Jul 16, 2009

Good act, bad act. Hard Choice

A wise guy once told me that if you do 10 good deeds and then 1 bad deed, people will remember the bad one. I knew he exaggerated but there surely is some semblance of truth in the statement.

Making the simple assumption that the statement is absolutely true how does one go about making a decision about doing a good or a bad deed. I roughly tried to calculate the probability that a deed at random which i do is good. Nowhere near 10/11. And considering our original statement, that i have to do atleast 11 good ones out of every 12 ones so that people may not as much remember the bad one, i was in a tight spot. Now i know why it is so easy for one to do wrong.

Let us take example of a typical workplace. Person A and B work under the same manager. Both are given 11 tasks in a period of time. A does 8 satisfactorily and 3 he screws. B does 10 satisfactorily and screws 1. Our theory (and the experience of the wise guy) says that the manager will remember the screwed tasks for both A and B and hence provide similar rating to both.

Of course one can't go around screwing every task but one can surely device a method by which he/she can optimize the excellent/screwed task ratio which results in maximum personal gain as well as professional gain. The model can be further strengthened by throwing in a few other parameters like the point in time of the task (hint: recency effect), task visibility (irrespective of its impact) etc.

Am i missing something or was i late in recognizing it? Let me test it and i will post the results.

4 comments:

Abinash said...

Best Choice....NO ACT !!! :P

Unknown said...

@Abinash: No act in this case is bad act ;)

odysseus said...

Shailesh J.Mehta School of Management Alumni Database:

Dear Senior,

I am working as a volunteer for All India Alumni meet scheduled on 29th August, Saturday @ SJMSOM, IIT Bombay. As a part of the same we are in process of updating the contact details of all alumni. Currently these are the details we have in our database of most of you:
Place:
Company:
Phone:
E-mail:
Bday:
If any of these have changed from what you had given earlier please update the same by informing us the latest details, so that we update the same in our database. Please do the needful. Once we are done with updating the details, we will share the same among your batches. Please help us in updating the database.

Thanking you in advance,
Ujjayan Sengupta,
M.Mgmt. (2009-2011)
Shailesh J.Mehta School of Management,
Mob: +91 9967968750
email: ujjayan@gmail.com

Ps: it was nice reading your blog

Anonymous said...

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