Management Musings

Recently, I had the opportunity to reflect on a question on career investment. Do Managers do enough in terms of investing in the careers of their team members? Often, employees are unclear on what they are looking to achieve in their careers. While this may simply be put down as a lack of ambition, it is undeniably important for the leader to inculcate a sense of self worth where it is lacking and encourage his team to think about themselves. Now, each person is different and the classic mistake that one can easily make is to apply the same paint to every idol, so to speak. With career planning, it is simply not "one size fits all". Very often, in India especially, we have kids in middle class families choosing between only Engineering or Medical streams of education in college. The main reason that this happens is because the previous generation (parents) have seen that these two fields are the most secure and "safe" for their kids in the future. The mindset ca...

  As humans, we have a fascination with moving fast. There are enough sports around either running, driving or even flying! The tendency to go "faster than ever before" has lead to numerous inventions around improving the speed. In swimming, there were faster shark suits invented that would ostensibly help the swimmer wipe off seconds from existing records, a huge margin considering how little the timings have varied over the years. In running, there have been fantastic advances in the kind of footwear to assist in healthier and consequently, faster times. Sports science is a specialized area and there are innumerable advances in this field over the past 20-30 years as we learn more about the human body and its response to external stimuli. In motorsport, the goal is simply to go faster and reach the finish line quicker than anyone else. Teams in Formula 1 spend millions of dollars in aerodynamic development of the cars and in research on the type of material to be used as t...