JOURNEY

Me Times ! From the time I heard about "Me-Time" phrase, I was excited.  Everybody has to spare some free time with themselves everyday.  It is as necessary as doing your job, spending time with kids, wife or your project team.  You have to be with yourself and yourself most of the times.  You have to talk with yourself. Stupid as it may sound but most of the people are sacred about loneliness.  Because when they are alone they have to face themselves.  Their own feelings, beliefs, attitudes, ego and more of such feelings. You have to spend some Me-Time in order to get organized.  You need time to read something, play some music, or game or just do nothing and be yourself.  You need it.  The "I am Busy" culture has penetrated so much into our lives that we do not have time for self-evaluation or self-reflection. I was a workaholic person and used to work till my body couldn't take it anymore.  My health deteriorated,  I wa...

I am very fascinated about Creativity.  Creativity can ignite the spark in you.   Creativity is awesome.  It gives you a high.  Adrenaline rushes into your blood when you are creative.  Creativity to me is doing something different.  Creativity is breaking the mold and challenging the status quo.  It is not only applicable to people who are in entertainment, marketing, or advertising business but to everybody. Creativity is everywhere.  You can be creative even while cleaning the floor.  You can be creative in presenting your ideas to your friends, to your boss, to your consultant or professor.  All you need to do is think differently and execute it irrespective of your fear and resistance.  Creativity is so simple to understand yet difficult to realize.  It is just being yourself and nobody else. Last year my father gifted me the greatest gift of all times.  He gave me a book on creativity( Creativity: Unleashing the...

I have a very interesting story to share with you and it is very personal.  Three years ago I finished my undergraduate degree in engineering in Electronics and Communication.   Through second year, I was literally struggling to learn the principles of semiconductor devices.  It was nightmares for me.  I never remembered it.  Tough subjects came over me, one by one and I couldn't take it.  As a result, I flunked in my second year.   I was terrified and had never failed before in my life. So I started again and third year came in and was bombared with more difficult subject like Microprocessors.  Same situation, couldn't get it but didn't flunked this time.  Somehow I passed it.  When final year came in I got an opportunity to teach few students.  They wanted to learn microprocessors and controllers.  I was clueless but I had some good mentors who taught me processors before.  So I thought I could do it. ...

Our Dean of the business school walks in a class room or a meeting with the same energy all the time.  He is always positive and we have never heard him complain.  He never said like my week was bad or the food was not ok.  Or atleast he doesn't project his image like that. Our professor Dr. Clinton Longenecker always mentions that leaders never complain.  He has never complained about food.  He always appreciates whatever has been given to him.  If leaders start complaining then the whole tribe would start doing so.  We need to accept the challenges the way they are.  And fight for them.  As a leader you need to take charge.  You will see the world the way you are.  Leaders never complain about life and they take charge for their life and the tribe.  The quote "Leaders never complain" had a lasting effect in my life.  I mentioned to my wife once and now she reminds me all the time whenever I tend to compla...

From centuries we have been taught to work the way it use to be.  The way everything works is the only way to work it out.  From the day mass production was introduced we introduced standardized way of doing things and parted our ways from doing things in a different way.   We were taught to go to school get education and work for someone in a factory. Thinking different was not allowed.  Thinking of Leadership was not in our surroundings. With this great mentality we have created millions of doctors and engineers along the way.  The way it used to work.  We created cogs who work 8-5PM shifts and return homes.   And simultaneously lost millions of leadership opportunities.  The society forced kids to go to follow, follow and follow all the times.  Nobody told them to LEAD from the front. There are millions of leaders in demand.  And nobody want to be a leader.  Because nobody is ready for the challenge.  We ha...

Simon Sinek argues in this Ted video, how great leaders inspire action.  Great video and my favorite one. 

Three words can kill an entire organization, whole company, even entire country and our planet earth.  Those words are "NOT MY JOB". Yes this is not killing each other with weapons.  It is killing without doing anything.  Do you wait to see if it is your job to fix your house's water leak?  Do you blame it on somebody and do nothing about it? It is not my home so why worry?  Right.  Perhaps everyone is thinking the same and same thing is repeated and multiplied in numerous organizations, companies and countries.  Why should I fix it when I didn't do it in the very first place? If you child does "PEE" in your house, don't you wash it or not?  If you consider yourself as a father of this planet and every creature its son then wouldn't you fix others "PEE". I know it is tough to imagine. It takes love to clean your son's shit but it take guts and a true selfless act to save an organization and the planet earth.  The longest devel...

If you are running your company then many times you will be concentrating on generating demand for your product.  How can I get more consumers? If your product is remarkable by all standards then you don't have to worry about demand and how to create one.  Product will have enough demand.  Worrying on numbers is all secondary when your product hits the stands.  You should not worry about demand before you design the product.  What you should be working on is creating a desire for your product or a service.  Apple Inc. was successful in creating a desire to own an ipod.  "If had the money I will only buy an ipod" - Is a Desire of a wannabe apple tribe member.  Can you create a desire in 100 true fans?  How can  you create a desire to possess your product to million people or billion people?  Answers is simple but not simpler : Build remarkable and desirable products.

