Category: Leadership
7 Insightful Leadership Podcasts one shouldn’t miss
On the 14th of July 2023, when the Chandrayan 3 mission took off, the critical phase – Slingshot to the Moon was scheduled for the 1st of August 2023. The date is significant for Leadership Centre as well as it being our seventh anniversary. The moon mission is yet another display of India’s ascension to […]
Inspiration – the magic potion to leadership
Napoleon the Bonaparte escapes from Elba in February 1815; sets foot in southern France; a defeated General without an army, an emperor without a country and an exile who sneaks back. On 5th March 1815, 9 months after his exile and 2 weeks after his escape, he is at Grenoble. Let me narrate the magic […]
Lessons on Leadership Paradox
Last week I saw a Tamil movie “Vikram Veda” and also read a piece by Sankarshan Thakur on Nitesh Kumar. My friend, Charles Assissi had shared with me the article “I Promiscuous power and improbable amorality of Nitesh Kumar” by Sankarshan Thakur. He encouraged me to examine the interplay of Leadership with ambition, power and […]
Putting Psychometry in Perspective
The last few months have been an eye opener for me on how ubiquitous is the use of psychometrics as an assessment tool. My new role as the founder of a company dedicated to leadership development and my engagement with various organisations brought this home to me. I have realised that this is led by […]
What’s common to Hitler and company budgets?
[The supreme commanders of the four powers on June 5, 1945 in Berlin: (from left) Bernard Montgomery, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Georgy Zhukov, and Jean de Lattre de Tassigny. By December 1944, it was clear that the German war machinery was broken. So, Eisenhower decided to pull his strongest resources into reaching Berlin before the Soviets […]
Research and Analytics: Better Accept With a Pinch of Salt
Nostradamus should be the patron saint of the Big Data and Analytics cult. I say this because we have hardly paused and reflected on what analytics can or cannot do. Despite the warnings from Taleb, Kahneman and Dobelli we have chosen not to take note of their caution on the human proclivity for cognitive biases. […]
How Intelligent Are Our Methods of Judging Capability
Our understanding of what constitutes human capability is so sketchy that in management and leadership education, very little attention is given to comprehend this. This is strange especially the heart of running any social institution be it commercial or others, is leveraging human ability to make capital create surplus for economic and social progress. Yet […]
Summit Fever- The quest for achievement
The book, ‘Into Thin Air’ by Everest summiteer Jon Kaukauer left me reflecting on the meaning of ‘achievement’. This personal account in essence raises a few dilemmas about our quest for achievement and the human debris we leave behind. I realised that what happened on Everest in May 1996 happens every day in the world […]
The Psychology that makes Agreement Compulsive
“Too much agreement kills the chat.” John. J. Chapman Every leader highlights the importance of challenging the status quo. Implicit in this is the virtue of challenging the state of affairs as they are. However, reality has conditioned many not to challenge. The liberty to challenge is perceived by many as the privilege of the […]
Strategy Retold
“All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.” – Sun Tzu Strategy is the term business has borrowed from military. This word has its origins from the Greek word Strategos or Strategia, meaning leading/guiding/moving an army. It became synonymous with […]
Values Sermon: Pause and Reflect
“Your time is way too valuable to be wasting on people that can’t accept who you are.” ― Turcois Ominek (From her book “Masquerade”) The incessant sermons on values made me risk writing this article. Political, Social & Business leaders, TV anchors, columnists and activists of all ilk, tell us about how they are the […]
The World and beyond of Innovation
300 years back men of science, believed that disease and pestilence were spread by odour. They could not conceive the existence of microbes, since it was not visible to naked eyes. When Dr. Edward Jenner talked of sterilisation they scorned at him and treated him as a mad man. Early humans were seized to the […]
Honesty: Not such a Natural Orientation
The current debate about Dhoni and our expectation that he should have told what he knew to the Hon Justice Mudgal Committee made me think. There is almost unanimity that any one of us would have told the truth, if we were put in a similar situation. One of the celebrated TV anchors was certain […]
The Busby Way to Talent Management: The Phoenix Rises – Part 2
Busby said “From the start, I had envisaged making my own players, having a kind of nursery so that they could be trained in the kind of pattern I was trying to create for Manchester United”. Busby now was restless. He wanted to pit his team against the best in Europe and not just win […]
The Busby Way to Talent Management: The Making of “Busby’s Babes” – Part 1
Manchester United Football club, a premier club today, in 1945 was languishing with only one league title in nearly 40 years. Its coffers were empty. It was saddled with a debt of 15,000 sterling pounds. Its stadium was bombed out, derelict and dilapidated. It was under these circumstances that the club appointed an army physical […]
The Thinking Challenge: Trapped Inside with Only a Keyhole View to the World – Part 2
In part 1, I had proposed that we are caught in a few thinking traps and fail to comprehend that we have at least 2 views to our world. Analytical thinking is dealing with the world as it is: Comprehending reality. Conceptual thinking is the world as it can be : Visualising the world with […]