Lumpers and Splitters

I was listening to Neil Degrasse Tyson's interview on the Diary of a CEO today. When he described some aspects of the universe and of the big bang, I couldn't help but connect the dots to spirituality and eastern mysticism. I don't know where and how I learned these items, perhaps from the Tao of Physics or from Carl Sagan's Cosmos - the connection from ancient Hindu-Buddhist philosophy and astrophysics is uncanny.

Which led me to the broader question - I see too many similarities between things. At an abstract level, everything is the same. From the Neil Degrasse Tyson interview - we humans have a 20% overlap in DNA with a banana. So I end up seeing everything as connected, similar and the same.

There are people who see the micro differences between things and they treat them as completely separate threads. Why does this happen? Are there actually different types of people who look at the world in these different ways? I put the hypothesis and observations into my friend Gemini, and I got a fascinating insight which makes a lot of sense.

The Framework: Lumpers vs. Splitters

In the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin popularised a concept that biologists, psychologists, and philosophers still use today: the world is divided into people who like to group things together (Lumpers) and people who like to separate them (Splitters).

Dimension	Lumpers (You)	Splitters
Core Focus	Similarities, patterns, and overarching systems.	Differences, distinctions, and specific details.
Thinking Style	Synthetic / Holistic: Integrates information across boundaries.	Analytical / Reductionist: Breeds precision by dissecting parts.
The Universe	A single, continuous fabric (e.g., "We are all stardust").	A collection of distinct particles and individual laws.
Risk	Over-generalisation (seeing connections that might be superficial).	Missing the forest for the trees (getting lost in the minutiae).

I am definitely a lumper!

I got curious as to what percentages of the world were lumpers vs splitters?

The Strict Splitters (The Linear Detailers): ~40% – 50%

This is the single largest default setting in modern society. These individuals possess a highly reductionist cognitive style.

• The Psychology: They process information linearly, focus on concrete data, and are highly uncomfortable with ambiguity. In personality theory, they score very high in Conscientiousness (specifically orderliness and duty) and low to moderate in Openness.

• The View: They create clarity by drawing sharp lines. To them, things are defined by how they differ from other things. They run corporate compliance, deep engineering, accounting, and legal frameworks perfectly because they spot the 1% difference that could break the rule.

The Fluid Lumpers (The Big-Picture Synthesizers): ~15% – 20%

This is where your brain lives. True natural "Lumpers"—people who default immediately to high abstraction, universal patterns, and macro-systems—are in the minority.

• The Psychology: This maps cleanly to people who score in the top 15-20% for "Openness to Experience" on the Big Five personality index. They are driven by curiosity, conceptual frameworks, and what psychologists call divergent thinking.

• The View: They see the forest, not the trees. They are the group most likely to instantly connect an astrophysics lecture to an ancient philosophy text because they track the structural layout of ideas, not the localised vocabulary.

The Situational Shifters (The Bilinguals): ~30% – 40%

A large portion of the population sits in the middle and shifts based on the context.

• The Psychology: They might be Lumpers when daydreaming or listening to a podcast, but they can ruthlessly force themselves to be Splitters the moment they open a spreadsheet or plan a calendar. They possess high cognitive flexibility, moving back and forth between wide-angle and macro-zoom depending on what the environment demands.

On a day-to-day basis, I don't meet too many lumpers. It turns out, we are a smaller percentage of the population as well. The people who do well in corporate life, are the splitters. Maybe, the bilinguals too! My kind - the lumpers are rare and do not rise up. Plus, we might start sounding cynical, and end up sounding like nothing matters. Eventually.

I then wanted to go down the rabbit hole of what my place in the corporate or a working world would be. And thanks again to my thinking partner for coming up with these options.

1. Growth & Go-To-Market (GTM) Strategy

True growth marketing isn't about tweaking a single ad copy; it's about ecosystem thinking. You have to connect the dots between product value, customer psychology, market dynamics, and sales pipelines. A pure Splitter gets lost optimising a single email sequence; a Lumper looks at the whole engine and says, "Our demand generation is failing because the narrative doesn't match the market's current pain point."

