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The One Leadership Trait That Can Skyrocket Your Career
If you assign a task to my colleague Saranya, there is one thing you will never hear from her: "It was not my fault." She takes such complete ownership that she will either get it done or get back to you if there is an insurmountable obstacle. In...
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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...
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...
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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...
Real Leadership Means Absorbing Pressure, Not Passing It Down
During my service in the police force, we once had a massive political riot after which, we arrested about 200 people. Now, before producing these people in a magistrate's court, we had to do a lot of paperwork. So I put a team of officers on the...