Volume 3 · The Corner Cabin · Essay 67
Corporate Nod
Some ideas arrive wearing uniforms. Corporate Nod arrives in a kurta — plain, comfortable, and ready for work.
The idea is simple, and like most simple ideas it is easy to nod at and hard to use. The nod is free. The use costs attention, every day, in small change.
It is worth keeping in your pocket not because it is always right, but because it is always available. A tool you carry beats a perfect tool you left at home.
In any Indian office there is one person who knows where everything is, whom to call, and how things actually get done. The organisation chart does not show this person. Reality does.
An organisation is only a group of people who have agreed, for now, to pull in roughly the same direction. That is all. A small tool, honestly kept, beats a large one admired.