A satisfying work assignment

A satisfying work assignment

For the past one month, I have been working on our Companies’ Annual Reports.

This job was not assigned to me. I wasn’t asked to do it. Nobody thought it needed to be improved upon. I only heard excuses that ‘Everybody is only doing it this way’ or ‘This is enough, as it is going to be thrown away’, ‘Don’t want to spend more on it’, ‘ why do you create work for yourself’, etc.

I have been talking about it for the past two years. I felt the very basic way we are doing the Company’s Annual Report is not appropriate for a Company of our standing in the business world; we need to project it a bit better to show we are proud of who we are; we need to create an image of quality at this level too. I argued that this is a great medium to show our shareholders that we care and it can be a Brand building activity too.

This year, with self-motivation, I gingerly started to do it for Thirumalai. Worked on a theme and got the cover page designed with the help of my friend Ramanan of Ram Creative Chambers. I was asked to do for Ultramarine too as the Company is completing 50 years since inception. Identifying a theme and the cover design to mean what we want to project was challenging, but feel so happy that it has come out well.

There is very little I can do with the content of the Report, and general format as it is all done in the prescribed format as per statutory requirement.

I started mainly on the layout and some standardizing. There again I was not sure I can change the way they have said like in ‘As on’, ‘As at’, ‘The period ended’, ‘The year ended’ etc. to mean the same thing. These and few others should have been corrected in the Accounts stage itself. People working year in and year out in these do not notice anything odd in these. I did a whole lot of corrections – mostly very minor, some insignificant that it will not mater at all in the final analysis. I was against using ALL CAPS.

Since Ultramarine’s AGM is earlier than Thirumalai’s I worked last weekend on UPL's report. On Sunday afternoon after completing the work, I felt very happy and very proud of myself. With confidence in my capability I am ready to do Thirumalai’s report.

I always remember this when I do any job - A man was doing a sculpture of Ganesha to be placed on top of the Gopuram in a temple. He was working so meticulously to make the back of the image so perfectly smooth. A person watching him asked, why he is spending so much time doing the thing that is not going to be seen by anybody. The man replied I know if I haven’t done a good job of it.

It is not who would notice or who cares - Happiness is doing a job well.