2. High-Level Consulting & Fractional Leadership

Fractional leaders and high-level consultants are brought in precisely because internal teams are stuck in the mud of "busyness." When an organization is bogged down by internal bureaucracy, politics, and narrow viewpoints, they need an outsider who can walk in, look at the chaos, and instantly see the underlying pattern. You win in these roles because you can scale a concept from 50k to 500k users by applying a universal growth framework, rather than getting stuck in the local weeds.

3. Turnarounds and "Fixer" Roles

When a business unit or a project is broken, Splitters will try to fix it by tweaking the minor details of their specific departments. A Lumper can look at the cross-functional mess—how Product relates to Marketing, how Marketing relates to Sales compliance—and diagnose the systemic breakdown.

And so connecting the dots we arrive here. What next? That's a genuine challenge for us Lumpers!

The cosmic dust thinking takes you to beautiful places, but to be understood by the Splitters requires some serious translations.

The Ref didn’t lose you the game. You did.

I spend a lot of time around teenagers on basketball courts. And what I’ve noticed — more than any particular skill or lack of it — is a pattern that shows up again and again, in players of all ages and abilities: the moment something goes wrong, the search for someone to blame begins.

The ref made a bad call. The other team got away with a foul. The court was slippery. The coach didn’t give them enough playing time. And sometimes — honestly — these things are true. The ref does miss calls. Life isn’t always fair. The playing field isn’t always level.

But I’ve started to notice something else too: the players who spend their energy on those grievances are the ones who lose twice. Once on the scoreboard. And once inside their own heads.

Why Victimhood Feels So Good

Blame is seductive. It’s emotionally satisfying in the moment because it removes the discomfort of accountability. If it’s the ref’s fault, then nothing about how you played needs to change. Your ego stays intact. Your self-image remains undisturbed.

Parents often make this worse without realising it. When a parent on the sideline joins the chorus — “the refs were terrible today,” “that was so unfair” — they think they’re being supportive. What they’re actually doing is teaching their child that external blame is a valid response to adversity. And that lesson doesn’t stay on the court. It follows a kid into school, into work, into relationships.

The victimhood habit, once formed, is remarkably portable.

What You Actually Give Up

Here’s the real cost: the moment you hand responsibility to an external cause, you also hand over your agency. You give away the one thing that is always, unambiguously yours — how you respond.

The bad call has already happened. It is done. Unchangeable. The ref isn’t going to reverse it because you argued. Your teammates aren’t going to play better because you’re visibly furious. The other team isn’t going to respect you more because you lost your cool. All that energy — the frustration, the argument, the slow burn of injustice — it goes nowhere useful. It just makes you smaller than the moment.

Meanwhile, thirty seconds have passed. And in those thirty seconds, something else happened on the court that you completely missed.

What the Greats Actually Did

Michael Jordan played in an era when the game was rougher, the calls were inconsistent, and the pressure was immense. He had every reason to feel the game owed him something. Instead, he said this:

“I can accept failure. Everyone fails at something. But I can’t accept not trying.”

He wasn’t talking about refs. He wasn’t talking about circumstances. He was talking about himself — the only variable he could actually control.

Kobe Bryant built an entire philosophy — what he called the Mamba Mentality — around a similar idea. Not toughness in the macho sense, but radical self-examination:

“What separates great players from all-time great players is their ability to self-assess, diagnose weaknesses, and turn those flaws into strengths.”

Not blame the environment. Not point at the system. Look inward. Ask harder questions. Do the work.

This Isn’t Just About Basketball

I see the same pattern everywhere once you start looking. In workplaces, people who blame management, the economy, or their colleagues for stalled careers — and never once ask what they could do differently. This includes my own behavior and pattern of response for things don't go my own way!

In relationships, where one person is always the wronged party and nothing is ever their fault. In careers, where talented people stay stuck because the conditions are never quite right.

The question isn’t whether something unfair happened. It probably did. Unfair things happen to everyone. The question is whether you’re going to let that unfair thing write the rest of the story.

Because here’s what I’ve noticed about the people who consistently get better — at basketball, at work, at life: they have a remarkably short memory for grievances and a remarkably long memory for lessons. They process what happened, extract what’s useful, and move forward. They don’t carry the ref’s bad call into the next quarter.

