Latest Post
The Startup Reality No One Talks About: Pain Behind the Glory
When I did my first startup, just updating my LinkedIn profile to "Founder, XYZ" got me tons of congratulatory messages. But soon, I realized that all that celebration was premature. Because the real grind comes next: building the product. But once...
Recent Posts
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...
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...
More Articles
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...
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...