In my very first engagement as a McKinsey consultant, we were trying to schedule a meeting with a senior leader at a pharma client. She literally threw up her hands, saying, "I am back to back with meetings the whole day." I was sorely tempted to ask her, 'When do you...

Here is a two-step process for hitting even the hardest possible goals: 1. Get started 2. Iterate until success Here is the two-step process for NEVER getting started: 1. Figure out everything 2. Then start Getting started seems daunting because we feel we need to...

Our obsession with 'billion' has made us lose touch with reality. If you are building a startup, it HAS to be a unicorn. If you are an entrepreneur, you have to be a billionaire. Gentle reminder: A billion dollars is more than Rs 7,000 crores. The benchmark for...

A leader who ONLY tells the crowd what they want to hear is not a leader -- he is just following the crowd from the front. Today, most political leaders across the globe are 'followers from the front.' Leadership takes the courage to be disliked. That is why real...

I took up my last job at a private equity fund after quitting McKinsey. I soon found that I had no idea about the jargon they were using. I had not even heard terms like Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) and termsheet. In fact, once by mistake, I told a company in the...

I would attribute half of my struggles and disappointments in my startup journey to just one factor: “Doing too many things.” This may seem weird – aren’t you supposed to do a lot of things in a startup? No, no, no. Don’t do that, please. And this applies to all of...

Last Friday, I figured that 24 hrs was not enough for me – there was way too much to do. So I ran this experiment: 1. I picked a priority task (something I absolutely had to get done). 2. I told myself, ‘Let everything else wait – let me just do this one task for...

I started my MBA 10 years after completing my B Tech. And since most of my classmates were much younger, I felt a bit like a dinosaur (in a not-so-cool way). If fact, I did derive some mischievous pleasure when I found classmates even more experienced – and therefore...

At the private equity fund where I last worked, in about half the investments where we lost money, the culprit was fraud by the promoters (i.e., company owners). In some cases, the promoters blatantly stole more than a hundred crores, but shockingly, not one guy went...

For all practical purposes, my first job out of college was to head the Trivandrum City Police as its Commissioner. Prior to that, I had only undergone the IPS training and done a piddly 7 months in a field assignment. But compared to me, my ACPs were battle-hardened...

Envy is an amazing thing. I never envy the British Queen, who has inherited this massive fortune and privilege without having worked for it for even a day. Yet, if our classmates get ahead and do really well in life, we feel a tinge of envy. And the fact remains that...

When I left my last job to do a startup, a new reality hit me – no more Car Club pickups, business class flights, expensive hotels, or unlimited travel budget. On the next flight, when I walked into the economy section, it felt a bit weird. But pretty soon, I got used...

In early 2009, I attended a townhall at McKinsey. This was just a few months after Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy, and the US was still in the midst of a horrible recession. The partners running the meeting assured us that all was well – in fact, McKinsey did not lay off...

In the 2nd year of my MBA at Wharton, I asked a finance professor for advice on landing a job with a private equity fund. When he learned that I had only worked as a cop, he told me bluntly – “With your background, it will be very difficult.” I was dejected but since...

Once, while driving in Trivandrum City, I saw a shop with a big banner: 'Margin-free shop’. Presumably, they don't keep any profit margin. On seeing that, you almost get the feeling that 'profit' is a dirty word. In fact, my daughter even asked, "What’s wrong with a...