Category: Excerpts

Keenly observed, sharply plotted and full of wit and brio, Mahesh Rao’s Polite Society reimagines Jane Austen’s Emma in contemporary Delhi to portray a society whose polished surface often reveals far more than is intended.
We humbler mortals would think that an actual house anywhere in the vicinity of the NCR and money without any visible employment, would mean a permanent state of bliss. But as it turns out, the rich have their own problems to deal with.
Read on to feel a sharp stab of sympathy for these six truly awful Rich People Problems!
The sheer futility of art fairs when by even a faintly glamorous foreign celebrity is nowhere in sight
“Excitement rippled across the front lawns as it emerged that there had finally been a sighting of Diana Ross. Determined to make up for other disappointments a group of jewelry designers from New Friends Colony elbowed their way through the main pavilion, gesturing at the tall figure being guided around some hanging steel pots. But the thrill dissipated soon enough-when it was discovered that the lady in question was in fact the wife of the Rwandan ambassador to India.”
 The sordid places the best people have to descend to, to remain the best people.
“Nina would not go so far as to call it a humiliation but it was certainly depressing. The best people were being invited to flashy restaurants that overlooked the flyover. The venue for a book launch might  be at the end of a corridor of sports shops in a shopping mall.”
Being aesthetically disappointed by your pet philanthropic projects
“Anyway, one night we were walking through the Marais and I was astonished to see a restaurant that served their cuisine. It seemed like fate so of course we went in. Such a disappointment, I can’t tell you. Everything tasted of some dreadful sour fermented liquid, and horrid bits of pork fat. I mean, it’s too awful of me, but after that meal I couldn’t help but feel far less sympathetic towards them as a people.”
The suffering experienced on private yachts
“He hated yachts, where he ran the danger of being confined for long periods of time with objectionable characters. He was also convinced that they were breeding grounds for virulent bacteria, which would only result in a boatful of passengers vomiting in the wood-paneled aisles.”
The stress induced by the precise science of invitation- dispensing
“There were questions of future utility to be balanced with the danger of current solecism. Favours sometimes had to be returned but in the correct measure and on the appropriate occasion.”
And that most indescribable of all horrors-the pain of watching a truly insufferable \  social climber  ascend to wealth and prominence
“Year after year, Nina had watched Silky inhabit her role as Mrs Chhabra, settling into its splendid nooks as though she had been born to it. She had traded in her social insecurities for a jangly new personality, in whose service bad manners masqueraded as benevolent plain speaking.”

This book explores the lives of the many different sorts of Briton who went to India: viceroys and offcials, soldiers and missionaries, planters and foresters, merchants, engineers, teachers and doctors. It evokes the three and a half centuries of their ambitions and experiences, together with the lives of their families, recording the diversity of their work and their leisure, and the complexity of their relationships with the peoples of India. It also describes the lives of many who did not fit in with the usual image of the Raj: the tramps and rascals, the men who ‘went native’, the women who scorned the role of the traditional memsahib. Below is an excerpt from the book. Read on!

Salvation for Doyle came three years later with his marriage, after which his army report rated him as ‘regular, good and temperate’. The agent of this remarkable transformation was his wife, Margaret, the daughter of John O’Brien, another Irish soldier in India, a private in the Madras Fusiliers whose regiment had been sent north to help counter the Rebellion of 1857.* O’Brien was part of the relief force that arrived too late to save the British in Kanpur (Cawnpore) although it did manage to reach the besieged city of Lucknow. Badly wounded in the shoulder during the conflict, O’Brien decided to retire on his pension to Bangalore. Although the subsequent Doyle-O’Brien marriage might have seemed a purely Irish union taking place in a tropical ambience, this was not in fact the case. As the registry records demonstrate, John’s wife, Matilda, was an Indian girl who at the age of thirteen converted to Christianity a month before her marriage. Billy Connolly’s reaction to the news that he thus had Indian forebears and probably – given that Matilda had several siblings – a large number of Indian cousins, was both charming and bemused. Although the comedian still felt he was a ‘Glaswegian, Scottish person’ – large, white and hairy – he was ‘very proud and happy to be part Indian’ as well.
As Connolly’s story suggests, much of Britain’s relationship with
India, especially at a personal and popular level, has very quickly been forgotten. One cannot help wondering why his maternal grandmother, to whom he was very close, never told him that her own grandparents had lived in India and that her mother had been born in Bangalore; if she had been ashamed to admit her Indian ancestry, she could have left that bit out. The story also indicates how much of the British-Indian relationship, again at a personal level, was accidental. Most British people did not go to India to conquer it, govern it or amass a large fortune there. When Daniel Doyle enlisted in the 3rd Battalion of the 60th Rifles, he did not know that he would be sent to India and spend half his active life there as a soldier who would never be called upon to fight a battle. Like private soldiers, many British women and children lived in India by accident, without having chosen to do so; chance or unexpected circumstances had brought them there. If we look merely at Connolly’s own profession, the theatrical, we find a good number of future actors living fortuitously on the Subcontinent: a list of those who were born in India, or went to school or spent parts of their youth there, would include Vivien Leigh, Merle Oberon, Norman Wisdom, Lindsay Anderson, Spike Milligan, Tom Stoppard, Felicity Kendal and Joanna Lumley, many of whom will appear later in this book. If we examine an even smaller profession, that of writers, we find that Thackeray, Kipling, Saki, Orwell (and Orwell’s second wife, Sonya) were all born in India.
The British in this book lived in India from shortly after the death of Queen Elizabeth I until well into the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, a span of some three hundred and fifty years. Life for them was very different – and was led very differently – in diverse ages, just as it was in Britain. For nearly three-quarters of that time British settlements – and later possessions – were administered by the East India Company (EIC); for the last ninety years of the Indian Empire (1858–1947) they were under the direct rule of the British government. All divisions by ‘period’ are artificial and prone to generalization, but perhaps one can divide Britain’s time in India roughly into thirds. The first (and largest) had its share of war and violence, especially on the west coast, but was mainly a matter of small enclaves concentrating on trade. The second, stretching from the 1740s to the 1850s, was a period of conquest and expansion during which the East India Company, one of several rival European entities, emerged to become the paramount power in India. The third (and shortest), ending in 1947, was an era of consolidation and subsequent withdrawal. Yet even these divisions would need to be divided into contrasting subdivisions. As at home, the behaviour of the British in India was very different in the Regency period from what it was in the more earnest years of the early Victorians.