How to Actually Turn It Around

This isn’t about toxic positivity or pretending that unfairness doesn’t exist. It’s about a very specific mental shift: from “what happened to me” to “what do I do next.”

When something goes wrong — on the court, in a meeting, in a conversation — give yourself a moment to feel the frustration. That’s human. But then ask: what, in this situation, is actually within my control? What could I have done differently? What can I do differently right now?

It’s a small shift in question, but it’s a massive shift in direction. One keeps you facing backward. The other turns you toward what’s actually possible.

And for the parents reading this: the most powerful thing you can do on that sideline isn’t defend your child from every unfair call. It’s model what it looks like to absorb a setback with grace and keep going. That’s the lesson that travels.

Own Your Game

The best players I’ve ever watched — not just the most talented, but the ones who genuinely kept getting better — weren’t the ones who got every call. They were the ones who made the calls irrelevant.

They played in a way that was so focused, so locked in on what they could control, that the ref faded into the background. The noise on the sidelines faded. The scoreboard, for stretches, faded. There was just the game, and what they were going to do in it.

That’s not something you’re born with. It’s something you practise. And it starts with a very simple decision: to stop waiting for the world to be fair, and start playing the game you actually have.

Refs miss calls. Own your game anyway.

Asha Bhosle, the legend

Asha ji was a favourite in our house. Amma loved her because she making her name famous. She always said that she a lot more versatile than her sister, Lata.

Her death ignited a curiosity to explore what her last recorded song was. It was a collab song with a British band called the Gorillaz. I had heard about them in Australian news media. She had her way of working on collabs with many artists. The most famous ones I remember are Brett Lee, and of course I've heard sing with Adnan Sami. But this was a different type of song. The lyrics were powerful. It somehow held my attention for a few days!

In her own words, she had posted this on Instagram. 

"The song ‘The Shadowy Light’ holds deep meaning for me. Visiting Varanasi and travelling along the most sacred river Ganges, observing closely what I saw, I understood the meaning of life, who I was and what I was supposed to do on earth.

On ‘The Shadowy Light’, my crossing this deep river signifies my life’s journey… my birth, my relationships, my dedication to music, my achievements and my duties as a daughter, mother, sister, wife and a Hindu Indian. The boatman is my music, my guide across this river of life and when I get to the other side, my journey shall be complete. I shall attain moksha (ultimate freedom) wherein I shall become one of the thousands of sounds floating all around us. If you put some of them together, they form a beautiful tune. Therefore, I shall become one of those sounds, which shall eventually become a musical note in a beautiful song which shall be heard by several generations for thousands of years. This freedom to become one with nature is what awaits me on the other side of the river.” - Asha Bhosle"

This was like - she sang her own farewell song. How beautiful! Especially the part about her disintegrating into sounds. Brought back so many memories and thoughts about the passing away of Amma too. She was also Asha. Her death was mourned. She had lived a beautiful life, with a beautiful mind. One of giving - always caring.

Tributes have been flowing from all parts of the world. Every major news outlet had coverage on her passing away, including so many from Pakistan and all over the world. 

I was worried about opening any comments section on social media. That's a different topic altogether.

For now, I feel like the continuity of generations of music lovers has been broken. Her songs, voice and versatility will live into hundreds and thousands of years. She was a legend.

Consume media or create something

This blog is a written expression of the middle in my head. The middle is just there. Can't do nothing about it. I even had a muddle deciding between nothing and anything in the previous sentence. Back to the muddle ...
In the absence of the writing, I'll end up consuming more useless content. 90% of which I can do nothing about. Or they don't even interest me, remotely.
This blog a digital footprint of my mind. I have stuff written in other places too, but those are not for public consumption.
I have managed to type so much without actually saying anything. So ...

Arnie's 6 rules of success

I was part of a leadership course at work and the introduction was done by our CEO. He showed us an old graduation ceremony in which Arnold Schwarzenegger was the key note speaker. Besides the fact that he simplified and made the concept of leadership really easy to comprehend, he was very articulate and actually inspiring. Without knowing too much about his background and his struggle, the way he told his story was entertaining. He did come across as an authentic person too.

So, what are the 6 rules of leadership?

