| | | Good morning! | | | | ONE  (Source: HT) It was Peter Drucker who said that “the purpose of an organization is to enable ordinary human beings to do extraordinary things.” Conversely, when a group of extraordinary people ends up underperforming, it is the organisation that is usually at fault. But what makes an organization? Structure? Processes? Actually neither; the single most important aspect of what makes (and defines) an organization is culture (Drucker had a quote on that too – about structure eating strategy for breakfast). The wise men (there are no women involved) who run Indian cricket do not seem to realise this. They have come up with a 10-point plan to “get India back on track” as Hindustan Times reported Friday. The best teams (and organisations) have a culture marked by fairness, transparency, and honesty. In the case of men’s cricket in India, the equation is rendered more complex by giant egos, commercial interests, and the elephant in the room that no one, least of all BCCI, wants to talk about, the Indian Premier League. Ideally, BCCI, which also oversees IPL, should have been able to avoid the club-versus-country conflict that ails all club sport (international football, for instance), but it isn’t always easy to manage powerful club owners. It will be interesting to see how (when, or if at all) the board addresses this issue. What has been evident for some time – and which became painfully clear during the team’s disastrous Australian tour – is that the bar is different for different players; that past achievements matter in some cases, and do not in others; that impulsive innovation is often mistaken for strategy; and that there appears to be a communication breakdown, not just between some of the members of the team, but also between the captain and the coach. Expectedly, the 10-point plan does not address any of this. Which may also be for the good – else we may have seen a 11th point that mandated that the coach and captain would sit next to each other in the team bus. | | TWO  (Source: PTI) But BCCI’s 10-point solution wasn’t the band-aid-for-serious-injury move of the week. That would have to be the decision of the National Testing Authority (and, by extension, the Union education ministry) to continue with the NEET exam (for admission to undergraduate medical courses) in offline pen-and-paper format, despite the huge controversy over malpractice in the test – allegations ranged from leaked papers to proxy candidates to venal invigilators happy to fill in papers with correct answers – last year. To be sure, an online exam (as recommended by a panel of experts set up in the wake of the controversy) may have been difficult to pull off, given the infrastructure required (an admission that flies in the face of India being a digital nation). And to be sure, an online exam may not solve all problems, although it will, most. It is surprising that the ministry has chosen to persist with the offline exam (even the halfway measure of a hybrid model has been ignored). Given that the Supreme Court got involved in the matter last year, I suspect that someone will approach it again. | | THREE  (Source: Pexels) In this day and age, an offline test is as outdated as BMI, a measure that dates back to 1832, and one that, unfortunately, is still widely used as a measure of obesity, which, in turn, causes a host of serious health issues. Earlier this week, an international health commission recommended that the Body Mass Index is “not a reliable measure of health or illness and needs to be used along with waist circumference and direct fat measurement to detect obesity”. The recommendation was published in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology journal on Tuesday. As my colleague Rhythma Kaul wrote: “According to the commission, although BMI is useful for identifying individuals at increased risk of health issues, it is not a direct measure of fat, and does not reflect the distribution of fat in the body, and does not provide information about health and illness at the individual level. A BMI value of 30 is considered obese , although the benchmark is lower in some Asian countries”. Instead the commission recommended: “at least one measurement of body size (waist circumference, waist-to-hip ratio or waist-to-height ratio) in addition to BMI; at least two measurements of body size (waist circumference, waist-to-hip ratio or waist-to-height ratio) regardless of BMI; direct body fat measurement (such as by a bone densitometry scan or DEXA) regardless of BMI; and in people with very high BMI (>40 Kg/m2), pragmatically assuming excess body fat.” Drawing from these recommendations, on Wednesday, a group of Indian researchers published India-specific guidelines for obesity, doing away with the vague term overweight, and replacing it with Obesity grades I and II (grade 1 — innocuous obesity; and grade II — obesity with consequence). | | FOUR  (Source: Bloomberg) It’s always difficult for the layperson to make sense of health metrics or advice. For instance, many people in the US (and elsewhere because an advisory in one country is not restricted to it, especially in these hyper-connected times) are confused by the Surgeon General’s warning that drinking is linked to at least seven kinds of cancer and that alcoholic beverages should carry warnings similar to those cigarette packs do. The Surgeon General’s report is the latest in a growing number of studies that have countered accepted wisdom (based on earlier studies) that moderate consumption of alcohol isn’t just not bad, but also good in some ways (such as reducing risks of cardiovascular disease). I’ve often maintained that drink isn’t the problem, drinkers are, but who am I to argue with science? For those who are confused, I can only point to an analysis by Dr Vinay Prasad, an expert in medicine, oncology and health policy, and one of the clearest first-principles thinkers I have encountered on social media. He has a 25-point recommendation based both on science and common sense. | FIVE  (Source: Columbia Records) Maybe I will feel differently when I see the movie, but the soundtrack of A Complete Unknown, the new Bob Dylan biopic starring Timothee Chalamet who also sang the 17 Dylan songs that are part of it, did nothing for me. Sure, they are great songs – they are Dylan songs, after all – but they have been done better, by Dylan himself, of course, but also by others. For those who want to listen to a good soundtrack from a Dylan bio-pic (limited genre, I know), I’d recommend that of I’m Not There featuring standouts such as Eddie Vedder doing All Along The Watchtower, Cat Power doing Stuck Inside of Mobile…, Yo La Tengo doing Fourth Time Around, Jeff Tweedy doing Simple Twist of Fate and several others. | | | | Were you forwarded this email? Did you stumble upon it online? 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