Management Musings

Many companies have a lofty vision which all boil down to a single point - "Change the world"! It is very much like all Hollywood potboilers that "Save the world!" How many of them succeed in doing this? To be fair, many of them do. Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Amazon are four that come to mind right away. Each and every one of them has done their bit, earning their respective CEO's fame and renown for their exemplary vision and drive to succeed. Of course, my list of companies is skewed towards the technology world, but I would argue that the major transformation in the world in the past 20 years has been because of technology.  I read somewhere, that one has to be the change that one wishes to see in the world. Very true. So how does a leader transform his or her team if he is only taking care of changing himself? First up, of course, lead by example. If you are embodying the change and the vision that you have for success, then you can inspire th...

My grandmother passed away recently, after spending the last few years of her life fighting all sorts of maladies. She was touching 90 years of age.   From the last 15-20 years or so, she would always bring up her impending death during every conversation. She would have one thing to say – “when will I die? I want to die”. Of course, the curse (or blessing) of choosing the moment of death was only given to Bhishma in the Mahabharata. So it was, that my grandmother would spend her years lying in wait of the moment when it would come to pass. Her last 4-5 years were spent on the bed, with a nurse/ maid for company. She had lost her memory, could only eat semi solid food and was yearning for a life support system. Eventually, old age and fever conspired to relieve her of her bond with life. Her condition towards the end begs the question – do humans really deserve this? We talk of quality of life being good and all the work that we do to maintain a dignity in life. What dignity ...

Every day news is replete with stories of someone being beaten up by a mob, road rage incidents, a winning presidential candidate basing his campaign on bigotry and division and more. Over the past few years, I get the distinct feeling that I have become more and more conscious of the various castes, religions and race that exist in our society today. I struggle to understand if I should be blaming the environment I am in, or is it just me? The older I get, the more risk averse and orthodox I become? If I take the stand of blaming the socio-environmental factors for my condition, I find enough evidence helping me out. Take the case of sedition filed against Kanhaiya Kumar of JNU, Delhi. Or the multiple cases of abuse of couples that happens every day across the country and which is reported by the media, quite unfailingly. At a global scale, IS and terrorist organizations carry out attacks in cities across the world. Over in the United States, Donald Trump is en route to becoming ...

  Reading this article from the CEO of YatraGenie, I cannot say that I am surprised by his analysis. He talks about how the current Taxi Aggregator model in India is bound to collapse since the operators (drivers who are also the taxi owners) are not cared for and not paid on par with the efforts that they put in. There is no doubt that it is a tough life for the taxi drivers. They have to work at least 12 hours in a day and often chose to do a night shift also so their family can lead a life better than their own. They are, in essence, no different from majority of the population in the cities, especially, who sacrifice their own health, time and joys in favor of a hope for a brighter life for their families.   Some basic napkin stuff math tells me that assuming that the car is a Toyota Etios (running on diesel as invariably all taxis do) which probably returns a mileage of approx. 18 km per liter, the running cost per kilometer factoring in the cost of diesel at Rs. 45/-...

And so it has come to this. Sleep - that wonderful part of our daily life that we yearn for and look forward to, is now part of extensive research, more so than ever before. What started off in the 1930s as a research in a University that would later become Carnegie Mellon, has now been quantified as a potentially 79 billion USD business! Really?! We talk about out-of-the-box thinking so much and here, all we need to do is break down everything that we do every day and it is a topic of immense research and potential for business. A recent article on this topic in the Fortune India magazine gave me food for thought. Companies such as Fitbit report millions of dollars in revenues quarter over quarter thanks to their wearable Tech products which basically charts how much sleep and seemingly more importantly, how much quality sleep you are able to get. How much it helps us is debatable, of course. It definitely helps Fitbit! They now have data from millions of hours of sleep across geog...

I have recently started commuting a longer distance to work as the office has shifted to a new location. It is at a place in Bengaluru that has "developed" in the past 10 - 15 years only. Developed is only a euphemism here since it only means that there are more buildings in that place and there are more people there than there once were. In the short time spent there thus far, I am taken aback by the dreariness of it all there. All I see around me is buildings, traffic, dust and pollution. There is no water body and there are a few trees dotting the landscape - all of which are, what I call the nouveau landscaping type. Palm trees, perfectly grown else where and transplanted to provide life to what is otherwise a sad location. This location is no different from any other suburb in other cities around India. Admittedly, I am no expert in new areas being added to cities and my sample size is small. What I have seen saddens me. Gurgaon is a hot, dry place with only concrete ...

An interesting read in today's newspaper had to do with the proclamation by a cognitive scientist that a Pencil eraser is the Devil! Who would have thunk it?! The innocent little eraser, the scrubby little thing, the chocolate toffee sized, multi-faceted pencil eraser is a devil?? Really? As you read along, you would realize that the pencil eraser is used to correct mistakes made and give an appearance of cleanliness, almost as if the contents were all written clean and good at the first time of writing. It encourages children to seek perfection in their presentation at the cost of making mistakes and learning from these mistakes. The act of erasing misspellings or hastily scribbled, illegible notes indicates a need to cover up and not own up to faults and/ or mistakes. Ah! Now that makes sense. When I was encouraging people to make mistakes so they learn from them, I did not realize that the devil of playing it safe and presenting a clean picture to the world germinates from t...