'GLOBE’, this 5 letter word became the mostly used word in the last 3 months of my life. After I joined MBA I came to know the real meaning of this word.
As part of the informal induction with seniors we were told to make a presentation on the topic “Did the chicken cross the road? “. We made India a chicken and tried to show off all the knowledge gained during the preparation for GD/PI round of selection into B-school by relating the road with all the hurdles that our country faced and crossed during all these years. We were not even 5 minutes into the presentation seniors shouted back “Stop the GLOBE and get lost”.
GLOBE! What is it? It is something where the speaker speaks anything and everything under the sky without evaluating the use of what he/she is speaking. I became very much conscious of this word whenever I speak or propose a solution to a problem. I ask myself “Am I globing?” If the answer is yes I try to unglobe the globe.
Now the question is, “Is GLOBE good? “ Let us try to evaluate it using non-GLOBE.
Suppose a manager says “The project is interesting, tough, challenging and blah blah” crap like that. Will the team ever understand the scope of the project except a bunch of nice adjectives?Obviously ” No”. The manager GLOBEd and I believe that it is not good. The manager instead should say,” The project demands 1000 man-hours, requires automation of accounting module and is reviewed frequently by the customer”. I think the second one makes much better sense to the team and it motivates it to work in a right direction. The simple observation is to substantiate whatever you say with solid facts and numbers at least in business scenario like above with out losing objectivity (sounded like Ayn Rand :)
I participated in a competition that requires the teams to come up with a practical solution to address child labour. Initially we pulled out statistics, wrote lot of globe like create website, create awareness etc. We proofread it and realized that we are talking something very trivial which everyone knows. Then we started to analyze the problem, analyzing stakeholders and hit upon a solution which generates income from a viable cottage industry run by parents of the children.
Let me share my resume preparation process. The most important document for a B-school student is resume. My first-cut preparation was absolute globe. I wrote points like helped client, manager applauded, interested in writing so on. Not that I have nothing to write but I didn’t know separating globe and presenting non-globe. Take the above points helped client (How?) , manager applauded (why? Is it because you ran marathon or Is it specific to your work?) and interested in writing (what? Do you write Shakespeare?). Taking care of “Globe vs Non-globe” helped me to carve a resume which is much better than my first-cut one though both of them doesn’t have much difference in the underlying meaning of the sentences.
Pondering more on this concept I feel that all those thick, huge books that I encountered (I won’t say that I read) all through my life should have contained 80% globe and 20% non-globe. The skill is to read non-globe and save lot of time from reading globe.
If everyone who contributes to information or who generates information understands the globe, non-globe thingy may be the world will be saved from information overload. Unfortunately we are all so used to globe and the so-called experts consider information to be meaningless if it doesn’t contain globe.
Does that mean GLOBE is bad? Not really. Think of this situation, a patient is dying. What should a doctor tell to the patient? I think that he should speak globe instead of giving him hard facts only to reduce his/her confidence levels.
So it is not black and white. We tend to use globe especially under stressed, time-constraint situations. At times it makes sense even though we don’t evaluate it consciously, like the one in the case of a dying patient.
My opinion , " Use GLOBE when required but ensure that the other person doesn't understand it :P". A practical advice to GLOBEing : Start the answer to any question you don't know with "IT DEPENDS"."It depends" makes the other person to pause and think.Use that time to prepare unbreakable GLOBE.
By the way Thanks for reading GLOBE
Watch out this funny video made by my classmates on GLOBE