Leaders Despite limitations

These people fought all odds and conquered

all their weakness to become successful leaders........get inspire.

Leadership Skills

Source: https://hbr.org/2014/07/the-skills-leaders-need-at-every-level

"Stamina Exudes Positive energy"

Susir Kumar, CEO, Serco Global Services spells his methodology of work life balance as follows:

• Priorities every activity and sync them to your daily life;
• Plan the day in such a way that separate time slots for urgent task that require immediate attention;
• A person's stamina determines his mental strength and helps exude positive energy;
• Micro plan important activities which have a tinge of risk involved ;
• Plan things ahead of time;
• Always be yourself and constantly strive to keep your body mind and soul in complete harmony;
• Success and failures are two sides of the same coin; one should take both positively and in the right manner; do not let either of them to go to your head; this avoids unwanted pain and ego problems;
• In crisis try not to panic an quickly adjust to uncomfortable and unfamiliar situation and focus on the next steps.

Source: Times Life, 16 November, 2014

"Always be aggressive"

Shiv Inder Singh, MD Fire Fox, expresses his model of work life balance as follows:

• He emphasis that -- so long as you are able to achieve your objectives both in your family/ social life, you should not worry about whether you have achieved the correct balance.
• He believes that a life spent in aggressively pursuing your goals -- whether in business or sport will give the person the satisfaction of a life well spent.
• To be effective in your work, you have to be mentally fit; physical fitness plays an important role in mental fitness.
• Energy and happiness are two sides of the same coin and are associated with achievement.
• take calculated risks at times;
• To handle failure, believe that failure is temporary look for -- what went wrong and what lessons can be learn't: most important is to look at the new opportunities any failure throws up;
• Coming out of a failure strongly defines character;
• For handling crisis -- compartmentalize the crisis; assemble your trusted teams and start thrashing out options.

 His final word: "Always be aggressive and positive."

Source: Times Life, November 2, 2014

10 Common Myths about Leadership...

A very interesting article which I read recently ......thought I will share for all the aspiring leaders:

"Leadership refers to the ability of a person to motivate and inspire other persons towards a common goal. It is a critical management skill in the corporate world where the manager should lead his team towards achieving a common objective. His role as a leader is crucial in maximizing and integrating the potential of available resources. For that, he needs multiple skills, which many of us may think cannot be developed by an ordinary person. More often than not, we nurture certain misconceptions about leadership.
Knowing what these misconceptions helps us understand what leadership is really about and enables us to build effective leadership skills. Here are 10 of the most common myths about leadership. 
1. Leaders are born and not made: This is the first and most common of all myths about leadership. Though some people have innate leadership qualities, it is rare. Mostly, leaders are made by their circumstances. The extraordinary circumstances that surround them propel them to become effective leaders. When it comes to the corporate world, you can learn leadership skills by consistent efforts. 

2. Leaders know everything: It is not true that leaders know everything under the sun. What leaders do have is a vision and a sense of direction. They too learn from others. 

3. Leaders are infallible: Leaders do make mistakes like all humans do. In fact, they could even appear to commit more mistakes than all of us because they take more visible decisions at every stage than others do. However, what differentiates good leaders from others is that they are candid in admitting their mistakes and in learning lessons from them. 

4. Leaders only give orders: Leaders do not always give orders, though. Leaders only give orders: Leaders do not always give orders, though the position they are in requires them to do so. More often, they inspire others to do what is required of them in a given situation. 

5. Leaders are charismatic: Charisma is not the absolute quality of a leader. Leaders are often followed because they are respected for their hard work, integrity, ideas, and commitment. 

6. Leaders have imposing personalities: Leaders need not have impressive personalities. Though, sometimes, this does help attract people. What leaders do posses is the ability to influence people even if they don’t have a distinguished personality. 

7. Leadership comes with age: There is no specific age to become an effective leader. People become effective leaders with what they learn from their past experience, not just with increasing age. 

8. Leaders possess absolute power: Not true always. Their true effectiveness is measured by their ability to command a following without wielding absolute power. Leadership is not tyranny. Bad leaders resort to strong arm tactics when their leadership fails and so end up creating followers. But if leadership succeeds, it creates leaders.