Have you heard stories of great sailors?  JOURNEYS of Great sailors teach us a heck of a deal on blogging and reinventing life through blogging.  I found a great co-relation between sailing and blogging.  And both are ideal way of living your life King Size. So what happens when your boat is off track or struggling in a storm or is struck with an ice berg?  You feel helpless.  What you do when your boat has lost direction and is wandering about in the ocean?  Your hope is someone will come and help you out.  Someone will show you the way of survival.  Some one will rescue your JOURNEY. So in that hope you start sending signals in the air hoping somebody in the world will receive, interpret it and eventually send rescue teams to save your boat.  Blogging is very similar to sailing and we can learn great life lessons from sailing and blogging. So you start sending the signals (write blog posts) and wait sometime.  As time passes by ...

How Apple has managed to stay on top and still managed to look foolish?  Why is Steve Jobs staying with this philosophy?  What is so great about it? What is being so great about being foolish?  I have thought over and over again about this philosophy and I am able to discover how great it is. Apple launched Ipad in January with a lot of buzz.  All over the world, people tuned into popular blogs to see what Steve Jobs has to offer.  And thousands were waiting to comment on the Ipad.  After the launch, most  people were hugely disappointed.  Lots of criticism floated around the web including the famous Hitler Video Series. People thought Apple has launched a mediocre product with not so many features and hugely disappointed the early adopters.  Apple looked foolish again.  But the catch was Apple made people hungry along the way for a better version.  It didn't gave away all the features at once.  They wanted to remain fool...

There is absolutely no room for excuses in this world.  Now people need results and they have higher expectations.  They need better results.   Failure to meet them means falling to our own prey.  In professional life there is no room for excuses.  Failing means you are weak .  Simple as it may sound but think about every reason and at the end it narrows down to just one sentence "You couldn't do it".  Corporations can't afford excuses.  If you boss is kind enough then he will listen to you but will still fire you or shift you to another department.  Excuses means you hated your job and now you are ready to be shipped off to another job or department. Don't give excuses because it reveals your weaknesses.  Don't give excuses because you couldn't ship it but give feedback on process improvement. Stop thinking excuses and start thinking results.   Delivering desired results with discipline is the mantra today. Nob...

What happens when an organization losses a Linchpin - The Indispensable?  A person whom you cannot replace, tough to find a person like that to fit in your organization.  If your firm or organization has such a person then think of that person leaving the job.  As a leader, I can only think of nightmares Or You shall see everything falling apart. You certainly don't want a linchpin to quit their work .  But you only realize Whether an employee is a linchpin when that person quits his/her job.  You start realizing their true value.  You cannot a buy a linchpin off of a Wal-Mart shelf or off a stack of thousand resumes.  They are not a factory worker and they are certainly not a commodity.  So tough to regain those employees with such high value. So what are you going to do now when that person quits? Or what are you going to do before that person quits?  What if you knew in advance whether your employee is a linchpin or not?  All thes...

My last post focused on maintaining focus at all times to succeed.  In this age of absolute distraction when you have so many like and conflicting ideas we need absolute focus .   You have so many ideas, thoughts, friends, feelings, desires and distractions going on, and in the midst of it you need to preserve your best one and organize them. We need to start thinking as a disciplined thinker.  A disciplined thinker is a person who fights continuously with one's conflicting ideas in the mind.  He is a person who gives attention to his ideas and listens carefully to them.  A disciplined thinker is a person who organizes various ideas into pools of categories.  He then organizes those categories to refine his own ideas and makes them sharper.  He writes them down as soon as they come to his mind.  He is a person who storyboards his ideas into series of pictures with the help of sticky notes to make a big picture.  A discipline...

What happens when you do things at the last moment?  Why you feel that I will do better next time?  What happens when absolute focus kicks in? Result: You will work with undivided attention.  Undivided attention brings creativity and results.  You are very creative when you are very focused  in your goal.  The ideas behind this post is not to encourage you work at the last moment but to bring light to benefits of absolute focus . Why apple is considered to be the most creative company?  The company with remarkable products.  Because they are a very focused company.  They are aware of their extreme focus .....high gains and high productivity.  highly creative individuals...preventing themselves from average products.  Most companies are distracted by too many things.  Trying to do just about everything.  And as a result nothing gets done.  Products with average quality, performance and lots of complains. I am writi...

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Are you keeping track of your ideas?   Can you recall those wonderful ideas you had once in the past about the future?  Did you ever had this feeling? "You see I had this concept while I was young." Our mind thinks amazing and crazy ideas everyday and of which some are really revolutionary.  But the average mass don't write them down.  People when confronted to write they hated to write even a single line forget about pages about a product concept or new marketing idea.  It might seem impractical to write down every small idea some of them could be really crazy ones.  But the catch is you need only one to hit the home run, only one big idea to get promotion, one great idea to get you job or your next marketing idea. Because they might be not practical now but in the future everything is a possibility.  You could be the first person in your company to come up with a new project concept. You can either become the darling of your organization, ...