You want me to take initiative. You want me to cooperate, voluntarily, with others around me. You want me to learn continuously and bring the benefits of that learning to my work, to my job, to the company, to its success. How do we get into those behaviors if around me it is the smell of the place you create?

If you’d asked these questions to your organisation, you would find the below interesting.

Sumantra Ghoshal in an article written shortly before his death, dwells on revitalising people and “the smell of the workplace”. He illustrates how organisations wading through those slog overs of satisfactory underperformance with controls that constrains, could revitalise its workforce with stretch and discipline.

He compares the smell of Downtown Calcutta and the Fontainebleau forest in France and explains why most large companies in India end up creating “Downtown Calcutta” inside themselves.

So every year, in July, I used to come to Kolkata for almost a month. Why July? Because that is the only time my children had a sufficiently long break. The whole point was to keep them in touch with my parents. Think about it — downtown Kolkata in July. The temperature is over 100F with humidity of 98%.

The reality was that I felt very tired during most of the vacation. Most of it I spent indoors and a lot of it simply in bed.

I used to live in Fontainebleau. It is a pretty little town, 40 miles south of Paris. What makes it outstanding is that around it is the protected forest of Fontainebleau, which is one of the prettiest forests in all of Europe. You enter the forest in spring, with a firm desire to have a very leisurely walk and you cannot.

There is something about the smell of the air, about the trees, that will make you want to run, jog, jump up, catch a branch, to throw a stone, to do something. You will find that even though you entered the forest to have a leisurely walk, you are doing something else — and that is the essence of the issue of revitalising people.

You can read the full article at Rediff. What is the smell of your workplace?