Latest Post
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...
Recent Posts
Prestige, Power, and the Hidden Costs
Yesterday, more than half a million people in India wrote the Civil Services exam, to compete for a few hundred jobs. From my firsthand experience,...
How the “Urgent” Culture Is Killing Productivity
In my consulting days, we saved a client a few million dollars with a simple recommendation. This company was spending $10 million plus on postal...
Can Generalists Thrive in a Specialized World?
Can generalists thrive in this new world order? To answer this, let me go back to the McKinsey I saw a decade and a half ago, which was full of...
Measuring Knowledge Work in Hours
Since the who's who of the corporate world is singing praises about hard work, I want to put on record that I agree with them 100%. But the problem...
More Articles
Why Intelligence Without Accountability Is Dangerous
One of my IIT professors had a stellar academic reputation. But after he quit/retired, he abandoned academic rigour and started making random claims. He would inflate mediocre work using jargon and began behaving like a quack. And the reason was...
Why Comparing Career Choices Is a Dead End
During my MBA, a college friend visited us in Philadelphia. And during our conversation, I asked him about his career plans. But he had no 'plans' -- he was happy with his life, and I couldn't understand how that was possible! After an IIT degree...
The Myth of the Top of the Hierarchy
I once met a mega business leader in his office in Mumbai. And on the office wall, there was a photo of the Indian PM with another head of state, behind whom he was standing quite deferentially. I am sure, when this business leader's direct reports...
How Seniority Can Hide Incompetence
I once knew a guy who had spent decades in investment banking and had climbed up the hierarchy but he was clueless about finance and deal-making. I often wondered how he got there. My guess is that in many organizations, if you don't antagonize the...