The British in India makes a highly original and engaging contribution to a long an important period of British and Indian history.

Is there a way to influence people without pushing data and analysis on them? Is there an effective way to drive change in an organization? Yes, through stories. Stories at Work will teach you how to wrap your stories in context and deliver them in a way that grabs your audience’s attention. Read an excerpt from the book to know more!

This book is designed to take you from being a believer of the power of stories to a seasoned user of stories in business, first by introducing you to the various elements of story work and then sharing with you the process you can use to unlock this enormous potential.
However, to do that I must first shift a belief most people have about stories. Imagine that you are one among ten people sitting in a conference room waiting for a very important meeting to start and someone in the room says ‘let me tell you a story’. Pause and think about what would be the first thing that would go through your mind. Take a minute.
If you are like 95 per cent of the 1500-plus senior leaders that I have run into during my workshops, your first thought would be along the line—‘why is he wasting our time’, ‘it’s time to be serious’, ‘what an idiot’, ‘has he not prepared for this’, ‘how long will this take’ or ‘why do I have to listen to it’. Very few of you, the 5 per cent, would say ‘I want to know what he has to say’ or ‘I hope it is interesting.’ That is the barrier stories face in business.
Most of you who have been in sales, and many of you who have not, would have at some point in time in the past been told by your boss ‘Kahaani mat batao!’ (Don’t tell me a story), when you were genuinely trying to explain the real reasons behind why something didn’t happen. Most people label stories as being made up, something to be used for entertainment or something usually for children.
While this myth will surely be shattered as we journey through the book, it would be useful to introduce you to my definition of business storytelling. Story is a fact. What we will do is wrap it in context and deliver it with emotion.
You might ask, ‘Can’t stories be created or made up?’
Of course they can, but not in this book and definitely not in the world of business. ‘Can’t I borrow from mythology?’ Of course you can if you have a huge memory bank for mythological stories and know how to connect them to business. But not in this book. In this book, and in the work I do, we will stick to stories being facts. After all, the currency of business is fact.

Stories at Work will teach you how to wrap your stories in context and deliver them in a way that grabs your audience’s attention.

What Works: Gender Equality by Design discusses how organizations can leverage findings from behavioral science research to fight gender bias in the workplace—starting with job listings. Read an excerpt from the book below.