Rule #1: Trust yourself. Figure out what makes you happy and pursue it

Rule #2: Break the rules. Following the well tread path can do you nothing in terms of leadership

Rule #3: Don't be afraid to fail. If you don't push yourself to try new things, you can't succeed

Rule #4: Don't listen to Naysayers. Most importantly, the little voice in your own head as well

Rule #5: Work your butt off. There's no substitute to hard work.

Rule #6: Giving back.

For a full video of the speech, here's the link.

https://youtu.be/uvYXMnnO2jg

Email: The most important channel for B2B marketing

As a data driven marketer, I get really excited when I see the comparison of how different channels perform. For me email is by far the most important channel. Rather than talk too many words on the topic, I found this infographic from Visually which says why it is important.

Tax: Expense or liability?

I filed my tax returns for the previous financial year yesterday. Finally! It's one of those tasks that is boring, manually tedious (even with a Mac compatible software this time) and low value creation in terms of intellect and wealth.
This pie chart from IBISworld (www.ibisworld.com) got me thinking on the fact that a tax is an expense. If each one of us, was a business, I would've viewed it as an expense. But, as an employee, I have always treated it as a liability. By liability, I mean, what is left after tax is where I start from as a revenue to the household! I now work in the salary packaging industry - and as a marketing guy. And still I realised this fact only when prompted by the chart. Food for thought - to be smarter about taxes. Not avoidance, just being smart about reducing expenses. $500 saved is as good as $500 earned!

Social media checklist for brands

This was a really good guideline for social media managers of brands that was posted on my Google+ feed by Fatemeh Fakhraie. Simple yet very useful!

Re-building trust one step at a time

The last few weeks have been good for me and trust. I am generally a naive kind of guy anyway - very trusting in the good of the world.Let me straight get into.

Last month, I lost my wallet in the train in Sydney. I didn't know I'd lost it either. I thought I'd left my wallet at home. Then I got a call from Pooja saying that she'd received a call from my insurance company saying they'd got a call from Wynyard station in Sydney CBD - they had found my wallet. Not knowing my wallet was lost was a relief, but having found it and picking it up from the train station manager - a nice lady - who had accounted for every cent in the wallet - was uplifting!

Fast forward to a couple weeks ago. A guy's car was in front of our house a for while and he looked like he was trying to do something to the tyres. He knocked on our doors and said he wanted to borrow $50 - he had lost his credit card and he needed NRMA to come fix his tyre. Again, with a lot of trust, I gave 50 bucks - giving him the benefit of the doubt. What if he was saying the trust - would be rude - someday I'll need help or someone I love and care about will need help. More than anything else, he looked like he was telling the truth. He gave me his driver's license to take a photo of. Again, on the very next day, he had dropped the $50 note in a little envelope and saying thanks for helping him out.

These 2 incidents have reinforced that trust is alive and well. We all need more such incidents to bolster our trust in trust!

There's never a right time

It's too hot, it's too windy! Or my boss is not in right mood. These are all common excuses I come up with for not doing something. I wish to change but translating to action is a bit weak. I'm sure I have company from many people.
Yesterday was Mahatma Gandhi's birthday. One of key message of his was "Be the change you wish the world would have!".
Got me thinking about the multiple excuses I have for not making that last effort.
Change is not easy. The older we get the more ingrained our assumptions are. Our assumptions are based on our reality. Being an agent of change is hard work. Gandhi saw non violence as a means to win a battle of minds and wits. He was successful in so many ways!
How can we implement some basic philosophies of change? A small commercial phrase "Just do it!".

Communicating the benefits of reliability for a utility

Utilities are the hardest services to differentiate from a marketing and branding point of view. When was the last time you thought of switching a payroll provider, or an electricity provider?
In the world of IT and technology infrastructure, change is a pretty common theme. What are some themes that are common to all utilities?

• They are talked about only when something goes wrong
• There's not a lot of excitement about the service provider

But in the world of marketing, everything can be differentiated and worked on. You just need to find the unique messaging or pain point. This LinkedIn inmail message from Macquarie Telecom was a stand out for me. I was so impressed that I took a screenshot of the message. The Inmail says it all for me.

Left, right or center?

