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How to Stay Secure in Uncertain Times: Skills, Brand, and Network
In uncertain times amid looming job losses, you can fall back on ONLY three things: your skills, your brand, and your network. Everything else can vanish overnight -- especially your business card. Then how does one navigate this world? Here is a...
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How Framing Shapes Our Happiness and Decisions
I was once listening to a meditation audiobook by Joseph Goldstein, in which he recounted the story of a guy who had moved into a new house where he...
Why Company Values Often Fail
During my MBA, an investment bank was visiting the campus for a pre-placement talk. After the talk, students were mobbing the visiting bankers,...
Guiding vs Letting Go
To be a good manager, you need to do two seemingly contradictory things: 1. Hand-hold people, guide them, and occasionally, even show them how to do...
Why Meaningful Work Matters More Than Comfort
Can you guess what terrifies Indian civil servants the most? Getting a posting with no work to do. And sadly, a lot of these positions do exist. But...
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Why Life Is Not a Zero-Sum Game
I was once talking to a public market investor who seemed very hesitant to reveal the stocks he had invested in, as if he was holding some trade secret or I could somehow derail his investments. On the other hand, Rakesh Jhunjhunwala used to...
Don’t Let One Critic Stop You from Playing the Game
You give a talk and the auditorium claps, but one guy boos you loudly. Or you write a LinkedIn post and get 99 positive comments, but one guy calls you scum. Will you feel 99% positive, and 1% negative? No. You will be 100% infuriated -- that one...
Staying Calm Under Pressure
My best managers -- be it in the Indian Police Service or at McKinsey -- were not the charismatic ones with swagger or bravado. Instead their biggest quality was this: In a crisis, when things became rough, they remained calm -- no freaking out, no...
Why Public Safety Should Matter as Much as VIP Safety
It was very hard and painful to see the photo of a poor taxi driver crushed in the Delhi Airport canopy collapse. And without facts, I won't speculate on whose fault it was, and how far up the responsibility should go. But one thing I will tell you...