Attracting the right people instead of managing the wrong ones is one of the most important tasks any organization confronts. This is the mantra Google lives by—or, as Laszlo Bock writes: “Only hire people who are better than you.” In an interview on the company’s hiring and corporate culture, Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman, explained that in addition to judging the technical qualifications of potential hires, a key focus at Google was to determine whether they were passionate and committed to innovation.
Surely, allowing all Google engineers to spend 20 percent of their time developing their own ideas serves as a sorting device. It attracts creative, independent minds who invent Google News, Orkut, or a social networking site. The time is not written in stone nor necessarily utilized, but it matters as an idea: “No one gets a ‘20 percent time’ packet at orientation, or is pushed into distracting themselves with a side project. Twenty percent time has always operated on a somewhat ad hoc basis, providing an outlet for the company’s brightest, most restless, and most persistent employees—for people determined to see an idea through to completion, come hell or high water.”
Not many of those “seeing an idea through to completion, come hell or high water” are women. In the spring of 2015, a gender discrimination trial brought by a former junior partner at a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley drew renewed attention to the low fraction of women in technology. While in the end a jury found against the plaintiff, the low numbers were undeniable: fewer than 20 percent in most tech companies and even fewer in Silicon Valley’s venture capital firms.
Some argue that the “tech bros” mentality of Silicon Valley keeps women out and even discourages female students from focusing on computer science. Perhaps. Surely, the male-dominated environment does not help tech firms attract women. As we know, deviating from behavior that is expected of a social category, either by others or by oneself, can be costly. A woman who acts against the norms by definition doesn’t “belong”; not surprisingly, the fear of not belonging is influential.
Indeed, research by Boris Groysberg, Ashish Nanda, and Nitin Nohria (now dean of Harvard Business School) suggests establishing belonging turns out to be a major concern of female job seekers. They report that women consider more factors than men when screening jobs; in particular, cultural fit, values, and managerial style. There is a surprising silver lining to this research, however: it carries hidden benefits for women and their employers. In follow-up work, Groysberg identifies this scrutiny as one of the key variables explaining why women transition more successfully to new companies than men. Women know better what they are getting themselves into.
The researchers analyzed the performance of more than a thousand “star” analysts working for almost eighty different in- vestment banks over a nine-year period. Analysts were labeled “stars” if they were ranked as one of the best in the industry by Institutional Investor magazine. The team was interested in better understanding whether the analysts’ skills were portable when they switched companies. It turns out most analysts lost their stardom when they changed employers unless they moved to a better firm or brought their whole team along—with the exception of female analysts. Not only had the women studied a potential new employer more carefully before joining, they had also built their expertise differently than their male colleagues.
The top-performing female analysts had “built their franchises on portable, external relationships with clients and the companies they covered, rather than on relationships within their firms.” Or as one female star analyst put it: “For a woman in any business, it’s easier to focus outward, where you can define and deliver the services required to succeed, than to navigate the internal affiliations and power structure within a male-dominant firm.”
People choose organizations based on their preferences and their beliefs about whether or not they could thrive in a given organization. Messages shape those beliefs. Consider the messages sent when Lieutenant General David Morrison stated in a video posted on the Australian army’s official YouTube channel that he was committed to inclusion. “If that does not suit you, then get out,” Morrison flatly declared. “There is no place for you amongst this band of brothers and sisters.”
Acting in response to a 2013 investigation into sexual abuse, Morrison sent a strong message. In 2014, Morrison joined the Australian delegation to the Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict in London. Speaking again with admirable bluntness, he said that armies that assign more value to men than to women and tolerate sexual violence “do nothing to distinguish the soldier from the brute.”
Will these messages attract and retain soldiers valuing equality and inclusion? Time will tell. And while actions have followed his words, we all know that talk can be cheap. When and how messages affect behavior is a large field of inquiry in itself, but experimental evidence is rare. One example, however, is encouraging.
Robert Jensen and Emily Oster took advantage of the fact that cable television became available at different times in different parts of India, allowing them to trace whether attitudes and behaviors went along with exposure to the new information cable programming provided.
They found that the introduction of cable television was associated with improvements in women’s status in rural areas, including female school enrollment, decreases in fertility, as well as reported increases in autonomy and decreases in the acceptability of beating women and son preference. The information conveyed via cable television, often through somewhat surprising means, such as soap operas, exposed rural viewers to gender attitudes and ways of life, including within the household, more prevalent in urban areas. And it changed behavior.
Sorting mechanisms are powerful and often overlooked. Those charged with attracting the largest, most talented pool of applicants should make sure they scrutinize the messages, overt and biased, conveyed in their advertisements, websites, or other communications.

“The Mind of the Leader” offers a radical, yet practical, solution. To solve the leadership crisis, organizations need to put people at the center of their strategy. They need to develop managers and executives who lead with three core mental qualities: mindfulness, selflessness, and compassion. Using real-world inspirational examples from Marriott, Accenture, McKinsey & Company, LinkedIn, and many more, “The Mind of the Leader” shows how this new kind of leadership turns conventional leadership thinking upside down. It represents a radical redefinition of what it takes to be an effective leader–and a practical, hard-nosed solution to every organization’s engagement and execution problems. Here is an excerpt from the book.