9. Leaders never delegate important stuff: Leaders do delegate the right work to the right person. They share work and responsibilities judiciously and get the job done. And this in no way undermines their credibility. In fact, as I said earlier, they pave the way for new leaders to emerge.

10. Leadership can be attained through study: Leadership is about attitude and not about knowledge. Even if you study thousands of books, you cannot develop leadership skills until you inculcate the right attitude. 

The misconceptions listed here are not what make you an influential leader but your ability to inspire a shared vision, facilitate collective efforts to reach a common objective and identify and nurture the right talent."

Source: blog.commlabindia.com/elearning/leadership-myths

Human Resource Managment.....1

Human Resource Management.........1

To understand view this page:

http://www.slideshare.net/drpadmashankar/11-human-resources-management-hrm-42198305

Classic Indian--American.

This is a beautiful article about 10 Indian who changed the world for the advantage of the human kind. Posting it in this blog to read and lead.

TOP 10 INDIAN-AMERICAN ENTREPRENEURS OF ALL TIME

Over 200 years after the revolutionary formation of the United States by European immigrants, immigrants to the U.S.A. continue to revolutionize both America and the world. As entrepreneurs, corporate leaders and other professionals create new wealth, America is witnessing the boon of a next generation of mega families – families whose wealth is not tied to industrial growth, but instead, those who have amassed their fortunes in the throes of the technological and information revolutions that have catalyzed the globe into an exponentially evolving and inter-connected network – one moving increasingly rapidly toward an “internet of things”. The following list presents (in no particular order) the top 10 American entrepreneurs of Indian origin who have trail-blazed paths to thriving businesses with resounding impact, and in so doing, represent a new strain of the American elite.
1. “I would have been fired a hundred times at a company run by MBAs. But I never went into business to make money. I went into business so that I could do interesting things that hadn’t been done before.” ~ Amar Ghopal Bose

Amar Bose was born in 1929 in Philadelphia. Amar’s father was a Bengali freedom fighter who immigrated to the United States in 1920, where he married an American schoolteacher of French and German ancestry. Amar enrolled in M.I.T. in 1947, where he ultimately earned his Ph.D in Electrical Engineering and continued on as a professor for the next 45 years. Amar began his research into acoustics as an engineering student and in 1964 founded the Bose Corp., now an American-household brand for high end, noise-cancelling headphones and loudspeaker technologies. With estimated sales of over $1.7 billion, Bose Corp. is a stalwart of American industry in acoustic technology. Amar’s decision to keep Bose a privately held corporation enabled him to plow most of its profits back into R&D.  Amar donated a majority stake in Bose Corp. to M.I.T before his death in 2013 and had an estimated net worth of $1 billion.

2.“A good entrepreneur never gives up.” ~ Sabeer Bhatia

Born in Chandigarh in 1968, Sabeer spent his early years in Bangalore and Pune. His father is a retired captain in the Indian Army and his mother worked with India’s central bank. Sabeer moved to the United States when he was 20 to study at Caltech and later graduated with a Masters in Engineering from Stanford University. Sabeer is most widely credited with creating the world’s first free email service: Hotmail. Sabeer successfully scaled Hotmail to the world’s second largest email provider and sold it to Microsoft for $400 million, making him one of the youngest stars in the Indo-American community in the early 90’s. Sabeer has gone on to form several new ventures.
3. “The key to being a successful entrepreneur is the ability to tolerate pain, face challenges, have the humility to correct oneself midway, if required, and self-belief.” ~ Dr. Gururaj (“Desh”) Despande

Gururaj, a.k.a. Desh, Despande was born in Karnataka, and graduated with a Bachelors in Electrical Engineering from IIT, Madras. Desh moved to Ontario, Canada, where he earned both a Master’s degree and Ph.D and worked at a subsidiary of Motorola that manufactured modems, prior to moving to the United States in 1984. In the U.S., Desh co-founded a router developer company, which he sold for $15 million within three years. A few years later, Desh founded Cascade Communications, whose products were important in routing the early Internet, and in 1997 sold the company for $3.7 billion. Subsequently, with the help of M.I.T. researchers, Desh launched Sycamore Networks in 1998 and took it public 1 year later, raising a market cap of $18 billion. At that time, the Sycamore Networks IPO made Desh one of the wealthiest self-made businessmen in the world. Desh has launched several centers for innovation and is a life member of the Board of Trustees of M.I.T. Corporation.
4.“Every big problem is a big opportunity…And there are plenty of problems in India.” ~ Vinod Khosla

