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Why Everything Seems Easy Until You Actually Do It
When I was a cop, everybody else told us how to manage the city traffic better. Now that I am an entrepreneur, VCs seem to know exactly how entrepreneurs should scale their businesses. 😊 And lest it sound accusatory, let me confess this -- when I...
Recent Posts
The Silent Shift Already Reshaping the Workforce
I am not hearing good things. From New York to Singapore, whoever you talk to, is talking about job losses. And the driving force is not economic...
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...
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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 is that we immediately translate 'hard work' into 84 hours, 96 hours, or 120 hours a week. So before...
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...