As I saw it

As promised in December last year, here's the first and last of the two stories on appreciation and thanking. A couple of months ago, I was invited to engage with the senior management of a company as their managers were embarking on a very interesting journey ahead. One of the things that came up for discussion was the importance and need for the senior managers to role model the culture of appreciating and thanking the good work done by their junior managers. Now, some people had a concern about appreciating and thanking and understandably so because most of those senior managers as well as I had grown up in a generation where our parents and especially fathers believed that any kind of appreciation would spoil us and that the only way we would develop would be by keeping us on our toes and edges all the time and by holding back any kind of sincere and genuine pride they felt about us and our work. The late Rishi Kapoor was a self-admitted example of this where he never appreciat...

In the morning, my wife and I were discussing the request for help we had received from someone and the question that came up was if it was the right time given that we are still not totally out of the pandemic and we still don't know for sure how the economic situation will be like in the days and months to come. And then what came out were the following: The right time to do what is right is right now. The good time to do what is good is right now. Now is the time to do what is right and what is good. You cannot wait forever for everything to fall in place before you decide to do something good and right with your life. It starts now with whatever good and right is available with you. Now is the time that is good enough to do what is good and right.

I am sure that hardcore Bollywood movie fans would remember this line from the title song of the movie Koi Mil Gaya. Well, I usually don't share what I am about to share and have mostly never shared in public the appreciation mails and messages I have received after my training and coaching sessions but there was something different about this line from one of current my coaching clients that, my intuition told me to share it. Maybe it's the profoundness behind the simple words that make me want to share it here. But it resonates with my purpose, identity, values and intent behind what I have been doing for a large part of my 22 years of working life even as success in the traditional sense of the term is maybe still some distance away. Here is what my client wrote as the concluding line of the email he sent me yesterday after our session early this week - "Thanks a lot again, Sree. I am in a better place today because of you. Thank you." It was a song that I heard in...

Over the last many years I have been examining a couple of models that have essentially the same foundation - disruptive innovation. But I found something even more profound as I dug deeper. Two core needs human beings have at work are Stability and Compassion and not to be left behind are the remaining two which also Gallup found in a survey conducted years ago about what makes people follow leaders: Trust and Hope. So in total the four core needs of follower-employees that Gallup found are Trust, Hope, Stability and Compassion. Stability is a core human need that comes from the brain's need for familiarity and predictability. And that is what makes many people resist change even when it has become inevitable. A stable platform enables people to build structures above it that have a utility. However, as we examine the rapidly changing work scenario, there is anything but stable. In such a scenario, it would be understandable if people are scared with the pace at which work and org...

I was invited by a government body to deliver a one hour session on the importance of soft skills for police officers undergoing a particular online course. We had people joining in from Uttarakhand, Jharkhand, Chattisgarh, Delhi-NCR and Madhya Pradesh. While I prefer to have a structure in my planning, I also prefer to go with the flow, tap into the magic of questions from the audience and respond from a space of intuition, spontaneity and stories from my memory.   As a result; Nelson Mandela, General Sam Manekshaw, Mahatma Gandhi and William L. Shirer, Katya and Kashinath, Asrani, Devdutt Patnaik and a former Gwalior jail superintendent came alive in the session today.   As it happened, in response to something one of the participants said, I remembered four stories about General Sam Manekshaw from the 1971 war and I shared it with them.   All the four stories landed in the right place and the participants were then able to deduce most of the soft skills i...

When Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Donald Clifton, Virender Sehwag, Anil Kumble, Kishore Kumar and Kumar Sanu came together last evening. On this last day of the last month of the last year of the second decade of the second century I am living in; are you curious to know: ·          My take on cricketers Virender Sehwag and Anil Kumble and the lessons we can learn from them? ·          Why I so passionately believe in Gallup’s strengths based approach to living our lives? ·          The unique discovery made at the University of Nebraska decades ago that once and for all changed millions of lives forever; for the better? ·          My issue with social media given what I learnt from Sherlock Holmes more than 27 years ago and therefore why I did not join Instagram till yesterday and even then I don’t intend to get active there? ...

I was in a review session for the Sakalya-Institute of Design Led responsible Entrepreneurship (IfDE) where one of the students in the Master of Design (M.Des.) course was showcasing the work he had done so far on building an app for the stretched out and stressed out millennial online content creators. It was really very, very interesting and I would say that when it comes out it will also be useful for people other than the type I shared above. During the review however, something important stuck me based on a question that one of the other panelists asked this student. And here is what I shared with the student to explore: Given the overall objective of the app, what all can we do to make the ‘Less is More’ and the ‘Slow Movement’ philosophies, the in-thing and the cool-thing to be, do and have for the over-leveraged younger generation that suffers from FOMO? What principles of behavioural economics can we tap into to make this happen and thus really serve the audience the...