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Disagree Without Defensiveness
Here is a simple skill that can accelerate your career: Learning to disagree without being disagreeable or putting others on the defensive. When you tell someone, ‘I disagree with you,’ more often than not, it makes them defensive. If people take...
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A lesson in focus from the army
Here is a powerful lesson in focus and getting things done, from an age-old army tactic - 'bayonet-charge'. During a bayonet charge, army units are...
Read this before jumping into entrepreneurship
Before you quit your job and become an entrepreneur to earn untold riches, please read this story. In the early 2000s, when I was serving as the...
Hit hard – don’t dilute your words with fillers
Do you know why instead of hitting hard, our words come out limp? Because we sabotage ourselves. We dilute our speech with fillers like "Umm, Uuuu,...
Happiness is in the now
The guy working in a small company wants a job at Amazon. The one in Amazon doesn’t want to work at all. We all want to jump out of our current...
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Mental health – remove stigma
Years ago, when I was a civil servant, a young IPS officer was briefly posted under me for training. A sensitive guy, he was struggling with some mental health issues. Unfortunately, his anxiety got aggravated, resulting in a near breakdown. A few...
Work where you are respected
We often hear, 'Don't pick a job just for the salary.' But if not salary, then what? Typically, the answer is - role, company culture, growth opportunities, brand, etc. And admittedly, all these things have serious merit. However, in my opinion,...
Keep pushing the boundaries
I first read the book ‘Jonathan Livingston Seagull', more than a decade ago. Since my wife was raving about the book, I got curious about all the hullabaloo. When I read the book, I found it stunningly disappointing. No storyline, no hero or...
Nothing wastes more time than random activity.
During a leadership training at McKinsey in Chicago, we were split into teams and given a task: From cardboard kits for building toy planes, we had to build the most number of planes in a given time. We thought it was a fun team-building exercise....