Fail! And we are stamped for life. Don’t we try and run from failure all our lives? But, ‘spontaneous doing has to go through failures’. Acknowledging failure is singularly the most difficult thing to do. It takes tremendous courage to come out and say, yes, I failed. Shweta Punj chronicles sixteen leaders who have celebrated their failure as much as their success. Each story is an anatomy of failure. So whether it was the difference between ‘need’ and ‘want’ that led Abhinav Bindra to miss that winning shot, or whether it was a suicide attempt that pushed Sabyasachi Mukherjee into fully realizing his potential-these stories will encourage you to look at failure differently.
Catagory: Health, Family & Personal Development
Ascent
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.
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.
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.
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.
Extraordinary
Extraordinary: 5 Steps to Achieve Success will help you realize your dream and be extraordinary! Are you leading an ordinary life? Many people go through life struggling with daily frustrations, making compromises all the time and feeling sorry for themselves. They never get to do what they really want. Soon, they begin to see themselves as failures. Is success just a matter of luck? Is the path of achievement open only to a few? Are most of us doomed to lead unfulfilled lives, without ever realizing our true potential? Certainly not, says Atul Magoon. Through inspiring real-life stories, this book shows you how success is simply a matter of putting in hard work, overcoming your fears and making full use of the opportunities before you.
The Magic of Friendships
Do you have numerous friends on social media, but hardly any in real life?
Do you find that your relationships don’t last?
These and similar questions have now become the part and parcel of our lives. Today, more than ever, friendship has become more important than any other relationship. The warmth and companionship that a good friend can provide is unmatched and each one of us craves for that special friend to whom we can unburden our heart or seek help from in troubled times. But not all of us are that lucky!
In his book, Shubha Vilas discusses, in a simple and straight-forward manner, what is missing in our friendships today and the various scenarios that prevent people from making and maintaining good friends.
How To Be Your Own Management Guru
How smart a manager are you? How good are you at leveraging your knowledge and skills in order to provide value for your business and your customers? How smart is your management team when it comes to understanding both the fundamentals of business and new trends? How to Be Your Own Management Guru is the perfect answer to those looking to master the fundamentals of managing in the modern world: how to make and implement strategy; how to understand and respond to customer needs; how to manage and get the best out of people; and above all, how to use knowledge. Drawing on both business research and examples of best practice from around the world, past and present, How to Be Your Own Management Guru will help readers manage more effectively, and do business the smart way.