It's election time in Australia. The politicians are trying to get everyone's attention on who had a better policy.
Watching Q and A (#qanda) last night listening to the 3 sides of politics (Liberal, Labor and Green) and 2 sides of media (News Corp and non news corp), I figured that no one really has a vision. This election is important for my job - clearly Labor policy has been on the go and is a threat to my job and an entire industry built around FBT on cars. But what does it mean for my kids' future?
My own standing in the political landscape is really mixed. I'm a social and economic liberal. The Liberal party comes close on my opinions of economy,  but social policies don't cut it. I don't think war mongering on boat arrivals is a good idea. That's where Labor has really conformed to the right by playing a populist tactic that sounds like this "Stop the boats". The Greens have a different ideology - but I have seen far too many idealists get corrupted by power. 

In effect, the choices are pretty bleak from a futuristic point of view - however, on economic credentials, I do have a problem with Labor. They are stuck in an era of industrial action and labour unions - where there are no industrial jobs left anymore. We are in a knowledge economy now! Therefore, the grand action plans that are built in an industrial era, a school system that creates more industry workers is not a solution. It's time for "real change" ;).

Regularity is more important than frequency

It's a strange reality that consistency is rewarded and regarded much more than sparks of occasional brilliance.
In every sphere of life and examples I have seen - blogging, eating, sleeping,  exercise ... regularity and predictability are more important than anything else. Why is this so?
Well mankind or even life in general is built around patterns of space and time. A routine builds patterns in our mind and reading a pattern becomes easy if there is predictability. We teach our kids about the Hare and the Tortoise. Yet the message can be taken to every domain.

The boat ride

Every Friday I try to take the ferry home. The walk from Town Hall to circular quay gives extra steps on my pedometer. The view of the opera House and just tgd relaxation of the motion of a boat is such a beautiful experience. I used to do this every day both ways of commute to the office. Sydney is home.

Trying a different mode of public transport

Gamification of walking and fitness is the best thing to happen to my fitness. Ever since the jawbone up band has come into my life, a small switch in perspective has occurred.
What I used to consider commute time is now exercise time. Walking 10000 steps a day is not easy. I have met tge target only 3 out of 15 days so far.
Data has become such an integral part of our every day lives. As a marketer, many times, data is an end goal in itself. How many times do we get thrilled about the number of site visits, page views, bounce rates. Like in marketing, wearable devices are going to explode - there are going to be tracking devices for every activity we perform. And as a marketer, I can relate these statistics to control the way my body reacts. Exactly, like how we know what data points are important for our website.

Being positive

I wasted an entire weekend being a sulky idiot! I wish to make a resolution that I will never again be negative. The power of negative thought is too great. 
Worrying about worst case scenarios is that they always happen!
Here's to positive thought and smile!

The underground river

This blog entry as a draft is more than 2 years old. Did I face a writer's block or a blogger's block?

This story is about the underground river in Tagore Nagar in Pondicherry. Many many years ago, when Kanna mama's borewell was being dug, at a certain depth (about 30 ft), there was white sand. And then within a couple of feet more there was water :).

Amma told me that she'd heard of an underground river used to flow in then Rose Nagar( old name for Tagore Nagar).

This incident fascinated me and in the absence of the Internet, my main source of search was the book of knowledge. I got interested in the Saraswathi river. There is evidence that the Rig Veda was written in the banks in the Saraswathi.

There's so much history in every piece of land. It is just so amazing that Pondicherry has so much of it. Agastya's ashram, the Vedapuri temple and then more recently the Aurobindo ashram. I wish we Indians had the ability to document things. Even now,we are such lazy creatures. I hope the underground river inside me to write starts flowing again. So much has happened since that time when I was a kid. I am a middle aged man now!

I hope we haven't bored out all the water from the underground river in Tagore Nagar.

The audacity of hope

So, finally he has been sworn in. Barack Obama has taken over as President of America. It must be a special feeling for the African American community – after all that they have had to go through. His speech was a fluff talk in my opinion. But, we have to watch him cautiously as his team works its way through some issues.

In India, the equivalent of the blacks might be the Dailts, in Australia it’s the aborigines, in New Zealand the Maoris. All these countries have done their bit for the integration of the down trodden to main society. I guess India has actually done much better than a lot of the developed countries.

