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Raj was the Head of Business Unit of a big group in India and was getting ready for his presentation which he was making to the Top Management for a new project. The new project was very important for both the organization and Raj’s area of work as he proposed to enter a new segment generating additional revenues. He reviewed his slides again and again for one last time before he saved the presentation and closed his laptop. Gathered some confidence and picked up his laptop, diary,  pen and set off to the board room. He made sure he was in the room at least 10 mins earlier to set up the projector and start the presentation on time. The Management team comprising of 2 Vice Presidents and 1 CEO of the group entered the room on time. Everything was set and with the initial greetings done, Raj started his presentation. The presentation deeply covered all topics keeping the objective in focus. He indeed had worked on this for months. When he reached the slide ...

That is what we have been taught in corporate from the day one we joined the organization. But today with growing competition and reducing loyalty, 'some' customers are exploiting companies and below is one example :  A year back after rolling out a major program, the sales team started meeting customers one by one.  One Afternoon, sales guy called me up fully excited. He wanted to break the news to me that he had made a big break through  “Yes, I am at a big prospect right now and he is good potential. We presented the complete program and is willing to buy our products. But, to gain confidence he is asking for this XXX part number on Free of Cost”. Trying out product before buying was a common practice and therefore I wasn’t surprised. But I knew he was exploiting us because to taste Coke / Pepsi you can taste it with a 200ml cup too, you don’t need to buy 10 bottles of 2.5Ltr bottle for tasting.  You get what am trying to say. To ...

When we walk into a theatre to watch a 'A' certified movie, kids below the age of 18 years are not allowed. Reason : They are not matured enough to be exposed to sexual / violent content. But, recently as i was reading through newspaper i happened to read an article with talked about SEX and also with some obscene pictures. Cinema is a one time exposure, but newspapers are daily source and therefore, kids accessibility to such content is easy. Moreover, in a digital era this accessibility is becoming more and more easy. Summary : All am trying to convey through this blog, is requesting the newspaper media to get more responsible and avoid such content in newspaper.  

When you browse for " Annual Performance Review ", you might get many articles on how to prepare and conduct Annual performance review. But rare on what to do ' after ' your performance review.   Even though am a person with an ideology of performance reviews to be part of day-day activities and not an annual event, but since many companies still believe and carry out as their employee evaluation am trying to pin down some things to do ' AFTER ' performance review.   So here are some of tips, hope they are useful to you :  1. Your evaluation is already done. Its a formality.  If your company is still following the bell curve, please be aware that your Manager has already decided on your rating and your discussion with him / her is a formality. With a sizeable team, Manager is forced to rate his employees into 20% Top, 70% general and remaining 10% as bottom. Therefore, your rating is already done and shared.  This practice is talking of...

You have been advertising various companies for FREE !! Really ? Yes !! It was recently when we were shopping at a known shopping mall in Bangalore. Since what am saying is a common practice, I wish not to name the shop. Getting back to incident. After picking all we needed, we reached the billing counter. It was around 2,300/- with many items. After the billing, the person at the counter asked if I wanted a carry bag. Since I had purchased a few items which were unplanned I realised I needed an extra bag and so I asked for one more carry bag. The person added another 10/- to the bill and handed me the carry bag with logo of brand printed all over the bag. I paid the extra amount along with bill and I further roamed around streets of Jayanagar for few hours with the carry bags.                       Pic Credit : DynaCorp As I was driving back home, I realised that I had done some free advertising of brand in streets ...

It all started from 2004 with the birth of Orkut and Facebook in same year. In initial days everyone were tilted more to Orkut and with time Facebook gained popularity and finally Orkut had to face its natural death like any other product.  Social media earlier started as platform to share your recent vacation, functions etc, but today has kept most of us 'busy' on to our smartphones. When I say 'Busy', it's according to comScore 2017 Future in Focus report, which measured an average person spending time on Top 5 social media which covers (Youtube, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter) a person spends close to 2 hours on these media with 66% of interactions happening through smartphone and remaining of interactions over desktop.      Photo by  William Iven  on  Unsplash Average daily Time spent on Social media :  Above clearly means we spend around 1 hour 56 minutes on top 5 social media, when you furt...

India is to overtake China in population growth. We are expected to grow faster than the world growth rate, according to National Commission on population.   The scarier part is not the growth of population with limited resource, it is also the growth in technology. With the growth in area of Artificial Intelligence , Kai-Fu Lee, founder of venture capital firm Sinovation Ventures and a top voice on tech in China claims that Artificial intelligence will replace half of all jobs in the next decade. This means we have more population with lesser jobs and wider gap in societies. And History has taught us well on what happens when there is wide gap in society.  Its time for us to start thinking. Comfort or necessity ? Share in your thoughts 

One of the most important aspect for an organisation is to be in regular touch with customers / vendors / accounts through various ways and what they believe the most productive being the official face-face meetings.  But as companies are expanding their markets, targets, reaching out to different level of contacts, with existing resource. This increases the travel time of employees and will only bring down the productivity level of each employee. This is more applicable to Sales, Marketing, Service, Purchases departments who are always on the move. Too much travelling will drain out the ' physical ' and ' mental ' energy of your employees. Many times the objective of the visit gets diluted due these drained out energies. According to a survey carried out in US with around 2,000 Americans, where 91% of the respondents agreed that too much time away from work had consequences on work productivity, also 70% of the respondents said i...

