The art of working from home

It’s a kind of Dale Carnegie meets Stephen Covey with some Rhonda Byrne thrown in. It’s not a smooth concoction, but it hits some high notes.

God’s Own Office is the story of how the author, James Joseph, went from being a gauche, motherless village kid in Kerala to the best employee of Microsoft in California before setting up a business making jackfruit available all year round. Certainly, the stuff of which dreams and daring are made.

The handy little book is also a how-to peppered with short and long lists for those who, like him, don’t want to be slave to traffic stuck between one meeting and the next and basically no life.

For this reason, it would resonate best with information technology professionals because they have the greatest logistical flexibility; they also are the most vulnerable to early onset of health, relationship, family and burnout issues. The book offers a way of achieving what Joseph calls “work-life resonance”.

Memory and desire The opening sentence of Chapter One dives right into what the author means by this: “There is equal satisfaction in being a big fish in a big pond and a small fish in a small pond, the former for the professional intellect and the latter for the spirit.”

Unfussily “mixing memory and desire”, the book connects the salient points of Joseph’s personal, educational and professional journeys.

When, after having first worked in an auto component factory in Delhi, he gets a job with the American company, 3M, he realises “I had joined a completely different league of people… These were the well-dressed, smooth talking IIT+IIM gang and I was sitting there with my broken English, unable to even wear a tie properly. I was a real misfit…”

Undoubtedly, this state of being would resonate with many readers. What gives Joseph the edge is not just his never-say-die personality, but the ready and easy way he shares his ideas and experiences; the book has a homespun quality but appears also imbued with doses of self-help lessons learned.

But he is also basically a risk-taker, which trait influences many of his decisions, including one to equip himself with a better education in the UK on the back of a huge loan.

Big moves It’s not all hunkydory, even though he manages to land plum jobs and gain a range of experiences in places like Ford and Microsoft, among others, in North America, Europe and India. At one time he’s refused a US visa, at another he’s jobless, but he keeps at it.

Eventually, while he’s still with Microsoft, he and his wife, a doctor, move back to India, to his native village, where he sets up what he calls ‘God’s Own Office’.

Cheesey, but it works: the air is pure, the family lives close to nature, he ensures the office is well-connected in every way, and he handles some of his most important assignments in the four years here. Along the way, he also wins Microsoft’s highest award, the Circle of Excellence.

And then he quits to do his own thing: grow the potential of the “sticky, smelly seasonal” jackfruit with JackFruit365.

As many television interviewers have remarked, he moves from the biggest company to the biggest fruit.

Professional, personal In the book, he shares his methods and his philosophy, be it finding the right location for the home-office or the right school for his children or finding a replacement chief guest at the last minute for a high level conference that had been in the making for months.

The book reveals how he managed to do this, on his terms, to his satisfaction and the satisfaction of his company and team and family.

As he says, “I enjoyed the contrast between my work and home life — one morning I was bumping into Steve Ballmer at a gym in Hyderabad, the next morning I was collecting a fresh catch of prawns from the backwaters of Kochi with my daughter.

Another day, I was speaking to a group of executives from the leading public sector enterprises about global engineering skills shortage and the next day, I was speaking to a group of farmers at an island near my home about the benefits of inviting professionals to participate in their farm.”

The books nicely weaves the professional and the personal, is adequately anecdotal and reflective, and best of all, a quick read.

It could have done with better editing and perhaps a few more editorial inputs to make it less chronologically confusing in parts and more substantiated in parts, apart from the text requiring a nuanced evening out.

And for someone who is clearly passionate about whatever he does – and it comes through in all his television interviews — the book sounds curiously detached.

It was Kris Gopalakrishnan, then chief executive officer of Infosys and president of CII South who suggested to Joseph that he document and share his experience “so that more professionals could return to their home towns”.

Bless Kris because Joseph, true to form, leaves no possibility unturned and does a decent job — he has the gift of the gab and the drive to pack a punch — even if his editors fell short of pushing the envelope. But that’s not a very big minus.

Stay in touch The big plus comes in Chapter Four, which is the chunk of the book, entitled ‘Start your journey to god’s own office’ which rides on the insightful and philosophical observation that “one must experience the world to withdraw to a small place and remain happy”.

James goes on to talk about the importance of conviction and a sense of balance between knowledge and wealth, constant focus on the goal, earning the right to return by doing full justice to the current job, finding the right location with reliable digital connectivity and backup where you can work without interruption and from where you can travel easily, and discipline.

As he says, be a Khushwant Singh during the week (refuse to be disturbed) and a Shashi Tharoor on weekends (catch up with family and friends).

Most important, even though you are out of sight, never be out of mind.

Joseph, who now seems content to be a small fish, offers many more tips and suggestions, professional and personal.

But basically what he says is: If I could do it, so can you. Come home. Make of India something more. If this isn’t the audacity of hope, what is?

MEET THE AUTHOR

James Joseph is an entrepreneur and author. He founded JackFruit365, an initiative to create an organised market for jackfruits in India. He has over 20 years of experience working in the US, Europe and India with companies such as Microsoft, 3M and Ford.

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