You don’t need an MBA or a job with a top company to be a good manager. Amit Chatterjee, in his provocative and contemplative book, explains how managers can excel beyond expectations. He urges managers to act of their own volition and shows how to transcend from being managers to leaders. Through illustrations and useful graphs, the author offers purposeful practices for leadership. Ascent provides a growth mantra for managers and how they can emerge as leader-managers through investment in complexity and volition. It is a must-read for all managers who want to grow and become effective leaders.
Archives: Books
Working Out of the Box
Do you know which business leader plays a game of sudoku every night before going to bed? Never uses a computer to write down important thoughts? Likes to stand and work?
In Working Out of the Box, Aparna Piramal Raje gives us an intimate peek into the lives of forty progressive leaders by exploring the connections between their workspaces and working styles. Capturing quirks, individual styles of working, motivations and leadership traits, and tracing the patterns exhibited by these leaders, she unravels their defining qualities and explains how they reflect in their workspaces. Divided into four sections, personal energy, organizational capital, brand values, environment and sustainability, the book provides insight into what makes these CEOs tick and how they manage their most valuable assets.
Effective People
Is Shah Rukh Khan an effective actor? Is Naresh Trehan an effective doctor? Was A.P.J. Abdul Kalam an effective nation builder?
Are you an effective person?
In this book, bestselling author T.V. Rao studies and analyses effective doctors, actors, civil servants, social workers, educationists, nation builders and entrepreneurs. Some of them seem to go beyond the tenets of effectiveness and shine out as what the author calls Very Effective People and Super Effective People.
His diverse examples and cases range from A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, Devi Shetty, Anil Gupta to Kangana Ranaut, Sachin Tendulkar, Anupam Kher to ordinary people whose lives are no less effective.
Hugely readable, with self-assessment tools at the end of each chapter, Effective People will propel you to leap forward and discover the best in you.
The Executors
‘If you produce what you have promised to, no one would want to come in your way’ S. Ramadorai, former vice chairman, Tata Consultancy Services
‘Relying on conventional wisdom is never a smart idea in an emerging business’ Akhil Gupta, vice chairman, Bharti Enterprises
‘Do your duty to the best of your ability, without attachment to the results, and remain calm in both success and failure’ Venkatesh Kini, president, Coca-Cola India and south-west Asia
‘Planning is academic. Action decides the winner’ Rahul Bhasin, managing partner, Baring Private Equity Partners
These are some of the life lessons that 30 of India’s most celebrated managers share in The Executors, a personal account of how they came to run influential companies such as Bharti, Bennett Coleman, Tech Mahindra, Apollo Munich, Convergys, Yum! Brands and Max Life Insurance, among others. Packed with inspiring stories of struggle, this book culls out the wisdom that these leaders have imbibed over the years and are keen to impart to others. Ashutosh Sinha insightfully explores their management style, philosophy and how they lead from the front.
Grassroots Innovation
A moral dilemma gripped Anil K. Gupta when he was invited by the Bangladeshi government to help restructure their agricultural on-farm research sector in 1985. He noticed how the marginalized farmers were being paid poorly for their otherwise unmatched knowledge. The gross injustice of this constant imbalance led Gupta to found what would turn into a resounding social and ethical movement-the Honey Bee Network-bringing together and elevating thousands of grassroots innovators.
For over two decades, Gupta has travelled through rural lands, along with hundreds of volunteers of the Network, unearthing innovations by the ranks-from the famed Mitti Cool refrigerator to the root bridge of Meghalaya. He insists that to fight the largest and most persistent problems of the world, we must not rely only on expensive research labs but also look towards ordinary folk, and eventually build bridges between the formal and informal sectors. Innovation-that oft-flung-around word-is stripped to its core in this book.
Poignant and personal, Grassroots Innovation is an important treatise from a social crusader of our time.
Glenn Maxwell1
Will plays better than everyone he knows, but is it good enough for the T20 Academy?
Will Albright is a batting whiz and captain of his local cricket team. But when his coach nominates him to attend a T20 training camp, Will soon discovers that standing out in a sea of young cricket talent isn’t easy. Especially, when Darren ‘Killer’ McKinnon, a super-quick pace bowler, has taken a deadly dislike to him. Luckily, Will’s hero, Glenn Maxwell, is on hand to provide some much-needed advice.
If Will can survive Killer’s bouncers, he may just have a shot at making it through the camp alive and gaining a place at the brand-new T20 Youth Academy.
