MyTake

One of my students' Facebook status read:  Its often said that nothing fails like success. But I believe nothing is as permanent as failure. Once it gets inside you, it stays there for quite a long time and in this process it destroys everything. I am sure many of us, especially when we pass through the age he is passing, tend to feel this way. Many times we don’t share it with others. Once I saw this post I responded quickly (well within 6 hrs): It depends on the frequency of its occurrence... And one's attitude... Positive people take lesson from that and move forward with caution, care and commitment... Negative people curse it and kill their efforts, enthusiasm and energy. Ultimately choice is with the individual... One must not handover his/her remote to others be it individuals or objects. It did not just end there. It took me back to my own experiences and interactions. It drove me to the lessons that I learnt all the while. It has been really interesting when...

Few weeks back I was being interviewed - 'So if you need to give one most important reason for corporate failures, what that would be', one of the interviewer asked.  Without even thinking for a minute, I responded - 'Greed'.  I could observe an accepting smile on his face.  True.  In fact we were talking about the whole case of Satyam and Maytas, the corporate governance issues, the cooking-up of the accounting books, overstated size of employees, etc etc. But after the interview was over, I wanted to ask myself whether it is only the Greed which is the cause of corporate failures or there are some more reasons.  I kept thinking of many reasons for the next week and thought of again going through the book by Jim Collins 'How the Mighty Fall' with the notes of 'Good to Great' as well as 'Built to Last'.  Apart from this browsing through some old magazines and searching out the failure stories (quite unconventional, generally people prefer goin...