Latest Post
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...
Recent Posts
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...
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...
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...
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...
More Articles
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...
A Leadership Lesson in Prioritization
In my first job, what used to really piss me off was that whenever I got a task from higher ups, almost always, it would be urgent. And sometimes, they would wonder, “Why is it taking you so long to get this done?” If that was the only task I had,...
Why One Hour Meeting Can Destroy a Workday
To understand this late-night-work mania, let us analyze what happens when we do a 1-hour meeting. 1. Let us say the meeting involves 6 participants. So a total of 6 hours are lost. 2. Typically, before a meeting, if there is only a little time...
There Are No Shortcuts in Financial Markets
A few months ago, a youngster (in mid-twenties) working in a tech role asked me how to get a job in a PE fund. When I asked him why he wanted to do that, he said, "To make a lot of money." Fair point -- these firms can pay quite well. Then I asked...