Mr. Alok and the Electricity Bill Nobody Asked Him to Fix

    Mr. Alok, an Operations Manager at a design company, noticed high electricity bills nobody had flagged — and fixed them without being asked. Here's what his story teaches about Initiative, the tenth trait on the Winning Kite.

    Mr. Alok and the Electricity Bill Nobody Asked Him to Fix

    Mr. Alok and the Electricity Bill Nobody Asked Him to Fix

    Nobody complained about the electricity bills. Nobody flagged them. Nobody asked Mr. Alok, an Operations Manager at a design company, to do anything about them. He looked at the numbers anyway, decided they were too high, and quietly fixed the problem — saving his company a considerable amount of money in the process. That is the entire story. And that is exactly why it matters.

    In short

    Where this sits on your Winning Kite

    In the Winning Kite (KITE Leadership Framework), the left side is EQ — Emotional Intelligence — and within EQ sits the cluster of Self Motivation traits. Initiative is the tenth trait in that cluster: the ability to see something that needs doing and do it, without waiting for a brief, a deadline, or a boss standing over your shoulder. A kite doesn't fly because one side is strong — EQ, RQ and PQ together lift it toward Success, the top of the kite. Initiative is one of the quiet threads on the EQ side that, pulled consistently, changes how far you climb.

    The Bills Nobody Was Watching

    Mr. Alok's job, on paper, was operations. Multiple offices under one design company, each with its own overheads, its own staff, its own small inefficiencies that nobody was paid to notice. One month, going through routine expense reports, he saw it: the electricity bills across all the offices were excessively high. Not catastrophic. Not the kind of number that triggers an emergency board meeting. Just — high. Higher than they should have been. The kind of number that is easy to glance past, note mentally, and move on from, because technically it isn't anyone's specific job to fix it.

    Alok didn't move on. He didn't wait for finance to raise a flag, or for a directive from above telling him to cut costs. He treated the number as his problem the moment he saw it.

    What He Actually Did — Not a Vague Gesture, a Plan

    This is the part of the story that separates initiative from good intentions. Alok didn't just tell people to save electricity and hope for the best. He built a plan and ran it like a project.

    He called a meeting with his staff across the offices and educated them on why saving electricity mattered — not as a scolding, but as a shared goal. He then implemented a plan with several concrete parts working together:

    Through this proactive approach, Alok significantly reduced the electricity bills across all the offices, saving the company a considerable amount of money — money that dropped straight to the bottom line, generated by a manager who was never told to generate it.

    Why This Is Initiative, Not Just Being Efficient

    It's worth being precise about what made this initiative and not simply competence. Alok wasn't hired to manage electricity bills specifically. Cutting them wasn't in anyone's KRA that quarter. Nobody in senior management had asked him to investigate. He took the initiative to investigate the matter and came up with a plan entirely on his own — without being prompted by anyone else in the company.

    That distinction matters, because it's the difference between an employee who does the job description and a star who does the job. An initiator sees the gap between what he was told to do and what actually needs to be done, and chooses to close it anyway. By taking ownership of the issue and rallying his team to work toward a solution together, Alok showed exactly the kind of commitment to the company's success that marks a star employee.

    He Wasn't Alone — Initiative Shows Up in Every Corner of a Company

    Alok's story doesn't stand in isolation in the book. It sits alongside other quiet initiators who never waited for permission:

    There's the shipping clerk in a large organisation whose entire job was to track incoming and outgoing shipments — nothing more. But he noticed the company could negotiate better rates with its courier service provider. Without being asked, he researched alternatives, calculated the shipping loads, and proposed a plan to management that saved the company real money.

    There's Mrs. Shivani Chavan, an HRBP at Sterlite, whom I met while running a corporate training project there. Nobody assigned her the task of overhauling employee training. She saw the gap, came forward with proposals for Management Development Programs and Skill Development Programs, and worked tirelessly until they were implemented — lifting employee productivity and engagement in the process.

    There's the salesperson who calls existing customers not to sell them anything, but to check how the product is working and offer maintenance advice — because relationships, not just transactions, build a company's future.

    And there's Chandrashekhar Puranik, an electric maintenance operator at NRB Bearings, a story shared with me by my friend Subhash Shinde from the HR fraternity. When a critical forging machine broke down at 3:30 PM — right as his shift ended, and right when a large, urgent order needed to be processed — four other operators clocked out anyway, too tired to stay. Chandrashekhar didn't. I will not leave until the machine is fixed, he told his manager. He worked for eight hours, unpaid and unasked, until the machine roared back to life close to midnight. He didn't do it for a bonus or recognition. He did it because, in his words as Subhash relayed them, his responsibility didn't end when the clock struck 3:30 PM — it ended when the job was done.

    Each of these people, like Alok, had the same trait in different clothing: they saw something that needed doing, and they didn't wait to be told.

    The Cricket Ground Version of the Same Instinct

    Long before I ever met an Alok or a Shivani, I found this same instinct on a cricket field. It was 1996, the Cricket World Cup semi-final at Eden Gardens, Kolkata. India was chasing against Sri Lanka, had lost six wickets, and the match was slipping away. The crowd — a hundred thousand strong — turned from anxious to angry. Bottles and garbage started flying onto the field. The situation was turning dangerous.