Vinod Khosla was born in 1955, the son of an Indian Army officer in New Delhi, where he obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from IIT, Delhi. Vinod went on to complete a Master’s degree in Biomedical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University and an MBA at Stanford in 1980. Two years later, Vinod founded Sun Microsystems, which he left four years later to join the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. In 2004, Vinod formed his own venture capital firm Khosla Ventures, which manages over $1 billion in investor capital. Vinod is also one of the founders of TiE, The Indus Entrepreneurs. Vinod has an estimated net worth of $1.5 billion.
5. “Everything’s real-time…Everything’s event-driven. It’s all about the data.” ~ Vivek Ranadivé


Born in Mumbai in 1957, Vivek Ranadivé was accepted to M.I.T. at the age of 16, where he completed his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Electrical Engineering. Vivek went on to obtain his MBA from Harvard University in 1983. Vivek started his first company while still in college at M.I.T., and in 1985 received $250,000 in seed capital from a technology incubator to form Teknekrom Software Systems. Vivek set out to build software on the premise of “The Information Bus” (TIB), which allowed for the tight coupling of applications. Through a strategic partnership with Goldman Sachs and Price Waterhouse, TIB architecture was deployed to revolutionize trading floors on Wall Street for real-time international transactions, with TIB-K becoming the first platform for Wall Street trading technology and eventually digitizing all of Wall Street. In 1997, Vivek founded TIBCO with funding from Cisco and Reuters and applied real-time software to other industries, including real-time news of all major sporting events including the NFL, NBA and PGA. Over the next fifteen years, Vivek grew TIBCO to a publicly listed company on NASDAQ with annual revenues of nearly $1 billion. An avid basketball fan, Vivek was the first person of Indian descent to own an NBA franchise and is currently a major investor in the Sacramento Kings. In 2012, Vivek launched TopCom, a private social network for world leaders.
6. “Even though Indians are less than one percent of the U.S. population, they have founded about 15 percent of Silicon Valley startups.” ~ Vinod Dam

Vinod Dham, widely acclaimed as the “Father of the Pentium Chip”, was born in Pune in 1950.  Vinod studied Electrical Engineering at Delhi College of Engineering and at the age of 25 came to the U.S. to pursue an MS in Electrical Engineering at the University of Cincinnati. Vinod received a job offer from Intel and in 1990, was in charge of developing the Pentium processor. Following the Pentium processor’s huge success, Vinod rose up the corporate ladder and later quit Intel in 1995, to join a start-up which he then merged with one of Intel’s main competitors. He went on to lead another start-up – this time in the communications processor space – to a lucrative exit at $1.2 billion. Vinod went on to found a venture incubator and cross-border venture capital fund focused on investing in Indian start-ups across various sectors.

7. “Every country has found that the best way to create jobs is to create entrepreneurs who will start and grow companies.” ~ Romesh Wadhwani

Romesh Wadhwani, founder and CEO of Symphony Technology Group, was born in India in 1948, where he obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from IIT, Bombay and an MS and Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University. Romesh joined American Robot as CEO, which he left in 1995 to launch Aspect Development in Silicon Valley. In 2000, at the peak of the Internet bubble, Romesh sold Aspect Development to i2 for $9.3 billion in stock. Romesh next founded a private equity group called Symphony Technology Group to invest in innovative software companies. He sits on the board of The Kennedy Center and has signed The Giving Pledge.
8. “Life is fleeting, and permanence in this world is something we all strive for. The best way to achieve permanence is through philanthropy.” ~ Ram Shriram

Ram Shriram, one of the founding board members of Google, was born Bangalore in 1957 and raised in Chennai, India. He studied at Loyola College in Madras and joined Netscape in 1994 as an early executive. He then became president of Junglee Corporation, an online comparison shopping firm. When Amazon acquired Junglee in 1998, Ram became vice president of business development at Amazon.com. Ram formed Sherpalo Ventures in 2000 to invest in early stage technology companies. Ram is a board trustee at Stanford University. His present estimated net worth is $1.86 billion.

