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Leadership is Hard
Stress spreads like a contagion. Just one person needs to have it -- especially the boss -- and soon, everybody around will feel it. Once the boss is snappy and angry, team members get scared and are on the defensive. Everybody's fight-or-flight...
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Mothers
Growing up, when I was facing my life’s first major exam (IITJEE), I was virtually biting my nails. I would often ponder, “What if I don’t make it?...
Recognize excellence beyond academic
My de-facto co-founder at HabitStrong, Nisha Salim, is brilliant but often runs into a problem -- she does not have a degree from any tier-1...
Small steps for lasting change
When starting my MBA at Wharton, I kept telling myself, “Don’t ruin it again. This is the last chance.” Earlier, I had ruined my 4 years at IIT --...
Micromanagement
It was my most amazing project at McKinsey. And yet, just when things were looking great, they went downhill. Here is what happened. This was the...
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Be your best
On the National Police Academy parade ground, our assistant drill instructor, head constable Ram Singh, would bark at us like he was General Patton. And even a millisecond delay in obeying his command would invite his rage, and the drill sequence...
Failure vs a life of regret
Five years into my first job with the Indian Police Service, I was unsure what to do next -- something had changed. In the beginning, everything was just so exciting --- nothing like anything I had done earlier. After spending years doing crazy...
Hard or easy is in our mind
Panwali was going to be our Waterloo, we were warned. This was a part of the 9-day trek during our Civil Services training that included a near-vertical climb of 2 km in the Panwali mountain range. In the words of our Physical Training Instructor,...
Change tomorrow’s story
In a semiconductor course tutorial at IIT Kanpur, Prof. Aloke Dutta pointed at me and said, “Please come and explain the functioning of an NPN transistor.” As I sprang to my feet and walked up to the blackboard, my friend Ashish Agrawal was gaping...