Management & Leadership Insights

A famous advertisement for New York Fries that features a silicon beauty holding a cup of fries sports a clever slogan - REAL FRIES IN A FAKE WORLD….Whether their claim is valid or not, we know we’re living in a fake world. Honesty might still be the best policy, but few people seem to adopt it nowadays. It’s growing extinct even faster in the business world. Inside companies, people lie outright or withhold information and keep their bosses in the dark about unpleasant news. Also, companies deceive customers by offering low-quality products at exorbitant prices. Admittedly, it seems that the falsehood is more marketable than the truth. Against this background, building a culture of candour seems to be almost counter-intuitive. But, the truth is it isn’t.  In ‘A Culture of Candour’ (HBR June 2009), James O’Toole and Warren Bennis, two prominent leadership scholars, outline the vital steps for building a culture of candour. It all starts with encouraging people to tell the truth. ...

Think about the world in 2000. Fast-forward to 2015 and see where it’s now. Ponder all the destabilizing events that occurred during the intervening years.  Vivid in our collective memory are bursting of the Dotcom Bubble, 9/11 Attack on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon, US invasion of Iraq and war on terrorism that ensued, US Credit Crunch and the subsequent Global Recession, and Arab Spring. Add to this all the changes in the science & technology landscape. No doubt, now it’s a mind-boggling mélange. All these massive changes in the Political, Economic, Social & Technological (PEST) Environments have affected both local and global businesses in innumerable ways. Amidst all this uncertainty and chaos some companies have found themselves out of their business while some have flourished against all odds. How come this happens? The reasons for this are the subject of an illuminating new book, titled ‘Great By Choice’ and co-authored by business pundit Jim Collins of ‘Goo...

The war for talent is raging. In the knowledge economy today, it’s people who constitute the principal reason for success or failure of most businesses. But, on the flipside, it’s people or talent as some business pundits call them that’s hardest to manage in more cases than most business leaders may feel comfortable in admitting. At the heart of this problem is the fact that most businesses have talent management reduced to a mere HR function which the top management pays little attention to. While HR department is responsible for it to a certain extent, the talent management process should be a well co-ordinated, strategic imperative led by the top management team with passion and purpose and the long term ambitions of the company in mind. Where people are considered merely as cogs of a machine that are easily replaceable, very little happens in terms of leveraging its human capital to drive its performance and growth. In fact, when business leaders adopt such a nonchalant attitude t...

Wrapping up his famous Stanford (2005) commencement address, the late Steve Jobs, the iconic creative entrepreneur wishes the new batch of graduates ‘Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish’ With over 22 million views on YouTube to date, Steve’s speech is hugely popular and has been widely talked about by a number of authors, inspirational speakers, etc. Quite a few people must have puzzled over the final wish he bids to the audience and googled it like I did when I listened to the speech in the first place. Quite a few must have felt as ashamed as I did when they found out what it meant and wondered why they couldn’t figure it out first. I know some of our readers who aren’t familiar with Steve’s speech are now getting curiouser and curiouser! Trust me it’s worth the wait. In his enlightening address on connecting dots, love & loss and death, Steve asks you to be hungry for new knowledge and not be complacent and decide that you know enough. In other words, his advice is to keep learning. Els...

Beyond doubt, Sir Alex Ferguson is the world’s most successful and best known Football Manager and has played a central role in transforming the Manchester United into the iconic football club it’s today. Such is his influence on the club that David Gill, the club’s former chief executive says ‘Steve Jobs was Apple; Sir Alex Ferguson is Manchester United…’ By the time he retired in May 2013, he’d consecutively served for 26 Seasons as the Manager during which the Club won 13 English league titles along with 25 other domestic and international trophies. The next best English Football Manager may have but half of Sir Alex’s accomplishments under his belt. In this article, I intend to discuss a few crucial elements of his enormously successful management approach and how they can be applied to the world of business. When he joined the Manchester United in 1986, unlike most managers, he focused on building the club rather than a team. Firm in his belief that he could win with youn...

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”- Peter Drucker Whether Peter Drucker was the author of the quote above is debatable, though, it’s amply demonstrative of the fact that even the soundest strategy fails to produce the desired results if the right culture isn’t in place. While establishing a healthy culture in your organization is tough enough, when it comes to Mergers & Acquisitions (M &A), integration of different organizational cultures may, sometimes, prove to be even harder than all other affairs combined. The greater the cultural differences, the harder it’s to reconcile them. In his storied memoir ‘Straight from the Gut’ Jack Welch, a former CEO of General Electric, narrates the harrowing events that led to the divestiture of the investment bank Kidder, Peabody & Co. from GE- a classic case of irreconcilable cultural differences. When, in early 1986, Welch first revealed his plans to buy Kidder, Peabody, one of the oldest investment banks in Wall Street, two...

The Black Friday looked like the end of the road, but the Pixar team who worked on Toy Story wouldn’t just give up… When Pixar struck a US $26 million deal with Disney to make three movies, Toy Story was the first. Inspired by the ambition to create the world’s first computer-animated film, though, the Pixar team still had to rely on the support and expertise of The Walt Disney Studios. It was on Friday, the 19th of November, 1993 at Walt Disney Co., Burbank, California that they screened the first half of Toy Story for Disney Executives.  After viewing it, the consensus across the table was that the film was awful. As the novice film-makers from Pixar worked hard to please the intimidating head of the Walt Disney Studios, Jeff Katzenberg, who wanted to give the film an edge so that it’d appeal to children, teenagers and adults alike, the film had lost its cinematic bearings. Peter Schneider, President of Walt Disney Feature Animation orders a shutdown of the project, threaten...