9. “To unleash the innovation potential in the country, we need to tap into the creative energy of our young entrepreneurs.” ~ Sam Pitroda

Satyanarayan Gangaram Pitroda, popularly known as Sam Pitroda, was born in 1942 in Odisha, India, to parents of Gujarati descent. After obtaining a Master’s degree in Physics in India, Sam immigrated to the U.S. where he obtained a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering. Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, Sam was involved in technology research work in telecommunications and hand-held computing. He is regarded as one of the earliest pioneers of hand-held computing because of his invention of the Electronic Diary in 1975. Sam holds over 15 honorary Ph.Ds and close to 100 worldwide patents, and is credited with revolutionizing India’s telecommunications infrastructure after returning to India in the 1980s, when he founded India’s Telecom Commission.
10. “I don’t know any entrepreneurs who are risk takers. The risk takers are gambling somewhere.” ~ Sanjiv Sidhu

Sanjiv Sidhu was born in 1995 in Hyderabad, India, where he earned a Bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering. He then moved to the United States and obtained a MS in Chemical Engineering in 1982. Sanjiv founded i2 Technologies after leaving Texas Instruments, and developed a production optimization product called the Factory Planner. i2 Technologies went public in 1996 with Sanjiv’s holding becoming worth $6.5 billion, making him the richest person of Indian origin in the world at that time. Sanjiv went on to found o9 Solutions, a Texas-based company that has developed a business optimization software product called mPower, which provides real-time internal company data to enhance business performance and operations planning.

Building upon their engineering backgrounds, each of these innovators rode the technological and information waves to create companies of value that generated tremendous wealth and productivity, earning them their place amongst America’s most successful entrepreneurs.

Source: http://dawallstreet.com/2014/10/27/top-10-indian-american-entrepreneurs-of-all-time/
© 2014 DaWall Street Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Syllabus for CEO

StanislavShekshnia of Insead researched to know whether “CEO specific scholar training” can be introduced, if yes what would be the syllabus curriculum. Interviewing various global leaders the “unorthodox insights” of this research are as follows:

• There should not be “CEO exam”. Experts believed that none could be qualified enough to administer such a test, nor could there be a standard CEO curriculum;
• A test would be back ward looking and CEO are always forward looking.”
• It would be wonderful to have a Renaissance man with the complete range of necessary skills and knowledge; but such a person simply does not exist.”
• No one can qualify as a CEO for life either;
• All the interviewed CEO agreed that their ob require lifelong learning.

This research identifies some essential traits and competencies fundamentals to success as a CEO especially the following three:

• Natural qualities;
• Knowledge acquired from formal education and 
• Competencies developed.

Diego Bolzonello says: “You are born with some of it, but you must learn it.”

Qualities such as curiosity, ambition and passion are considered indispensable traits though formal education and on the job training also are essential components.

Schools for CEO curriculum should include subjects relevant to future CEO’s, such as developing a vision, selecting talent, enabling performance, managing in crisis, communicating with an entire organization, personal discipline and using language that business people understand hard skills to complement the soft skills needed in the job; Help CEO to assess their potential to make a data based decision about that choice and to develop a specific plan to achieve it.

Source: Empower, The Hindu, October 22, 2014

"Is there a formula for successful Leaders?"

William W Kooser, Associate dean for Global Outreach, the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, answers this questions thus:

• Successful global business leaders today need key capabilities and attributes such as solid analytic; global mindset; an appropriate dose of humility, curiosity and a bit of luck.
• The age of Big data (customer and competitor data) is upon us and leaders need to understand what that data tells.
• "Informed gut" is a valuable tool .
• Do not delegate all the analytical wok and understanding to others.
• CEO need to rely on others -- both within and outside the company -- to generate the information and ideas they need and challenge their decisions and strategies.
• Humility fosters a sense of curiosity; constantly seek out new ideas and adjust the company's direction.
• Therefore the characteristics of successful leaders include skills that can be taught in the classroom; attitudes that are learned in life/job; personality traits that are developed through life and a element of happenstance* that can't be taught, developed or predicted.

