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The Startup Reality No One Talks About: Pain Behind the Glory
When I did my first startup, just updating my LinkedIn profile to "Founder, XYZ" got me tons of congratulatory messages. But soon, I realized that all that celebration was premature. Because the real grind comes next: building the product. But once...
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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...
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...
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...
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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...
You Don’t Need 10 Hours of Productivity, just 2 hours of deepfocus
You cannot be 100% focused, 100% productive, all day long. In fact, don't even try -- it is a guarantee for self-inflicted agony. Life ebbs and flows. There are good days and bad days. Even within a day, our mood and energy go up and down. But here...
Why Continuous Improvement Beats Market Leadership
Around 2006, Steve Ballmer, the then CEO of Microsoft, came to Wharton for a talk. After he finished his talk, a student asked why Microsoft was not as innovative as Apple (or something to that effect). Ballmer said that Microsoft was a 95% market...