Reflections--the stoic way!

Have you ever faced it? I have, a few times in recent years. Most recent is when a President Corporate Strategy and BD at a large Indian Corporate Group blocked me. I had been following him for a year or so. He is a popular name on college campuses for his lectures. I respect his views and his candidness. He truly inspires and he questions many conventional idiocy, publicly and that makes him popular among those who challenge even the sacrosanct and this includes me! Recently he was lecturing at an IIM down south and he shared on LinkedIn his lecture as an article. In that article he mentioned about a lady he hired recently from an ISB recently and he praised her for questioning even the senior management leaders at meetings, at this Indian conglomerate, in matters of business and strategy. I don't know what was his intent when he mentioned her name too, but what worried me was this: "how would a senior management guy take her questioning when she has just new

In a 2015 survey conducted by the   MIT Sloan School of Management   and the   London Business School , it was found that only ‘one-third’ of 11,000 senior executives and managers could list their company’s top three priorities. That’s a huge problem. A company can be tugged in too many separate directions overtime as departments and employees make decisions without clearly set priorities. What Are OKRs and how different are they from other Performance measures? Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) as   John Doerr   (who worked at Intel and introduced Google to OKR) defines OKRs as not just   What   is to be achieved but also   How   to get there! Executives see OKRs as a Goal-setting mechanism to give everybody ‘visibility’ and ‘transparency’ into what's going on. The biggest problem OKRs solve is ‘prioritization’. Performance measures even if very intricately defined still remain ‘guidelines’, while OKRs are ‘frameworks’! Unlike performance measures which are essential for measu

Everything that is broken can be fixed! Let's be positive but hiding deep rooted issues for long under the carpet could erupt with volcanic intensity. Let's fix it with gratitude! Thank Glassdoor, thanks to those who took pain to write their reviews. As part of the Glassdoor review by an employee who worked between 2012 and 2018 with this IT Services company, based at Nagpur India (Happens to be a company I worked for as an HR Manager, between April 2009 and Feb 2011) This feedback got ONE star rating and has Pros too as you see here ( This company is better you if are joining at any of the managerial designations.). My idea is to draw your attention towards the value laden review that it is by a seemingly quite committed and successful employee who ultimately became victim of a poor culture . Despite his poor parting experiences this person wrote a feedback which is more valuable than a management consulting firm's recommendations! Read below in italics!: This re

If you go to a B School, it is largely it's reputation/brand name that you want to get tagged to. Obviously they are great so they have enviable and unique pedagogy and inspiring intellectuals to teach. But all boils down to the first placement that you get on campus. I have seen in 2008, after Lehman disaster, ISB Hyderabad students who had worked with me earlier calling me desperately to secure a job on campus. What worried them as fear #1 was, the 35K monthly education loan EMI. I have got some hiring experinecs for tech, engineering and management consulting firms at B and T schools in India, some top 5 IITs, top 5 NITs, many other emerging T and also B schools, including ISB, Le High, U-Penn, Duke (in US) Once, a corporate relations head of an new IIM in Rajasthan called me to ask, what he should adopt as practice to get this new IIM into the recon of the recruiters. I had given him some glimpse of my experiences of being a University Relations and Hiring Manager a

Everything that is broken can be fixed! Let's be positive but hiding deep rooted issues for long under the carpet could erupt with volcanic intensity. Let's fix it with gratitude! Thank Glassdoor, thanks to those who took pain to write their reviews. This glassdoor review brought smile on my face! Not all creative engineers are writing novels, some of them are on Glassdoor too. Here is one that impresses me! This is the same place where I worked as HR Manager much before this guy joined the firm. I love that company and the school-boy faced CEO (co founder)! This man gets 90% recommendation from all him Glassdoor reviewing employees/ex-employees. Take a bow! But despite all that, why situations appear so alarming and deplorable? You will find mention of word, "management" below. Where does management rest? in the CEO, right? That surprises? confuses? whatever?....many more dished out below in italics. Pros Once upon a time in Nagpur, there was a good com