MyTake

‘He is the most uncoolest guy I have ever seen. I wish he was she… he should have been a girl… he would have had more following.’ One of the girl told her friend when they were travelling towards Bangalore Airport in the public bus. ‘And she you know, she has lot of attitude, she shows of all, many times she brags and she knows she is doing wrong, she is hurting me, she still never says sorry. She has lot of ego. You know last time she told me she got KPMG job because of me, I felt good, I felt really nice, she is a good girl, but you know, kind of attitude she shows, I don’t like.’ The other girl who was listening to her was speaking in a very low voice. It was just a whisper, politely punctuated prose. The voice of her fingers on BBM keyboard were louder than her verbal cord. I couldn’t make out much what she spoke. I wished I had the sixth sense and skill of making it out from the keyboard punching what really she was typing. Anyways by now the other girl started again talking...

Lexical semantics of ‘Ethical Leadership’ drives me to believe that the very activity of leading should be ethical. Ethics are generally accepted moral principles to be followed by individual/s. Leadership as such is a group activity but ethics have to be followed by individuals. The broader message that I get from these two words is that the leaders should follow moral principles and thereby expound their discourses through ethical practices. So ethics have an important role to play in the behavior of a leader and in the whole process of leadership. We need to look beyond just lexical semantics and explore as to the role of ethics in leadership. Success or failure of an organization depend on the person who leads it. It is a general belief that an organization has three types of people working for it - 10% belong to the category of hard working group (highly committed employees) and 10% belong to hardly working group (laid-back employees) and remaining 80% follow the leader (Co...

We grew in an environment which was surrounded by people who kept preaching us all through that ‘work is worship’ and somewhere in our inner self it got imbibed that we live to work and there is no escape from work.  The meaning of work changed according to time, for a child it was to go to school, learn and study and perform best in the examinations.  After studies it was to get a job and work as per the nature and requirements.  So the school and the workplaces were believed to be temples.  Temples where we worshiped our work, temples where we were allowed to meditate, temples where we were groomed and mentored by experienced and learned people, temples which helped us build ourselves, temples where we could find our call, temples where we learnt and discovered the purpose of our life.  These were places where we met different types of people and we learnt to deal with them to their and our satisfaction.  We debated, argued and quarreled on some petty i...

Academia has always been differentiating a leader from a manager. And it is believed that a manager can transform himself/herself into a successful leader by learning the art of leadership and by developing those traits that a leader possesses. All business students and practicing managers have to deal with this dilemma often and to come to terms that ultimately if one has to manage affairs of business successfully and produce expected results, one has to have a perspective of a leader. This is something which needs further elaboration for the cause of clarity and for the purpose of practice. The whole idea of leadership stems from the sense of followership. No follower, no leader. So it is the followers who make a leader. Honest intent for the cause, art of articulating the vision, winning attitude, guts to take risk and providing rock solid support to the followers are some such virtues which help one to put forth efforts to attain organizational goal. The vision has to be f...

A lot has been written on what makes one a great leader. I approach leadership from another angle. What does not make one a leader? It is an ALERT to be precise. A for Aloofness (as against friendly), L for Lawlessness or Lack of control (as against Systematic), E for Enigmatic (as against Clarity of purpose), R for Repetitive (as against Original or Innovative) and T for Timid (as against Confident). Leaders cannot afford to stay aloof from the people and purpose as they are expected to lead through their involvement, guidance and support at all levels. They need to portray friendly behavior in order to lead the team. Abiding law of the land is important as nobody and nothing is beyond law. Lawlessness does not just mean abiding by law, it also reflects on orderly structure and flow of things and activities as it drives measurable outflows. Absence of systematic planning and implementation takes away much of what a leader is expected in an organization which aspir...

Raju burst out, ‘This rock is a sign from Lord Ganesha, I want to worship it.’ Chetan raised his voice even louder and said, ‘No no, this rock is going to be used for my next sculpture.’ The merchant shouted, ‘I have invited all my friends to rest on it! It is ours!’ Ajit was giving order to remove the stone to his soldiers. Bholu now grinned and said, ‘But this rock has been there for years and years! Earlier half of it was submerged in the mud.  Now with the rains the mud has got washed off, and you are seeing more of it.  The washermen of Chitpur have been using this rock to do our washing for many, many years! There’s nothing miraculous about it.  Now off with all of you, I have work to do.’ So saying Bholu emptied his bundle of clothes and set to work.  What could the others do? They had to go away grumbling quietly to themselves. This is the last part of the story titled ‘the way you look at it’ , from the book Grandma’s bag of stories, penned by ...

It was some five years back when I visited a Mall in Gurgaon with some friends and afterwards, thought of sharing my take on their present and future.  It was put on my blog and my friends, who read it, were skeptical as to whether what I was preempting was really something that was reality of the future. In this backdrop in all these years whenever I visited a Mall, whether in NCR, Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Guwahati, Lucknow or any other small city my belief got confirmed.  Of late I kept reading stories of empty malls and some of them closing down, it started giving me a feel that business opportunities when not defended by viable research and when it is just following herd behavior, it is bound to result in what is happening in many of the cases.  And that is the challenge before entrepreneurs of all sizes and from all geographies, to respond and work on. One of the issue raised in my earlier post on sustainability of malls was that many of them were involved...