The Vice President had lost his audience mid way of his speech with a montonous and uninterested content. Noticing this the Managing Director of company who was next to address the employee at the half yearly event wanted to get back the audience. So he started with an aggressive start. "Good morning my dear colleagues, i am sure the canteen services have improved and we get the best food here. I see that in all your eyes." Sarcastically started the MD.  "As many employees here are future leaders, let me start this speech with a short story. There were a group of young soldiers who were lost in peaks of Alps, Swiss. It was getting dark and they wanted to get back to their base camp. A young soldier in group who was carrying some food in his bag, emptied it and suddenly realised that there was a map stuck to the bag. He took the map and gathered the other soldiers to lay out the route to the base camp. They all laid out the map and started moving in the dir...

Traffic signal is one of the most spent time for an Indian commuter and recently when i was passing through the signals i happened to notice a defined pattern by the beggars / homeless For them we are customers and i noticed that they were quickly able to identify who would lend them money and who wouldn't. They had a quick 120 seconds only and covering maximum number of vehicles would maximise their earnings too. Higher coverage of vehicles -> Higher would be their earnings                                                   Having observed the same at few more traffic signals, i realised that it is indeed important for us too in organisations to spend our time with right customers. Customers who were interested, customers who would provide us with the orders. After all, we all have same amount of time and its effective " TIME MANAGEMENT " which...

In an era of digital marketing, here was an incident which I came across when I was strolling through the busy streets of Bangalore. A Young Boy probably in his early 20's approached me with a bunch of pamphlets and handed me one. The boy looked well dressed and wore latest fashion. "Sir, we have a new photo studio with the latest technology and amazing Service". This was really not the need and I informed him of my dis-interest. But he pleaded hard and infact gave away that on sending X no. of customer he would be getting Y% of incentive and he was in extreme need of money. Still not interested, but also not trying to make him feel dejected again I agreed to go upstairs to studio and have a look. But I had a pre-set mind not to be lured, because I didn't have a need. As I reached  photo studio I was amazed with the studio and the photos they had taken. I spent nearly 30 mins in studio appreciating each photo and also ended up getting a photo done ...

The human body is best example to compare with the organization hierarchy and learn out of it. Each level is important in an organization and they have defined responsibility to do, changing responsibility will only result in undesired results. Wondering HOW ? Let me try to explain. To explain this, let me take an activity which all of us enjoy doing. “Eating”. BRAIN = TOP MANAGERS The Brain is the top management of any organization. It doesn’t do any activity but only instructs each organ to do particular work. It is able to evaluate options better between the right and wrong. When the food / drink is too hot, then the brain instructs to remove the food out of the mouth to avoid any burns. When in normal conditions, it instructs to chew the food. Mouth = MID-MANAGERS The mouth receives the food and breaks them into smaller food which would be easier for stomach to do its work. STOMACH = FRONT-LINE  MANAGERS / WORK EMPLOYEES T...

Recent events in the game of cricket has grabbed everyone's attention in a country where " Cricket " is another religion.The head coach of Indian cricket team resigned from his post after reporting difference between him and captain's style.  Here is what he wrote on Twitter which got viral instantly.  People took to social media raising their voices and disappointment over the captain's behaviour and that ego of captain had won. Let's wear corporate glasses and look into this issue. We all do at some point of time do not agree to some aspect / strategies of our managers right ? Sometimes it is us who are close to the customer and understand the project much better than the manager, but it is the experience what the manager brings in which can help the organization. But finally both you and your manager are working towards the same organizational goal. So the difference in your opinions can happen and need not be that you are always ri...

Everyone of us are striving  to grow in an organization, thus continuously and tirelessly working without understanding the contribution towards the organizational goal. Apologies for the harsh statement, but that's a true fact that most employees are tirelessly working today without having knowledge on the impact what their work would have towards achieving the organization vision / goals.  What are they working for ? Growing in the organization and climbing the ladder! Why ? Because it feels good to be called Vice President rather than Manager / Officer ! Right ?  But please be open to the fact that "Designations" are deceiving! Lets look at below example. Here, do not bring in your opinion, look from majority perspective :  There are four job openings you have received with the below posts, what is the immediate reaction and which job would majority of them get attracted ?  Shouldn't take much for you to answer this, Of course majori...

In the recent times there has been a huge controversy and protests with an Indian High Court placing ban on slaughter of cows. Many took the streets, organised beef fests, many group were raged and some even turned out violent events. Having been a complete vegetarian throughout for choice of my own and no religious belief. Surprisingly we never had any concerns of people eating meat until recent times. Sometimes when media is jobless they have to keep the people entertained and create such buzz....  Now coming to subject, it's a very simple question I would like to ask.When people raised the question "Right to Eat" for eating beef, would like to place this question to all of them. Would you also then accept Zombies / Cannibals ? Today it's cow / buffalo, tomorrow it could  be humans wanting to eat humans.  Doesn't the law prevent such actions when it comes to humans murdering another just for sake of flesh / meat ? When law pr...

In the recent times organization have moved away from proper training period for new entrant to "on the job training". There are many reasons which can be attributed to this movement.  In today era where things are fast and furious, it's evident that the organization are also focused on faster result and therefore places the resource towards achieving the defined results, in which new entrant undergoing " On job Training (OJT) " is one of them.   A new entrant is one who is high on energy / enthusiasm but low on experience and knowledge. Therefore, they are the most absorbent category of employees, who absorb anything which is thrown at them. This is same as a child who is keen on learning and is very observant. Therefore, it is best comparison to deduct some observations out of this comparison and new process of OJT. Lets question the regular practice of teaching a kid : What happens when this process is not followed and start teaching kid w...