My systems thinking journey

My journey with looking deeply into systems thinking began when I had a string of bad bosses in the corporate world. Initially, I did what we're supposed to do - look for faults within ourselves, not blame the boss. This is because boss blaming makes you a victim, a weakling and a loser, and we can't have that, can we?

Whatever boss problems I had, I was smart enough to not approach HR. I just got the feeling that HR isn't there to support employees, but to protect the "chain of command" from them.

All the "advice" that's out there tells you, "even if your boss is a problem it's your job to fix it," "if you can't stand the heat don't be in the kitchen" and suchlike. But I thought to myself, "Let me mentally take myself out of the picture for a while and try to figure out what's going on."

Do enough quiet digging around and you soon find out that almost everyone has had a bad boss experience at some point in their career. It's a global phenomenon. Across the ages. Looking at some of the experiences others had had, I felt that my "tribulations" were nothing.

I had studied systems thinking as a part of my MBA specialization (management of mechnology). I remembered a case study simulation in which no matter what we tried, regardless of the individuals or the team, the company we were trying to fix would collapse. The system was set up in a way that the company was bound to fail. The lesson was that systems matter.

So I took my systems thinking learning and applied it to the boss-subordinate relationship. The result was the book, Why Your Boss is Programmed to be a Dictator.

And watching repeated patterns in marriages, I realized that systems thinking could be applied to marriage too, which resulted in the book, How to Think About Marriage.

Brief CV

I've worked mainly in the IT (information technology) industry in a variety of roles including product management and marketing, business development, project management and management consulting. I've worked in the UK and in India.

Education wise, I have an MBA from the Bayes Business School (London), an MA in international journalism from City, University of London and a BSc in physics, mathematics and electronics from Bangalore University (India). I also have an honours certificate in psychology from St Joseph's College (Bangalore).