Aish's Blog Spot

Stupid Questions and their Silly Answers

End of the week! Yippee!
Suresh is down with what appears to be typhoid. Poor chap. He keeps complaining of nausea/ fever / cough, etc etc. I am disgustingly healthy as usual!! :)
Anyway. Remember there was a season, where people would ask you - "Who is your greatest competitor?", and the "smart" answer was supposedly, "Myself". In my opinion, the stupidest answer ever. Ask Bill Gates that question, would anyone expect him to say "Myself" instead  of  "Oracle, Sun, Netscape, Everybody else..."? I have fallen into that trap myself. That and other stupid questions like - "What do you fear the most". The "Smart" answer for that, of course, is "Fear Itself". How dumb! Talk about a question and answer set that defeats itself! If you ask me now, who is your greatest competitor, I would probably sock you. Or restrain myself to a dirty look directed at you, provided you were one of those people I considered sane at most times, or one of those people whom  could probably never hit (like Parents, Sister, Husband, etc). I mean, who isnt my competitor?? Every da*n person in this world is a competitor! My batchmates- few of them are earning more than I am, which irritates me, even though I am perfectly happy with my salary- the people I have to share the bus with, in the morning, my colleagues, all 5000 of them, everybody in the IT industry, everybody not in the IT industry, because they could be doing something fundamentally different from what I am doing, and probably atleast 10 times more interesting... I mean, who ISNT my competitor! I am supposed to leave all these fellows out and actually give the sickly "Myself"  answer! Yikes!
On a more serious note, I definitely think that answer shows a very bad mindset. the pure inward thinking mindset that characterised companies in the mid-20th century. the attitude that would lead to marketing myopia. How do I increase my company's profits? hmm... lemme see... Increase production, reduce costs, buy another company, expand my current lines of production... You get the general drift. Would anyone today call that attitude healthy?
An individual is, after all a small-scale model of an organization. If inward thinking philosophies are unsuitable for organizations, why should they be suitable for individuals? Strange.

posted by Aish @ 12:03 PM