I'm Arjun. This is my digital garden.

Never be emotional at work. People will not look at you professionally ever again. Always stick with the facts at work. If your personal credibility is lost once, it will never recover. A job is a transactional relationship between you and your employer. You get paid to work. Not liking your work or the people you work with is no reason to not be good at your job. Everything you do at work MUST only answer at least one of these two questions. Everything else is just noise. Will doing this get me a promotion / raise / goodwill? Will doing this make my boss shine in front of her boss? Be nice and kind to the people at the bottom - Admin, IT, peons, janitors, cafeteria staff and receptionists. Don't fake it and only be kind when it directly benefits you. Over the long term, people see it for what it is. HR’s only responsibility is to look for company’s good. Your HR may be a nice person, but her and your professional alignments will always be at odds. Everyone you will ever talk to ou

If there was one thing that I wish someone would have insisted that I learn early in my career, it should have been to recognise and implement the power of aligning my incentives with the incentives of the people I was dealing with day-in-day-out. It’s such a simple concept and appears to be so obvious, but in my experience, it is also one of the most under-utilised psychological frameworks used by us humans. “There is only one way to get anybody to do anything. And that is by making the other person want to do it.” - Dale Carnegie I’ve spent days, weeks, months and years in trying to close deals that never closed, in trying to prove to my managers that I deserved a promotion or a raise, in trying to persuade recruiters that I was a good fit for the role I was applying for. I’ve also spent an inordinate amount of time in personal relationships that just fizzled away eventually. In hindsight, had I understood what these clients‘, bosses‘, recruiters‘ and friends‘ incentives were, perhap

Lockdown 3.0: The case of Moral Hazard So, the lockdown has extended for another two weeks and a lot has been, is being and will be written about its good and bad. I have been thinking about the implications of principal-agent relationship between the central and various state governments and how the latest guidelines open a doorway for Moral Hazard . Here's why: The central government has designated districts as Red, Orange and Green Zones based on active cases present in any district. However, this information is provided to the central government by various state governments as health care is a state subject. Each state has formulated its own testing strategy. Some states are going for aggressive testing, some states are sticking to necessary (read minimal) contract tracing testing. There is bound to be a skew in the number of red zone districts in states that test more vs states that do not. Two maps. See anything? Map on left is redzone districts. Map on right i