Listen your way to success

Every CEO knows that listening is a powerful weapon in his leadership armoury. Only by honing his listening skills can he decipher the thoughts, ideas, emotions, feelings and concerns of people around him. Decoding what is innermost in the minds and hearts of people is crucial to his ability to address the real issues in the workplace. Preventing, pre-empting and resolving the real issues is the key to the leader's effectiveness and this, in turn, is the single most important factor in the complex equation that delivers results consistently.more

Curious case of a top performer

Managers sometimes present terrible dilemmas to leaders. Take the curious case of Suresh Joshi. As the factory manager of a large unit manufacturing engineering components Suresh is responsible for an annual production of nearly Rs 1,000 crore; 800 people work in his factory. Considering the size of the operation and the weightage it commands in the company's scheme of things, Joshi is king!more

Reflection on IPL & Leadership

The Indian Premier League (IPL) is replete with interesting management and leadership angles. Though on paper it is made out to be sport, in practice it’s actually a no-holds barred corporate battleground. The pitch is simply the front line of this fierce competition for market share, eyeballs, ad revenue, cash, publicity, reputations and profitMore

Adapting to survive

Dominic is teetering on the edge of panic. The company he founded and nursed over 25 years is now on the verge of bankruptcy. In a space of months the sales and profits have evaporated. He’s down to the last couple of lakhs in cash. Salaries and overheads are bearing down on him like a fully laden truck. Creditors are pressing like vultures poking a mortally wounded animal More

Promise of IT and Web access

Those who are obsessed with the gathering gloom are condemned to be overwhelmed by it. So it’s far better to be guided by the beacon of hope. That way we stand a much better chance of escaping from the quicksand of present problems. Irrespective of the seriousness of the problem, all of us have options and choicesmore

Framework for innovation

The unfolding global scenario has many interesting facets.
Though panic has captured markets, the environment is pregnant with possibilities for innovation more

Culture of corporate omerta

If the Mumbai carnage brought home the reality of the security threat to our country, the Satyam episode demonstrates the other grave threat to India: the corruption and dishonesty that has been feted and celebrated by the educated, highly qualified intelligentsia and adopted as a way of life by most of us. The deadly combination of corporate greed and information technology has laid bare a menace that has long been gnawing away at the innards of our once-great country More

Surviving disruptive change

Make no mistake at all about the present times: we are experiencing change on a scale that we haven’t imagined. At best we’ve encountered incremental change earlier. Nothing has prepared us for the kind of fundamental change of game (not just the rules) that has suddenly overtaken us More

Lessons from Karna's dilemma

Mali V. Madhavan Nair’s classic Karnasapatham kathakali explores critical elements of leadership and relationships. The master storyteller constructs a theme that is unmatched for pathos and poignancy More

Facets of accountability

The assault on Mumbai is like India’s ‘Pearl Harbour’. It has strengthened the resolve of ordinary Indians like no politician can even begin to understand. Millions upon millions are consumed by an internal fire that is no less than that which powered India to Independence in 1947. More

Commitments embedded in comments

CEOs and business owners better watch out! Every word they utter is recorded, interpreted, amplified and transmitted across the organisation and beyond. Furthermore, perceptions, attitudes, behaviour and performance are shaped by these ... More

Economic Paradigm shift

The current global economic scenario is not something we have experienced in our lifetime. Comparisons are being made with the Great Depression (1929-33) and later crises. However, it is dangerous to hark back to the past and try to recycle and refurbish previous policy responses. That is because the Indian economy and the global economy are vastly different from what they were even 5 years ago More

Leadership lessons from Kumble

For nearly two decades a billion despairing Indians found a role model who inspired them to aspire for greatness. That inspiration came not from sovereign sources but from Anil Kumble and his magnificent performances on the cricket field More

Coping with distress

No matter how bad the current bad news, opportunities abound for those who learn how to cope with the distress. If we keep a few general principles in mind we can ride out the crisis with élan like an expert surfer skims along the crest of the Big One with consummate finesse. More

Empowering the customer

Make no mistake about it: the business paradigm has truly shifted. Greed has paradoxically caused the global financial system to implode. The winner takes all, win-lose paradigm has been taken to its logical, catastrophic conclusion. more

Rules of empowerment

Jagdish is caught in a vicious cycle. He can’t leave the store for a moment because he doesn’t have anyone to entrust it to. And he doesn’t have anyone to entrust it to because he can’t trust anyone else. So he’s stuck in the store forever. The world is passing him by and he knows it. Jagdish is lashing out at his near and dear ones; his relationships are frayed. Long hours, a sedentary lifestyle and gnawing frustration are eating away at his health. More

Papaya theory of customer centricity

Customer centricity is something everyone talks about but hardly anyone practices. It’s really quite shocking to see that even today many businesses and companies treat their customers as “necessary evils” to be exploited, cheated, taken for granted or otherwise inconvenienced. Since IT is now available for every application CRM is almost universal. But in that process customers have been reduced to numbers like prisoners serving life terms! More

Leadership anaemia

Contemporary India is a seething mass of discontented super-competent people suffering from almost terminal leadership anaemia. That's why we're an unending story of missed opportunities and a messed up polity.. Who said that the current global ..more

Metrics do not make a leader

If we monitor corporate suites with a secretly installed CCTV we’d find that most top managers are doing the same thing most of the time! Despite all the hoopla about high-faulting strategy, they’re actually engaged in something ... more

CEO's secret weapon: Feedback

Sometimes we may wonder how the CEO manages to juggle his myriad priorities and indeed, himself. In between seminars, newspaper interviews and TV sound bites he also needs to put in the necessary effort to lead his organisation to results. .more