*a chance happening

Source: Economic Times , 4th Nov. 2014. p.8

Top 5 attributes of a leader

Neville Wadia Managing Director  of Altitude Synergy addressed a group of students recently. He began his speech by saying "Stay hungry and stay very very foolish."

The top 5 attributes listed by him are summarized below by me:

• Listen: Stop talking and start listening. Astute leaders know there is far more to be gained by surrendering the floor than by dominating it. In this internet age everybody is rushing to communicate ; fail to realize the value of everything that can be gleamed from the minds of others.
• Communicate: Being able to clearly and succinctly describe what you want done is extremely important . Relate your vision to your team.
• Humility: Great people are humble people . They don't seek success but share credit for success and accept blame for mistakes. They are shy but fealess when it omes to decision making. Arrogance is destruction.
• Appreciation: It generates  marvelous giddy feeling of self worth and self esteem; it encourages more collaborative relationship .Creates human connection , it is special and intimate.
• Passion: Love and  believe in what you are doing. Having the courage to follow your heart and intuitions show confidence. It is an addiction to the receiver. Do not make choices based on the norm in society . Do something that makes your happy.

Tom Peters …..Leading the 21st Century

I read this interview with Tom Peters and have made an attempt to highlight a few vital points that is to be considered by leaders of this century. I have also given links in some places for a better understanding. Read on.......

The discussion with Tom Peter started off with the following query by the interviewers from Mckinsey:

“what would you say is missing from today’s discussion about management?”

Tom Peters replied: 

“I don’t know.” My real bottom-line hypothesis is that nobody has a sweet clue what they’re doing.”

Quoting Peter Druker on the trait of effective leader, that they do one thing at a time, Tom Peter claimed that he is a fanatic on the topic of time management. With technology he claims that he sees managers with attention deficit disorder, constantly barraged with information and chasing the next shiny thing. Stressing that big company CEOs do not read enough he recalled two messages from Dov Frohmans’ book “Leadership the Hard Way’: 

·         50 percent of your time should be unscheduled; and

·         the secret of success is daydreaming.

He pointed out that big companies never outperform the market over the long haul; he mentioned Albert Allen Bartlett words, “the greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” 

Commenting on the short executive tenures Tom Peter remarked: “The question is how you survive? One way to deal with the insane pace of change is by living to get smarter and to learn new things. Another way is by going up the value-added chain beyond the kinds of tasks and roles that can be automated.” 

He continues, ““Design mindfulness” has got to be in everything you do—down to the littlest thing. Even the language you use in your e-mails. There’s a character to communications. There’s a character to business. It’s how you live in the world.”

Expressing his distaste on the organization charts lines and boxes, he remarks that such organization has not thought of organization culture yet, which is the key. He substantiated this thought on charts and boxes as follows:

“LouGerstner has this wonderful passage in his book that says something to the effect of, “When I came to IBM I was a guy who believed in strategy and analysis. What I learned was that corporate culture is not part of the game: It is the game.”  

Tom Peters continued: “You know, I was a San Francisco 49ers fan, and their great coach Bill Walsh said the same thing. In 1979, he inherited a team that had won 2 games and lost 14 the previous season. His entire first year was teaching football players how to wear coats and ties on buses. And he said, “The key is to become a professional organization.” On the one hand, coats and ties may be a formality, but Walsh said, “You’ve got to do the corporate culture first.” Two years later, he won the Super Bowl.” 

Tom Peter wondered why work cannot be made a joyful experience or an energetic or vivid experience. He stressed that the role of a leader is to develop people and make the work energetic and exciting with growth opportunity. As you grow old it is how many people you develop that are very important not fame or wealth he points out.

To the query why is it difficult to get the culture point across, Tom Peter quotes Rich Karlgaard, who states that companies end up as vicious rather than virtuous circle. He was concerned by the truth that companies are “less engaged with the people side, culture side, the values side of things.”