So – coming back to the concept of hope – it’s an important fuel for the world. If tomorrow is perceived to be better than today, it’s a great feeling. Change is the buzzword currently – it’s here to stay. In corporate life, will that mean a new twist towards socio-capitalism?

Sea of Poppies

Amitav Ghosh's book by this title was my latest escapade into the imaginary world of books. This was an awesome page-turner set in the 1830s in a colonial India.
Deeti, kabuthri-ki-ma is a regular peasant woman, growing poppies on her field - primarily out of compulsion by the East India company. The company wants to make money by selling opium in China, exported from the fields and factories in India. It describes a time when the 'weed' was taking over the vast agricultural expanses of eastern India fed by the Ganga - to satisfy the greed of the company. Her husband, an afeemkhor or an opium addict dies after an accident in the opium factory. Kalua is the ox-cart driver of lower caste, whose destiny is, to rescue Deeti from a sati she was going to jump into to escape life in the protection of a perverted brother-in-law.
Zachary Reid, is a mulatto, freeman, who becomes second mate on ship from a carpenter, due to a twist of fate in which all the seniors on the ship have died due to disease. He has shown a lot of promise and the Raj has rewarded him by making him the second mate of the Ibis. The Ibis is a central character in the story - it's a former slave ship from America that is now being put to use to transport Girmitiyas or indentured labourers.
Paulette Lambert(or Putli), a french girl living in Calcutta, daughter of a botanist that worked in the Botanical gardens in Calcutta, and having been brought up by a local maid, feels more Bengali than European. As a consequence of living with her benefactor, Mr Burnham or Burra Sahib, must get on the ship to escape the torments of the lady like mannerisms being imposed on her; and more because she wants to escape from her new life in Calcutta. She wants to go to Mauritius too, where the Ibis was going to be heading.
The story has some other interesting characters - Jodu, Putli's brother by virtue of being brought up the same mother, Neel Rattan Halder, the zemindar of Raskhali, Ah-Fatt the half Chinese, half Parsi afeemkhor, and the most interesting one being Baboo Nob Kissin :)).
The novel gives a good insight into the personal lives of several Girmitiyas - giving us a peak into the migration of Indian labourers into Mauritius, Fiji, Suriname, Malaysia and scores of other countries with an Indian diaspora. It also tells a tale of colonialism, on the business acumen of the English, and their justification of the opium wars, which in a satirical manner is portrayed as being the protection of free trade, even if it meant death, destruction and addiction of the Chinese populations!
The language used in the book is an eclectic mix of English, Hindusthani and Bengali. Sentences like "Do a dekho of me" are common. Also, several nuances of Indian English are exploited to give it a humorous quote as well. The sailor speak of Serang Ali, is cute and funny. The Malay-English-Hindi mix comes out very funny and kudos to the author for getting such humour into a well researched, semi-historical account of several lives thrown in together by destiny.
Overall, an enjoyable page-turner and entertainment to the core. It transports the reader to a bygone era very effectively.

Mood of an Indian

I feel injured, hurt and angry. I didn't personally lose anybody or any body's anything - but lost a few brave soldiers. Mumbai is hurt - this great city has been attacked. The whole country has been hurt ...
Will it be different this time? I have reason to believe, yes it will be different! I think the middle class and the upper classes will finally wake up. I hope I am awake too. I want to make a difference ... I will contemplate how, over the next few days ...
Enough has been written on how pathetic our politicians are. There are enough people in developed countries who laugh and make a joke of how Mumbai is burning ... I feel angry .. but I don't react to these jokers. I also realized how insensitive I might have been to others, when I might have spoken of the situation in Afghanistan or Iraq (though I should admit I haven't met anyone from these countries and spoken to them in my living memory).
As I feel sombre and my mood is grey - I hope I will be awake. I hope I don't go back to sleep. I hope our middle classes don't go back to sleep ... And deep inside, I have a dream! I dream of an India that is advanced - may not be in monetary terms, advanced in culture, in peace and above all - that one thing that is the greatest of our resources - love! India is about love .. We will share it with the world and the world will fall in love with us again.