Back Of The Book: The New Board Room

BACK OF THE BOOK
The New Board Room

Pool tables aren't just trendy and fun-they also make great corporate meeting places, especially in companies packed with young 'uns.

By Vinod Mahanta

Anand Tilak surveys the pool table, he can pick from red, blue, or yellow. He opts for the blue, sights the ball along the length of his cue, and lets rip. "Yes," he exults, as the ball rolls towards the pocket. He speaks too soon; Mr Blue kisses the corner and rebounds. And the marketing manager of Yahoo! India loses his turn. Some facts first: this isn't a week-end; it's a busy mid-week day.

This isn't evening (not that that matters in a company where people routinely stay back till 2:00 in the morning); it's three in the afternoon. And this isn't a pool-bar Tilak has slipped out to for some mid-work R&R. This is the first floor of 386, Veer Savarkar Marg in central Mumbai, the nerve centre of Yahoo! India's operations. This (and we've used that word often enough) is the designated pool room, and Gaurav, Pradeep, Sushant, and Ela are still celebrating Tilak's miss.

The meeting-for that is where it all began-didn't have a game of pool written into the agenda; it was called to discuss the content strategy for a property Yahoo! India was about to launch. But the discussion went nowhere and the team decided that a game of pool was just what C.K. Prahalad (fine, Doctor C.K. Prahalad) ordered-especially since Yahoo! India's office is a designated no-smoking zone. Pool, as Tilak would no doubt testify, is a great leveller. The cues and the coloured balls couldn't care less if a person is from sales or marketing, young or old; and the casual banter that accompanies any game may be just the catalyst to get those creative juices flowing.

Purely for the record, the participants at this Yahoo! meeting are Gaurav Bahadur from hr, Sushant Baliga from sales, Pradeep Rao and Ela Vasudev, both producers, and Tilak. ''At Yahoo!, discussions often flow onto the pool table,'' grins Tilak a former ad-exec.

Not everyone at Yahoo! plays pool; Deepak Chandnani, the portal's country manager relishes his role of non-playing spectator, and occasional peace-keeper. Sometimes, just sometimes, discussions get out of hand and 'the Yahooligans' end up making a racket.

Another city, another company: Delhi, on the 12th floor of Videocon Towers, West Delhi's own Petronas, the Sapient sign and a packed pool room greet the visitor. The receptionist assures anyone who cares to ask her, that between 50 and 75 people pass by her, into the pool room each day.

Like Yahoo's workforce, all of Sapient's is composed of people in their early twenties. All of them are techies, and pool is their game of choice. That shouldn't surprise anyone. Techies love all things short and snappy (except code); not for them, 90 minute football games, or half-day tennis-ball cricket matches.

Pool is just right; a game lasts for anything between 10 and 12 minutes. ''You work better after a few shots at the balls,'' laughs Ashu Mahajan, an engineer working with Sapient who was responsible for the introduction of the game in the company. He picked it up the way itinerant techies pick up their non-work skills, while working overseas.

As a tech company, Sapient's systems are bound to be a little more formal than Yahoo's. Thus, it is possible for an employee to book the pool room for a discussion. Pool is a great ice- and boundary-breaker. "We meet a number of people apart from those who are part of our team (in the pool room)," says Ajay Narayanan, an engineer at Sapeint.

The fact that the senior and middle management stays away helps. Employees who may be a trifle too timorous to contribute ideas at formal gatherings may do so while shooting some pool with their colleagues. Sapient's head honcho Amit Govil prefers table-tennis (they have one of those tables too). And most of Infosys' senior managers stay away from the pool, snooker and billiards tables.

There is, of course, the obvious benefit of shooting pool in the workplace: it provides a pleasant distraction to working long hours, and to the timings of other markets. And the opportunity to play something in the real world, and not some of that odious online snooker, has its own unique appeal for employees who spend most of their working-day staring at monitors.

Pool is an easy game to learn, and it has none of the elitist trappings associated with billiards or golf (both, games a traditionalist would recommend to anyone who wished to get along at work). It also seems to be a fairly popular game in India. Over the past few years, hundreds of pool-parlours (as they are indigenously called) have mushroomed across the country.

So, come Saturdays, the Yahooligans don't head for their favourite watering hole to play pool; they head for the office, catch up with some work, and end up shooting lots of pool. That's truly a subversive way to get your people to work week-ends, and enjoy it.

TREADMILL

Slumpbusting Made Easy

If you aren't a gym rat yet-that is, if you don't suffer from withdrawal symptoms when you've missed going there on two consecutive days-chances are you're still prone to the slumps. These are phases when gymming seems monotonous; when the mind wanders and everything seems hazy. This fortnight, Treadmill is all about the best cure for the slumps ...you guessed right, working out is what I'll be talking about.

Regular weight trainers call them slumpbusters. They are pint-sized but fully-loaded workout sessions that can stimulate bored minds and weary bodies. Slumpbusters are typically superset combinations of two or more different exercises that are performed in quick succession without a break between the sets. Supersetting is a style of training where exercises that complement each other are performed one after another to enhance output. Here's a list of slumpbusters. Target four sets if you're a beginner and, over time, move up to higher numbers.

Pullovers-Presses-Curls: A classic combination, which helps work out the entire upper body. Use a barbell and bench for the presses, a dumbbell for the pullovers and go back to the barbell for curls. Body parts that are targeted: Chest, longitudinal abdominals, shoulders, triceps and biceps.

Curls-Close Grip Press-Pulldowns: The main focus here is on the biceps (the barbell curls) and the triceps (the close grip bench presses and the pulldowns).

Lat Pulldowns-Seated Rowing-Curls: These, as any gymgoer knows, target the upper and lower back and biceps. They're a good combination as back exercises like lat pulldowns have a beneficial effect on the biceps.

Shoulder Presses-Squats-Leg Curls: Workouts for the shoulders and legs are a good combination. If you're not comfortable doing the squats, skip them and replace with sets on the leg press machine.

There's another way of supersetting. And that's simpler than trying to combine all these different exercises. Do four sets of any exercise-say bicep curls. Then, instead of taking a breather, jump up on a stationary bike and pedal for 5 minutes. Hop off the bike and do another four sets of some other exercise, say lat pulldowns. Then get back on the bike for another furious five minutes. By now, if you're panting and sweating, you're doing fine.

-MUSCLES MANI

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