On change he remarks, “There’s nothing stupider than saying change is about overcoming resistance.”

He says, “You don’t bring about change in real big meetings or virtual meetings. You bring it about one person at a time, face to face…….It is a subversive act, and being co-conspirators is a subversive act requires trust and intimacy.” His belief is “we’re still safe believing in the importance of face to face contact……I don’t thing I can do it all screen to screen.”

He emphasized on the aspect of women in management and said: “put more women in management, they know how to do a work around. Men do not know how to do work-around, because the only thing they understand is hierarchy.”

His concluding words in the interview are:

“There is no difference between leading now and leading then. What I certainly believe is that anybody who is leading a sizable institution who doesn’t do what I did and take a year off and read or what have you, and who doesn’t embrace the new technology with youthful joy and glee, is out of business.”

Source: This interview was conducted by Suzanne Heywood, a director in McKinsey’s London office; Aaron De Smet, a principal in the Houston office; and Allen Webb, the editor in chief of McKinsey Quarterly, who is based in the Seattle office.

Copyright © 2014 McKinsey & Company. All rights reserved.

For more visit:

 http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/organization/tom_peters_on_leading_the_21st_century_organization

Attitude not just Abilitiy

Dr. Amarnath Ananthanarayanan, CEO, Bharti, AXA General Insurance says:

"The best leadership lesson I learnt:
If as a boss, you take risks with people and not only give the right amount of freedom but also the required support and guidance, they can really deliver out of the box solutions. So the biggest learning for me was that the Attitude of a person plays an even more important role than their ability , when it comes to being successful at work.
On managing work life balance:
Watching stalwarts of Carnatic music and dance performance in the evenings and weekends and getting acquainted to Chennai /Tamil life style as I grew up at Delhi."

RM 2 -- Research Problem

What is a Research Problem?

To understand visit this site: 

http://www.slideshare.net/drpadmashankar/research-problem-38855252

Coping with Gen Y leaders

Millennial Leaders (ML) or Gen Y leaders as they are called are people who are born between the 80s and the 90s.
If you have a Gen Y  as your leader, then the following points shall help you to understand him or her. Devashish Chakravarty, Director, Executive Search at Quetzal.com explains how it is followed:

• ML has reached there for good reasons and thus has the potential to succeed. Believe in him or her.
• Contribute to the initial excitement of your leader, go along with the flow, help the ML in establishing accountability and defining metrics for yourself and others.
• Use data to reset unreasonable expectation. Seek more responsibilities--you will be evaluated on your contributon to the present assignment and not your past record.
• Gen Y is social Liberal, open, inclusive and accepts diversity easily. Brace yourself for cleary articulated feedback on what works and what doesn't . An inability to handle criticisms won't get you far.
• Sometimes you may have to nurse your bruised ego, after an especially loud interacton with an over confident gen Y. Appreciate that you brash new team leader is likely to stand up or her ideas and her team even in impossible situateion.
• Gen Y leader has a marked preferenmce for a collaborative approach to problem solving. Use your new found freedom to colloborate with others and grow faster. Establish trust early to get honest feedback.
• ML had grown in a flat world, less likely to respect ancient structures and process . Expect  blurred reporting lines, less communication barriers and cross functional work. Rely on your people skills rather than bureacratic frameworks.
• Figure out a more efficient tech-enabled method for completing each task. Be a willing learner; digital skills your master now will become essential for a success full careers.

Source: Economic Times, Wealth, Sept1- 4, 2014

Portfolio Management

This is a very interesting pictorial article in Portfolio management. I read it on the 25th August, 2014 in the Economic Times....Read and plan for your future. 

RM 1 ..Research Methodology

This is an introduction to Research Methodology: 

http://www.slideshare.net/drpadmashankar/research-i

New perspective to EI

I read this article in the Economic Times on 23 August, 2014, It sounded different from the general perceptions, hence I decided to share and store. 

 

"Emotional Intelligence: Why People Get it Wrong

Emotional intelligence is an “it“ thing in business, if you believe the 11,000 books on the subject on Amazon. Still, there's lots of confusion about what emotional intelligence is. Here's a quick look at the concept::"