    At mid-wicket stood a young Sri Lankan fielder, Upul Chandana — not a superstar, not even particularly famous. He saw the danger before anyone in the dugout reacted to it. Without waiting to be told, he ran to his captain, Arjuna Ranatunga, and said: send me to the boundary line, let the more experienced Aravinda de Silva field in the inner circle instead — because if a senior player is injured by these bottles, Sri Lanka could be disqualified from the tournament. He was volunteering to put himself in harm's way to protect his team and the result they were about to secure.

    Sri Lanka went on to win that match, and the tournament. Chandana never got a headline for it. But that split-second decision — seeing a risk nobody had assigned him to manage, and acting on it immediately — is the same instinct that made Alok walk into a staff meeting about switchboards nobody had asked him to hold.

    Why Most People Don't Do What Alok Did

    If initiative pays off this visibly, why isn't every employee an Alok? In my work training organisations across India — from the Indian Army and BRO to RBI, BARC and JSW — I've come to see the same handful of blockers again and again:

    1. Fear of failure. What if my plan doesn't reduce the bills? What if I look foolish? Alok risked exactly that when he called his first meeting.
    2. Lack of confidence. I'm an Operations Manager, not an electrical engineer — who am I to propose this? Initiative doesn't need a title. It needs the willingness to try.
    3. Comfort with the status quo. High bills were, technically, someone else's problem to eventually notice. It would have been easier to say nothing.
    4. Fear of criticism. Asking colleagues to change switch-off habits risks pushback and eye-rolls. Alok did it anyway, and educated rather than ordered.
    5. The it's-not-my-job mentality. The single most corrosive sentence in any organisation. Alok never said it.
    6. Fear of the extra commitment that follows. Fixing this problem meant owning its follow-through — monitoring bills regularly, not just once. Many people avoid starting things specifically because they don't want to be on the hook for maintaining them.
    7. Fear of opposition. Change always meets resistance. Admiral Jackie Fisher faced fierce political opposition when he pushed to modernise the British Navy before World War I — and was proven right only years later. Initiative rarely gets applauded on day one.

    None of these fears are irrational. They're exactly what keep most employees average. What separates a star is not the absence of the fear — it's acting despite it, the way the American psychologist Martin Seligman found that explanatory style, not experience or qualification, predicted who thrived under pressure. Alok's explanatory style, in effect, was that the problem was fixable and he was the one to fix it — not that it was somebody else's problem.

    Employee who lacks initiativeEmployee who takes initiative (like Alok)
    Notices high bills, assumes finance will handle itNotices high bills, investigates the cause himself
    Waits for a directive to cut costsBuilds and runs the cost-cutting plan unasked
    Focuses only on assigned KRAsTreats company savings as personal responsibility
    Fixes a problem once, moves onMonitors usage and bills regularly, sustaining the fix

    How to Build Your Own Switchboard Moment

    You don't need multiple offices or a facilities budget to practise this. Initiative starts small and compounds. A few ways to apply Alok's approach at your own desk, drawing lightly on the kind of self-awareness Daniel Goleman describes as central to emotional intelligence — the ability to notice, without being told, that something around you isn't working:

    If you want to build this trait deliberately — in yourself or across your team — this is exactly the terrain we work on in Signature Corporate Training Programs and in our broader corporate training topics, where Initiative sits alongside the other twenty-four traits that make up the EQ, RQ and PQ sides of the Winning Kite.

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    Avinash Chate

    TEDx Speaker · Founder, The Future Corporate · Author of Stars at India Inc.

    Avinash has trained the Indian Army, BRO, RBI, BARC, JSW Steel and 1000+ corporate leaders across India. His work focuses on leadership, emotional intelligence and behavioural training rooted in Indian values and modern business needs.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    What did Mr. Alok actually do?

    Mr. Alok, an Operations Manager at a design company overseeing multiple offices, noticed unusually high electricity bills while reviewing monthly expenses. Without being asked, he called a staff meeting, put up motivational quotes beside switchboards, installed automated timers to switch off lights and equipment, replaced old equipment with energy-efficient ones, and tracked usage regularly — cutting the company's electricity bills significantly.

    What trait does Mr. Alok's story illustrate on the Winning Kite?

    Initiative, Trait #10 in Avinash Chate's Stars at India Inc., sitting under Self Motivation on the EQ (left) side of the Winning Kite (KITE Leadership Framework). It is the willingness to see a problem nobody has flagged and act on it without being told.

    Why don't more employees take initiative like Mr. Alok?

    Avinash Chate identifies fear of failure, lack of confidence, comfort with the status quo, fear of criticism, an it's-not-my-job mentality, fear of extra commitment, and fear of opposition as the seven reasons professionals hold back from taking initiative at work.

    How can I build the habit of initiative at work?

    Start small: notice one recurring inefficiency in your own area, propose a simple fix without waiting for permission, involve the people affected the way Alok involved his staff, measure the result, and keep monitoring it. Initiative compounds — one small unasked-for fix builds the confidence and credibility for the next one.

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