After much thinking aloud, I have resolved to take an early off from work today and go to the nets at Finsbury park for net practice and assess my fitness – mainly the wrist.

I pray that I do well and elevate my spirits to play this season for Ashgrove.

Rather the question is where will I get a Cricket gear from even if I decide to play hoping that my wrist does not give up? Buying a cricket gear doesn’t sound like a healthy investment in a foreign country while on deputation. There may not be a used cricket gear market to sell it off before I depart.

All I can ask for is  borrow cricket gear from the club – sans the abdominal cup, of course!

God, I wish to play, I wish to bowl.

The right time to do something right is the first time. That is when it is best, in most cases, if not all. Want to give a red hot iron the desired shape? Ensure you strike it right in the first blow. Want to make a desired design out of molten glass? The best time you have at your disposal is the first few moments after the glass mould is taken out of the furnace.

This doing right the first time offers us the striking benefit of being able to mould or cast a target when it is most amiable. It is the first few moments when it is slender, amiable and most receptive to the extraneous world. Now, this line of thinking well applies to the human mind.

I am not writing here about the first few moments after emerging out of the mother’s womb but I am keen to state the importance for an organization to seize the first few days or months of its new employees to invest into their training.

A new recruit is very receptive to pick up signals people around him at work shoot out, knowingly or unknowingly, as a part of their routine activities and inter-personal behaviors. He is most observing about the time people arrive at work, number of hours spent productively at work, code of conduct by people, time spent over endless phone talks and about the extent of frivolity in people’s work. He is also most observing about the competency of his mentors and peers who are his first line of interface with the company’s culture and value-sets.

A learning organization must not lose this invaluable opportunity of constructively invading into a man’s mind and sphere of thinking and activity, which can so effectively be achieved through a well-planned, power packed, idea-rich and sensitive training programme. If an organization succeeds in ensuring that the training programme he embarks on sets the right examples before him, that he is taught, in as good a way as affordable, a right mix of theory and practice, that he begins to start thinking analytically or atleast realizes the importance and benefits of analytical reasoning in terms of preventing budgetary overruns, and that whilst striving to provide him all the above, inculcates sensitivity in him towards adherence to the organization’s core value-sets then, I must say, the organization has made a big investment that would yield impressive dividends. The returns would be realized in the form of sincerity, fidelity, and living the core value-sets and, most importantly, setting up a legacy of rock-solid training programmes.

An organization’s strength in a project can be very well equated, intangibly, to the product of skill-sets, talents, goodness, and sincerity of its employees aboard the project. Does it not follow naturally then that if an organization has invested hard and thoughtfully into training its people for the tasks they take up, the effective strength of the organization would be greater than if it had not invested into a good training? Not only this, the resilience of the team to oncoming failures would be also be formidable as each employee is very likely to not let the employer down into troubled waters.

An organization’s success, whilst there are several other parameters that may play varyingly important roles, is determined to a significant extent on the employees whom it has nurtured ever since they stepped in first. The success is a value-added success if it has come out its employees’ passion, competence, and loyalty. But…But to come to a point even close to this state of success is just a dream if the organization has made not enough emotional investment into its employees. And this starts best when the employee is new to the organization and places himself to embark on the journey of career-growth.