MyTake

All my friends in the discipline of commerce know SRCC as the premier commerce college of India. But for Charles Feltman SRCC meant differently. Sincerity, Reliability, Competence and Care are identified as four assessment criterion of trust. In the book titled The Thin Book of Trust , which was published around a decade back, Charles discusses his model of trust and provides practical solutions to avoid the enemies of trust around these four criterion. This model is timeless and helps one to build trust – a primary requisite for effective leadership - and lead a team of trustworthy people. Effective leaders create loyal and smart teams through winning the trust of team members which is duly reciprocated with an intent of concern and achieving organizational goal. Leaders go beyond rules and help making new rules. They cannot just afford to be manipulative and opportunistic and use others as sanitary pads. This may reap fruits for a very short period but otherwise it shall ruin th

What a day it was, yesterday. Hectic and humid. These youngsters, mostly in their 20s, or millenials as we bracket them, were talking on Camus and Kafka - absurdity and existentialism, Ramayana and Mahabharata - idealism and reality, Buddha and Gandhi - aanand and ahimsa. Trying to explore and revisit meaning of life and meaning of meaningfulness, purpose of existence and evolution, they seem to be in hurry to jump to conclusions as fast as maggie noodles gets cooked.  Totally a different generation more into showing off what they know than what they understand and in the process getting exposed on what they do not know. Their experience and exposure of context and contemplation is away from reality yet they make sense and their intent looks genuine. Though AI and simulations, freewill and fortune, power and prosperity, chaos and criticism allows us to dive into the realms of our 'being', I am not too sure as to whether it would lead towards a thinking on focusing on

Capability is nothing but the power to do something. The more one has, the better it is, for individuals as well as for organizations they work for. More power provides more choices and the more the choices, the more one enjoys freedom. This is an interesting continuum, whether we consider human beings in global context, citizens in national context, or employees in organizational context. The agency function gets performed by different agencies in different contexts. Whatever the case may be, one thing is sure that one has to improve one’s capabilities in order to enjoy more freedom. And incase of organizations, HR has to actively involve in facilitating the process of building capability so that the employees get empowered and make choices that are compatible with organizational goal. One should not misunderstand the term freedom in the sense that one can do anything in the organization, once one has better capability. Here it is related to one’s choices and expectations. It i

बारिश की आव्यश्यक्ता सभी को है। प्रकृति का यह उपहार जीवन हेतु अत्यंत महत्वपूर्ण है। बारिश से पानी है, पानी से जीवन। पानी और जीवन का साथ चोली दामन के साथ से भिन्न नहीं है। मिट्टी और पत्थर दोनों बारिश की प्रतीक्षा करते हैं। जहां एक ओर बारिश पत्थर को धोती व चमकाती है, दूसरी ओर मिट्टी बारिश की बूंदों को अपने मे संजोती है। मिट्टी के स्वरूप को परिवर्तित करने में पानी की अहम भूमिका है, और यदि वह बारिश का पानी हो तो चार चांद लग जाते हैं। मिट्टी ही तो पत्थर बनती है, और बिना पानी के ऐसा असंभव है। कुछ पत्थर पानी से मिट्टी बन जाते हैं। कुछ ही, सभी पत्थर नहीं। यह देश, काल व परिस्थिति पर निर्भर करता है। हम मिट्टी हैं, या पत्थर? --- गांव और शहर में मिट्टी और पत्थर का अंतर है| जिस गति से गांव शहर बनते हैं, उसी गति से मिट्टी, पत्थर बनती है। बारिश का पानी पत्थर से टकराता है, पत्थर को चमकाता है; अपने आवेग से पत्थर को मिट्टी बनाता है| लेकिन ऐसा कम ही होता है। पत्थर-वन अपने विस्तार में व्यस्त रहते हैं, बारिश के पानी के थपेड़ों से परे। मिट्टी पानी के साथ खेलती है, अपनी घनिष्टता को प्रदर्

Roughly around half a century back, Alvin Toffler was thinking and writing on how jobs, people, relationships and society shall change in the 21st century. Jack Ma might have barely started going to school by that time. During the World Economic Forum 2018 session, Jack Ma was talking about the future trend of work and sounding quite relevant when he was warning that automation would eat the kind of jobs that humans are doing today, so we need to have thinking shift and develop different kind of mindset. Ardent follower of Jack Ma, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, the man behind Paytm, is the richest billionaire under the age of 40 in 2018 according to a recent report. These people reflect on the call of time as they could think much ahead of times when it comes to market. In this backdrop when we look at the environment today, we find existence of impermanence, dominance of technology, transient social values, changing work schedules, emergence of multitasking, generic work portfolios

[pc: https://www.livehappy.com/relationships/community/celebrate-international-day-happiness] The size of an economy and level of development is predominantly measured in terms of GDP. Economic progress has been determining the speed of development through the eyes of Kuznets and Stone via production, income and output. It has its roots in Adam Smith and the invisible hand as described in The theory of moral sentiments and The wealth of nations. Paul Samuelson viewed GDP as one of the great inventions of the twentieth century. None of these economists would have imagined that the nations would get so obsessed with GDP that all their policies and practices would target growth indicators surrounding GDP and the progress of nations would be measured and compared based on this key coinage.   It is discussed at length by economists and psychologists that improvements in GDP have not translated in enhancing life satisfaction of people.   Though their physical standard of liv

[PC: http://www.mpnewsflash.com/anand-activities-to-be-introduced-on-experimental-basis] Around a decade back while interacting with Professor Suresh Tendulkar I suggested that we should have some question to track happiness level of people at national level by having a question or two in the National Sample Survey conducted, as it is done in the US through General Social Survey. My suggestion was driven by the fact that we lack data on happiness from India and the world depends on some unorganized data collected through a very small sample size. He showed concern for the issue and replied that it is not proper time for India to go for this as there are sizable amount of people living below poverty line and not just this, people are dying out of miseries and the size of such population is not small. Around the same time Adrian White of University of Leicester developed World Map of Happiness compiling secondary data of 178 nations in which Bhutan had 8th rank and India

One of my friends was looking for a house and a broker was taking him to different places and was helping him choose the best. Most of the explanations of the broker were on the proximity of the houses with the hospitals, schools, bus-stand, banks, airports, national highway, etc. The argument of my friend was that these are not the places that I would like to visit every day, rather I need to look at the proximity to my workplace where I have to go every day. This is a real concern apart from the utilities one looks for in the nearby vicinity. [PC: https://roselawgroupreporter.com/2014/09/money-ranks-gilbert-among-livable-cities-phoenix-among-best-bargains/] While attending a conference on Livable Cities, I got to learn that there are three important components to assure livability, that are: place of stay, place of work, and ease of commuting between the two, i.e., facility of transportation and commuting time. For urban planning and for assuring better human well-being,

Sitting in the Vivekananda Hall at the Delhi School of Economics on the day of his birth anniversary while witnessing the discussions on Digital Revolution and the future ahead, I get reminded of the worldview Swami Vivekanand portrayed through his preaching and practices. The inscription in the hall reads - May I be born again and again, and suffer thousands of miseries so that I may worship the only God that exists, the only God I believe in, the sum total of all souls – and above all, my God the wicked, my God the miserable, my God the poor of all races, is the special object of my worship . The farsightedness of his thinking and the depth in his beliefs brilliantly blended the universal conception that science and technology is trying to bring together by making the world look like a village and the flattening is proving to be a temptation for an entrepreneur and enterprise. Yes we are all beholding digital journey into the new world and as Nandan Nilekani had told Thomas Fri