Women and work!

My conversation with  Gourav Roy  this morning on the brutal and untimely death of Ms. Twinkle Sharma (with some additions) Many Twinkles are abused everyday, some of them are brutally killed! These incidents happen everywhere, with everyone! Our souls are abused everyday, and our inspirations are killed everyday too; isn't it? But who cares! Society is becoming increasingly intolerant. The ‘I’m the (sic) man’ attitude among many has taken a great toll on the humankind. What we’ve become as humans?  Our day mostly starts with intolerance, continues with it through out the day, and ends with it in the night too. At the wash basin we wash our face with one hand and hold the telephone with the other scolding our reports with the choicest abuses, in the public transportation system show manliness at fellow commuters, in the cafeteria look down upon 'that shabby looking Zamato guy' adjacent to us who like us has paid and is sipping her/his cup of coffee (not ours),

In many B-schools, business ethics (BE) is being introduced as a core course. One needs to analyse the demand side and supply side to find its true relevance for managers. The demand side practitioners emphasize on bottom-line. It's not that they don't prefer ethical decision-making but they just don't know whether the other person is ethical or not. Consequently, the demand side mostly tries to give lip-service to it to cut cost and remain a going concern. The supply side mainly comprises of consultants and B-school faculties who generally try to operationalise BE as CSR or a means to mitigate various (extra) costs like government regulations/interventions, hue and cry by civil society activists, etc., in the events of unethical business practices. Furthermore, who head the CSR projects in organizations; well, they are mostly the superstars with expertise in core functional areas like marketing, finance, and so on. Hence, the bottomline thinking slowl

The present state of the Corporate and two fundamental issues Yesterday Kingfisher went off the sky, today it's the turn of Jet, and tomorrow (God forbid) another! Who's at fault? Employees? Company decision-makers? Shareholders? Governments? And the list goes on. I ain't here to find where the fault lies; there're many who're already doing it. Rather, I'm rekindling two issues that have been ignored by practitioners and academics alike, since quite some time. As management is neither a science nor an art, but a practice; I'll discuss the practitioners' issue first. So, here's the first one. It pertains to the practitioners. It hovers around the classic question posed by Socrates in the fourth century BC: How 'one' should live? The question isn't how I should live? Or, how you should live? But, how 'one' should live? The 'one' that Socrates mentioned is the human, i.e., homo sapiens. Homo sapiens isn'

Hypocrisy and being critical could be just millimetres apart! People hate subsidies. They say it takes us toward the Stone Age. But many of them, at least from my generation, have forgotten that they could complete higher studies with the meagre salary that their parents used to earn in the eighties and early nineties. Many of those cheap educational programs came from subsidies. (Though, I can understand the millennial generation hating subsidies because they hardly have enjoyed them.) Second, people hate political and corporate leaders who talk about philanthro-capitalism. However, when Michael Porter lectures about creating shared value, i.e., simultaneously creating economic and socio-environmental values, the very same people applaud in the audience. (Though I can understand the millennial generation getting confused encountering this new form of capitalism.) Third, people look at Prof. Md. Yunus and Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam with awe and appreciation for their gener

Have today’s PhD programs become avenues to write (any) article, instead of gaining (some) knowledge? Once, while sharing lunch with a PhD student, I discussed about the progress of his thesis. He said that he was more concerned with publishing articles to get selected by a premier B-school (on completing the PhD program). I asked whether a PhD program was meant for publishing articles? (That was under the premise that my professors had emphasized on gathering knowledge to write a decent dissertation than writing articles.) However, he argued that to join an ivey league university, he needed to publish. He said that his CV may not move to the shortlisting phase, if he didn't have publications. He also said that he wanted to study and gain as much knowledge as he could, but writing articles was an imperative for him to get a decent job. Then I said, "Well, I don't have any problems with your aspirations to join an ivey league university. In that case, please acce

4Ps of Professional Excellence in the Organization " Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit ." -- Aristotle Professionals act to excel. Be it budgeting, recruiting, producing, or selling, craving for excellence has become the buzzword across the corporate corridors. However, professional excellence isn't achieved by everyone. We see professionals dejected about failures, cribbing about, "You know what! That guy knows how to palm grease the boss; I don't know." "That girl, you know! Boss is pleased with her because she smiles at him every now and then; that's not my type." Many such discussions flood our office spaces and off-office places like cafeterias and pubs everyday. However, after seeing the professionaldom for over 25 yea