting a war
• We have neither expected nor planned for such confluence of phenomena
• The astonishing similarity & applicability of fundamental ideals & concepts irrespective of wildly different contexts
• This is the confluence of management

Fire

• Fire is a phenomenon of the natural world
• Layman perspective of fire is that it is scotching hot, pressurizing, unbearable and repulsive
• Yet,
• Science (fire modelling) has shown that the phenomenon of fire is actually composed of heterogeneous nature and different regions
• At the centre & darkest region of the fire is a completely dark void zone where heat is non-existent, where it feels not scotching hot, but interestingly cool
• The heat originates from the exterior regions of the fire in contact with the fuel & other combustion components & products
• The dark region is a cool region despite this intense heat, pressure & repulsiveness surrounding it
• It is an everyday irony that almost all people fail to perceive
• But the dark cool region within fire has been there - it is as much as about fire as fire about it
• It is the fire itself
• This cool dark region (the author is ignorant of its scientific name) has been dramatized by Roald Dahl in his short story - The wonderful story of Henry Sugar

Management by fire

• At the confluence of management and fire, we have none other than the …
• Kitchen
• What & why is this? U may say
• This has been aptly described in a Harvard Business Review July 2002 article of the same name
• It is an interview by a HBR associate editor with Chef Anthony Bourdain, author of the recent best-seller ’Kitchen Confidential"
• Now, Chef Bourdain is special in that he runs his kitchen of a busy food outlet like the military
• He is in fact, the disciple of Auguste Escoffier who pioneered the brigade system - a self-devised military management model of running a busy, almost chaotic kitchen
• The rationale behind is equally counter-intuitive, especially with regards to the present attitude of employee empowerment & flat management hierarchy
• Vision: camaraderie by team-building to allow absolute freedom within absolute rule-based structure
• Principle: lay down the law, command-and-control kitchen as an organization of different functional regions with its own group of chef, cooks & waiters under rigid hierarchy & strict code of conduct
• Context: kitchen is so extremely busy that a crisis is waiting to occur at any moment; externally, it is judged by its quality & consistency, which is purely what a kitchen is about, hence it has been described as one of the last true meritocracies; internally, the kitchen is a whole chain of overlapping processes in which any delays, hiccups, deficiencies or slackness along any single stage would accumulate throughout the chain & eventually destroy the cohesion of the kitchen's external produce
• Demands: punctuality, good preparation of ingredients, excellent cooking & honourable services (excel & bring honour, fail & bring insult, inconvenience & shame); strong, capable, compassionate (help in troubles in whatever way when work in kitchen is well-done) & experienced chefs (leaders) who absorb all criticisms of his cooks & waiters (return loyalty with absolute loyalty); treacherous behaviour forbidden (everyone lives & dies by the same rules, exact same reaction in every instance the rule is broken);
• Rationale: since mutual respect, hard work, superior performance & absolute loyalty are not desired, but absolute necessity, this eliminates pretense, politics, should-do correctness & perceived abnormalities & pressures; people begins to feel comfortable & focus on the work despite whatever external pressures & crisis alarms; people feel comfortable being themselves; Chef Bourdain describes his kitchen as full of thieves & psychopaths
• Result: casualness, camaraderie & sense of accomplishment through the mix of informality with order
• Insights: given the difficult, overbearing & degrading conditions, what appears on hindsight to be hardest, pressurizing & unbearable to others (owners, customers & outsiders to the kitchen) are precisely the ones that the people takes the most pride in; the negative has been transformed into the positive; it makes everyone feel better & focused;