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Life is complicated
The performance reviews are done. And you get an email announcing a big fat bonus. Yay! Then you hear the news – your colleague got 30% more! Now you hate the very idea of a bonus. Nay, you hate the whole world. Ah, life is so complicated! 🙂 -...
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HabitStrong Scaling
Our obsession with 'billion' has made us lose touch with reality. If you are building a startup, it HAS to be a unicorn. If you are an entrepreneur,...
Leadership takes the courage to be disliked
A leader who ONLY tells the crowd what they want to hear is not a leader -- he is just following the crowd from the front. Today, most political...
We all start from the same baseline — “Zero.”
I took up my last job at a private equity fund after quitting McKinsey. I soon found that I had no idea about the jargon they were using. I had not...
When you take up something, do it like your life depends on it.
I would attribute half of my struggles and disappointments in my startup journey to just one factor: “Doing too many things.” This may seem weird –...
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Are 24 hours enough?
Last Friday, I figured that 24 hrs was not enough for me – there was way too much to do. So I ran this experiment: 1. I picked a priority task (something I absolutely had to get done). 2. I told myself, ‘Let everything else wait – let me just do...
When you are learning, there is no senior or junior.
I started my MBA 10 years after completing my B Tech. And since most of my classmates were much younger, I felt a bit like a dinosaur (in a not-so-cool way). If fact, I did derive some mischievous pleasure when I found classmates even more...
What is holding our country back?
At the private equity fund where I last worked, in about half the investments where we lost money, the culprit was fraud by the promoters (i.e., company owners). In some cases, the promoters blatantly stole more than a hundred crores, but...
Leadership is not a ticket to comfort and luxury.
For all practical purposes, my first job out of college was to head the Trivandrum City Police as its Commissioner. Prior to that, I had only undergone the IPS training and done a piddly 7 months in a field assignment. But compared to me, my ACPs...