Although they were inseparable friends, Life and Death were as distinct as Cheese and Tar. Life was always cheerful with a bright sparkle in her eyes. One meeting with her would fill anyone with positivity and hope. Death on the other hand, was extremely fearsome and revolting. People were extremely fearful of him and dreaded the fateful day when they may run into him.

That day, Death had already generated a list of people he would be ‘paying a visit’ to; and was running his AI algorithm to prioritize those meetings. His next piece of code would be to generate a small set of people that he would visit in their dreams. Giving people a jolt in their dreams before the inevitable meeting gratified him to no bounds.

Watching all this with curiosity, Life popped a question, “Why are people so scared of you? You meet them only once in their lifetime, while I am available for them every day. They go through their lives in the fear of meeting you one day, yet do not even bother to look for me. I can fill them up with promise, positivity and possibility of a better living. A life that is so accomplished that in the end, they wouldn’t fear meeting you. What is wrong with them?”

Smiling at her naivety, Death replied, “That is because I am a certainty, I am inevitable. You are a journey, I am the destination. A journey could have ambiguity, indecision and most importantly, change. You throw them challenges. A better life cannot be achieved without changing it, but the fear of change is what stops them from embracing you. And because they do not embrace you, they live their lives fearing me.”

One can very easily draw an analogy of this in the corporate world. While Life represents successes, achievements and growth, Death is the synonym for the fear of change and the finite shelf-life. With this established, one can very easily conjecture what we fear in our corporate lives, and what we miss as we live in this fear. Feel free to evaluate your own corporate existence on these two attributes – the variable of success and the constant of fear of change. What would you embrace?