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Leadership: Learn by Doing
In a leadership course at Wharton, the professor would ask, "What qualities should a good leader have?" Some student would say, "Vision." The professor would then parrot back, "Yes, without vision, you can't have leadership." Then another student...
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Doing vs. Telling
Most professors teaching leadership in B-schools have never been in the hot seat or held leadership roles. Most consultants advising companies have...
Expertise Behind the Ease
Years ago, I was involved in organizing the National Games in Trivandrum, where two people did a skydiving demo for the opening ceremony. In this...
Patience and Readiness
In 2008, I had a lunch-cum-job interview with a very successful New York-based fund manager, who had made hundreds of millions of dollars from...
Rethinking Deadlines: Prioritize Quality, Not Urgency
A friend of mine was once interning with a major Wall Street bank. One day, on a Friday evening, his boss asked him to make a presentation and share...
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Escape the Urgency Trap
Conventional wisdom says: Prioritize tasks that are urgent AND important. No -- this advice isn't good enough. If something is urgent and important, it is called 'firefighting.' And firefighting destroys peace of mind. So you should be asking: How...
Breaking Free from FOMO
About 20 years back, I stopped watching TV. It all started with this addiction to TV I had started developing in the early 2000s, when I would mindlessly switch on the TV after a stressful day at work. Soon, I started worrying about missing this or...
Don’t Freeze, Keep Moving
Long ago, a friend who took the NDA/military career route was telling me about the bayonet charge routine in the army. In a bayonet charge, you run towards and attack an enemy bunker typically defended by a machine gun firing 10 bullets per second....
Why Consultants Always Have ‘Three Things’
Whenever consultants want to say something, they always have 'three things.' And we mock them for that 🙂 But if you want to communicate well, there is some real science here -- the science of working memory. It turns out that our working memory...