Beyond Home Office

While pursuing a career, one has to sacrifice a lot. The familiar environment, comfort of home and native place, friends, relatives, family and a lot like that. Is it possible to pursue a successful career, without sacrificing all these?    

 

This question is sure to crop up sometime in the mind of any professional and when confronted with the option of ‘leave your job and go’, will decide to continue the same life in an unknown city or town or state or country. 

 

It is possible, that is what the life of James Joseph, a senior executive with Microsoft writes in the book God’s Own Office. Joseph was in his late thirties and was a director with Microsoft, when he thought of moving to his village in Kerala.  

 

With extreme frankness (unlike many corporate executives), Joseph writes the way he built his career with companies such as 3M, Ford and Microsoft, pursued a globally accepted management degree like the one he got from University of Warwick, UK, and then carefully planned to move up in his career. Then, migration to his village in Kerala and make home his office and went on to win the highest award for a Microsoft employee, the Circle of Excellence.

 

The decision is whether to remain as a small fish in a big pond or become a big fish in a small pond, he says. From his life and experience, James suggests several tips on how one can find a way to have a successful career while working out of the native village and how to mitigate issues like education of kids, connectivity, social life and travel.

 

In this part memoir, Joseph also details how he left Microsoft and became an accidental entrepreneur to market freeze dried Jackfruit as a brand through his initiative JackFruit365. 

 

“In the new economy, there will be fewer and fewer traditional jobs — companies will rely increasingly on networks of experts who could be anywhere,” says Ravi Venkatesan, ex-chairman of Microsoft India.

 

Mohandas Pai, chairman of Manipal Global Education says, “God’s Own Office is the office of the future.” 

 

(This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 29-12-2014)