The Mother-In-Law
In this witty, acute and often painfully funny book Veena Venugopal follows eleven women through their marriages and explores why the mother-in-law is the dreaded figure she is.Meet Deepa, whose bikini-wearing mother-in-law won’t let her even wear jeans; Carla whose mother-in-law insists that her son keep all his stuff in his family home although he can spend the night at his wife’s; Rachna who fell in love with her mother-in-law even before she met her fiancé only to find both her romances sour; and Lalitha who finds that despite having had a hard-nut mother-in-law herself, she is turning out to be an equally unlikeable Mummyji.Full of incisive observations and deliciously wicked storytelling, The Mother-in-Law is a book that will make you laugh and cry and understand better the most important relationship in a married woman’s life.
Leadership Secrets From The Mahabharata
Management insights culled from the Mahabharata, one of the greatest books of all time, is not simply the story of a fratricidal war or a fount of wisdom for philosophers; it is also a comprehensive manual on strategy. From this storehouse of knowledge, Meera Uberoi selects the most pertinent shlokas to reveal the secrets of leadership and the path to success. She shows that the Mahabharata is equal, if not superior, to other management bibles such as The Art of War, The Prince and Go Rin No Sho, The Book of Five Rings. The aphorisms in Leadership Secrets from the Mahabharata have been selected from the Santi Parva, the Bhagvad Gita Parva and the Adi Parva.
As Bhishma lies dying on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, Krishna realizes that with Bhishma’s death, the world will lose ‘all knowledge’. To prevent this, Krishna asks him to impart to Yudhisthira all he knows. These teachings, coming as they do from Bhishma, the wisest of them all, contained in the Santi Parva, form the core of Uberoi’s book. Apart from detailing how to apply the craft of kingship to modern business practices, the book also explores the analogy between kingship and leadership. Pithy and insightful, Meera Uberoi’s selection is a practical guide to leadership in any field of life. The aphorisms, grouped under heads like Duty, War, Espionage and Conduct, deal with eternal values and truths that are as relevant today as they were 3000 years ago.
The Modern Monk
He loved French cookbooks, invented a new way of making khichdi, was interested in the engineering behind ship-building and the technology that makes ammunition. More than 100 years after his death, do we really know or understand the bewildering, fascinating, complex man Swami Vivekananda was? From his speech in Chicago that mesmerised America to his voluminous writings and speeches that redefined the idea of India, Vivekananda was much more than a monk. His work sweeps through Indian politics, economics, sociology, arts and culture, and of course religion. So ubiquitous are his sayings that they pop everywhere from the speeches of politicians to t-shirts and mugs. It may perhaps be said about Vivekananda that he rarely had a boring idea – and even when he did, he never expressed it boringly! We see and hear so much about Vivekananda that we have almost forgotten how critical he is to our understanding of ourselves as Indians, and indeed, as human beings. Vivekananda is one of the most important figures in the modern imagination of India. He is also an utterly modern man, consistently challenging his own views, and embracing diverse, even conflicting arguments. It is his modernity that appeals to us today. He is unlike any monk we have known. He is confined neither by history nor by ritual, and is constantly questioning everything around him, including himself. It is in Vivekananda’s contradictions, his doubts, his fears and his failings that he recognize his profoundly compelling divinity – he teaches us that to try and understand God, first one must truly comprehend one’s own self. This book is an argument that it is not just because he is close to God but also because he is so tantalizingly immersed in being human that keeps us returning to Vivekananda and his immortal wisdom.
Venus Crossing
In Venus Crossing, Kalpana Swaminathan masterfully crafts twelve stories that lay bare the deepest complexities of human relationships. These stories capture the instant of transit, that moment when the impossible-the unthinkable-is absorbed into the fabric of life so that life can be lived again. That moment is everything: revelation, challenge, existence. In the Yellow Dupatta, practical compulsions surmount grief as a young couple takes their dead child home from the hospital. A middle-aged nurse finds romance with the most obnoxious of patients in Sister Thomas and Mister Gomes. Two young women shattered by rejection begin the long journey of survival in Fly Away, Peter. Incident at Abu Ghraib finds Sukhi appalled by her mother’s empathy for a disgraced American soldier. Hemant is counselled, in Euthanasia, to opt for the final solution-but will he?
Incisive, brilliant and deeply compassionate, Venus Crossing showcases Kalpana Swaminathan’s consummate skill as a storyteller and proves, yet again, the uncompromising vision of her craft.