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Last week, I was involved in some interesting conversations on issues that slows organizations down and the role leadership play in leading to or resolving of these issues. One such teething issue was how to get employees/new leaders understand the meaning of cultural fitment and further to avoid people/culture misfit cases early in their lifetime at the company. Not an easy problem to define, let alone attempt to solve it. A group of us talked about specific cases (people/instances too confidential to be called out in this blog) on how early stage employees (in some cases, the ones in system for a long time too) just failed to align to cultural norms, behavioral expectations, leading to poor impression (about them) being formed. In some of these cases, their managers being in a remote country/site which gives them a very thin window to recover from these slip-ups and thereby shortening their spans in the teams or even in the organizations. We did try and delve into root causes and s...

I started running in late 2007. I remember my first running event was a 7 km run Bangalore, which I managed to finish huffing and puffing. That start, though not perfect, gave me the mental fuel and focus to sustain and make running a part of my life. In May 2008, I ran my first 10 Km run in an event called as Sunfeast 10 k run. I remember to have received a completion certificate (yes, there were no medals then) for this feat. A successful finish in this run really kicked off a series that I managed to stretch for long. From 2008 till 2018, I ran 11 consecutive editions of this run. In between this phase, I gradually built the strength, stamina and hunger to run longer distances, up to 100km a few times and full marathons 15+ times. If my memory serves me right, I think post 2011 the sponsor of this run was changed to TCS (from Sunfeast) but what didn't change was my participation in this run. Year after year, for 11 years my routine was almost ritualistic. I prepared in the month...

Here's a beautiful story that I came across in the book ' The Trillon Dollar Coach '. The book is a tribute to Bill Campbell, who is widely regarded as the best coach Silicon Valley ever had. He coached the likes of Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt, Larry Page and several other execs like former CEOs   of eBay and Twitter. The story was about Apple spinning off the software division called Claris and offered Bill Campbell the position of CEO, which he duly accepted. Bill stayed the CEO till 1990 when Apple decided to bring Claris back in it's fold. Bill decided to leave Claris for other opportunity. After hearing his decision to leave, several Claris employees came together and published this ad in San Jose Mercury News. In our careers, all of us probably have worked with good bosses and not-so-good ones. While the latter more often dominates our mind and gossip table discussions, how many times do we come forward and choose to return the dues to the good bosses. This example o...

I was recently listening to this amazing podcast: Outliers with Pankaj Mishra in conversation with Nandan Nilekani. I listened to first 7 minutes or so but got so much out of it that i had to stop listening and blog about it. I am reproducing some of the contents right from the podcast (full credit to Pankaj Mishra and Nandan Nilekani) for this. Nandan's thoughts on dealing with ambiguity: My upbringing made me deal with new situations very easily. I am quite comfortable embracing change. I am also quite comfortable trying out something that is not in my comfort zone. Very often what we do is because we become successful at doing something, we just remain in that space. I can embrace situations that are full of ambiguity. Nandan's thoughts on how to build things: My nature i am a builder. Creating new things is what interests me. Is there an enough momentum and opportunity ? : First i look for an opportunity where there is something to be built and there is enough momentum to ...

This is in continuation of my last post on conversation with a dear friend of mine Ashok Thiruvengadam (founder and CEO of Stag Software). Ashok had reached out to record a video on the theme of  “ Reinventing yourself in these changing times ” [Ashok] It is seen that people deepen their knowledge/skills in their work area as a means to achieve career growth. Is such a unidimensional approach good ? Do we need to break this linearity ? [Anuj] I would like to put the answer to this question in 2 buckets. One is non-linearity aspect that you called out and the second is the unidimensional aspect. Should I embrace non-linear career or not ? Lets talk about non-linearity in careers. I have worked in a few organizations and know about the practices in a lot of other organizations, one thing that i find common is most of the organizations (keeping start-ups out of this discussion for a bit) is that most organizations have a career path. Two of the key characteristics of a career path ...

This post is in continuation to my post on ' My Talk on Innovation '. As i promised, i am double-clicking on some aspects that i shared in my talk to awesome internship batch at my organization. IPL season is on (ok, about to finish today as i write this). Of the many memorable sporting actions, one was narrated in quite a modest manner in this post . Shane Watson is a veteran opener of one of the most successful teams in the franchise, CSK. He went through a lean patch and couldn't score runs good enough to give his side a decent start. He experienced failure after failure in consecutive matches. MS Dhoni, the most successful captain, persisted with Watson and didn't drop him from the team. Watson eventually paid forward and scored a massive 96 runs in team's victory at the league stage and later 50+ in a crucial semi-finals match. During the phase Watson was struggling but Dhoni chose to show faith in Watson. As the author of post,  Inder Kumar R  sums up: The big...

(draft blog, editing in progress) A few months back, i was speaking with an entrepreneur friend of mine. He was dealing with the challenges of an early stage start-up. During the course of conversation, he made a remark that i found intriguing. He said that engineers from IITs (premier institute in India) have far more stamina to slog and do hard yards needed to pull off difficult job tasks. I didn't contest his observation, but i did find his use of the word 'stamina' fascinating. I had often used this word in the context of running but to think over it, it matters a lot in the work context as well. Yesterday night, i was reading the book 'Why I Stopped Wearing My Socks'. The book delightfully captures Alok Kejriwal's journey as an entrepreneur with the key learnings summarized for the readers. Given that the book is written in a story form, autobiographical in style, I chose to read not at a stretch but a few pages each day. I am sharing the extract that caugh...