Redefining Horizons

Who doesn't want to be rich, famous and powerful ? Who doesn't want to be successful?   Success, to almost all of us, is being rich, famous and powerful. But are these the only manifestations of success? What happens when one hits the apogee? How does the CEO of a mega business empire seek to continue his rise in positional hierarchy? Does his success hit the wall? How does an individual, having become the premier of a super power continue his success story? Has he too hit the wall? Does the flux in the Forbes list indicate climb to and fall from success?   Talk on the subject at MILIT, Pune Irrespective of the organisation one works for or the society one lives in, everyone wants to succeed.   It is this yearning to succeed that drives humans to excel. Success, simplistically defined by dictionary as ‘accomplishment of a purpose or aim’, encompasses things much beyond mere achievements. It is perceived, understood and experienced differently by ever...

Tricolour with Pride On the Independence Day, our National Flag is hoisted with pride across the country.   Government Institutions, individuals and even commercial organisations hoist the National Flag. While governmental institutions are mandated to hoist the Tricolour, private citizens and commercial entities do it out of pride.   Commercial entities however, do not hesitate to use the event as an exercise in ‘image building’. In fact, I feel, it is good for an organisation to draw on nationalistic pride, provided they really mean it. When, I was approached, by Mr Satish, the manager of one such organisation, to unfurl the National Flag on the Independence Day, I readily agreed . I wanted to utilise the occasion to address the gathering about our duties as citizens and increase awareness about defence forces. Brilliant Organising Skills Having spent most of my life in uniform, punctuality is in...

M uch has been researched, written, read and taught about leadership and authority . Experts have classified leadership depending on the approach adopted. Types of leadership and levels of authority enjoyed notwithstanding, everyone, including those at the very end of the chain wish to rise in hierarchy. Inevitably everyone, in due course, gets to be entrusted positionally with authority. While methodology of exercising authority is personality driven, effectiveness of leadership depends on how subordinates receives it. Superiors, irrespective of realm and reach, yearn for unquestioned acceptance, wholehearted adherence, enthusiastic compliance and unfathomable respect. But, history bears testimony to the fact that different individuals occupying the same position of authority over the same chain, evoke dissimilar responses in terms of acceptance, adherence, compliance, relevance and reverence. Are all superiors leaders? Superiors Since functional hierarchy is...

The Inevitable Act There would be no manager or executive of consequence, who would not have given a PowerPoint presentation or sat through a few. Presentations, frills attached, is now a way of life and inevitable to effective sharing of information, as bullets , charts, graphs and audio video visuals. Any thing possible could be improvised and incorporated to make presentations impressive. Despite all that, most merely remain visuals and seldom achieve purposes intended.   When presentations are contests to win situations, where only one can win, success normally graces, not the most spectacular but the most influencing. Winners The Internet is teeming with experts and their recipes that guarantee great presentations.   Most of them offer techniques to make screens look better and more attractive. Blazing screens alone, unfortunately, don’t guarantee success in favourably influencing the audience. Without a clear understanding of the means to effectively i...

Dumb Terminals? The stand-up comedian’s program was well subscribed. Each one sitting there was  from the corporate world  and had paid a tidy sum for the laughter riot. Jokes galore followed, few intelligent, some sane, many insanely hilarious and few outright vulgar. But the joke that elicited laughter and claps the most was about the corporate team leader who merely forwarded reports upward and distributed tasks downward to manage the numbers required. The narrative laced in humour painted management hierarchies as endless maze of meaninglessly inter connected, remotely controlled, ‘dumb-terminals’ which receive and send whatever came its way.  It looked as if every one sitting there was familiar with the picture painted and knew some dumb-terminals. Whether they laughed at someone else or at themselves, only they would know, but each one, someone high or low in a vertical in some MNC, laughed at being called a dumb-terminal. The The...