Selflessness is the wisdom of getting out of your own way, the way of your people, and the way of your organization to unleash the natural flow of energy that people bring to work. Selflessness combines strong self-confidence with a humble intention to be of service. With selflessness, trust increases because we have no secret agendas and followership strengthens because our selflessness sets free our people to be their best selves. Selflessness in leadership manifests itself as humility and service.
In Good to Great , Jim Collins showed that humility combined with strong will is a key trait of successful leaders. Humility, his research found, is when leaders are able to keep their egos in check and always put the organization’s goals before their own.  Humility is a trait of selflessness where we’re not attached to an inflated, important sense of self: we have a very real view on how little we actually matter. In the bigger scheme of things, even the best CEO is only one out of hundreds or thousands of individuals contributing to a company’s success. In addition, the company’s success is heavily determined by market trends and large- scale global forces. Any company is merely the result of an interconnected, global field of events, actions, and intentions. There’s no one person who can create this singlehandedly— not even the greatest leader. Understanding this awakens a healthy sense of humility.
Humility allows leaders to understand the value of providing service—a legacy, if you will— to the organization. That is what creates a healthy culture and what creates an organization that can continue from generation to generation. Arne Sorenson, CEO of the hotel chain Marriott, described his role as being a function of service to the company’s 400,000 employees. The driving business philosophy of Marriott is to take care of their employees, so that their employees take care of their guests. That way, business takes care of itself. Arne’s role is not one of power but one of service.
But what about the ego? What’s the role of the ego in selfless leadership? It’s small. We all have an ego that longs for attention and recognition. But great leaders are the ones who’ve tamed their ego so that it doesn’t hinder the larger interests of the people and the company they lead.
Indeed, corporate history is full of great examples of the danger of self-centeredness. Consider Nokia’s fall from industry leadership in cell phones. Nokia was the global market leader in cell phones when Apple introduced the iPhone, a much more sophisticated, yet simple and compelling product. However, the then- CEO of Nokia announced to his entire organization that the iPhone would never be anything but a niche product, and that Nokia would keep producing the phones with which they had gained their success. A few years later, Nokia had fallen into market insignificance, and Apple was the leader.
It wasn’t because Nokia engineers and developers didn’t have good ideas or recognize the shifts in consumer demands. The problem came down to leadership and, specifically, the former CEO’s emotional and ego attachment to what had made him and the company successful. He and his leadership team had fallen in love with Nokia’s past success and created a self- image of success based on that. Because they were not able to let go of this image, they lost major market share almost overnight.
Many of the leaders we’ve talked to worry that selflessness will make them pushovers. But it’s not that simple. A leader’s selflessness has to be combined with self-confidence. If you have selflessness without self-confidence, you will indeed be a pushover. Therefore, selflessness cannot stand on its own. It must be paired with self-confidence.

Do you ever wonder how successful businesses can be used as a force for good? Do you sometimes feel conflicted by the principles of capitalism? Do you wish to change the world around you whilst doing what you love?
In his book, Compassion Inc., Gaurav Sinha, world-class businessman and entrepreneur, outlines the economics of empathy for life and for business. Here is an excerpt from the first chapter, titled Incorporating Compassion

You are on a fool’s errand if you expect the world to change around you unless you actively participate in influencing the change you seek and lead by example. This applies to countries, corporations and consumers. The true compass of compassion is powered by a purpose beyond profit that embraces principles of sustainable prosperity, tolerance and harmony. You only transmit what your antennae pick up, so tuning your frequency to the channel of compassion is the first step towards making the planet a better place.

These are contrarian times. No, I am not about to present a series of dystopian views, but I think any pragmatic analysis of the current state of affairs across the globe will give anyone reason to be very concerned. There is a lot going on in the world today and for the first time in human civilization we know there is a lot going on, in real time. From the mundane to the monumental, literally everything we need or want to know is at our fingertips. All this information leaves us in a state of pixel-obsessed permanent anxiety.
Twitter storms by the President of the United States hit the airwaves daily, sending stock markets spiralling out of control. Most media’s sensational banalities seem like a new religion, and partisan views and opinions convey raw hatred and dogmatic thinking even among the refined and educated. We are educated, but not enlightened. We are liberated, but not liberal.
They say politicians are the same the world over, promising bridges even when there are no rivers to cross, but today many politicians mostly profit by polluting rivers that feed our villages. I think you get my point about corrupt governance. We now have a world predominantly mired by characters playing to their own end-games – from the Italian who loves bunga bunga parties, the rogue African autocrat whose wife’s extravagant obsession with new shoes is no secret, the indulgent Asian strongmen who siphon off money from sovereign funds, a polarising president who denies the existence of global warming, the communist dictator with a passion for rockets, to a battalion of incoherent yet sadly impactful ruffians running amok to fulfil their own agendas. From party leaders to party-poopers, they are all playing their games. Do they exemplify benevolence and integrity?
A barrage of bullets spews across a concert, killing hundreds; civilians are carpet-bombed in the Middle East; a volcano vomits ash over an Indonesian island, displacing thousands; an earthquake kills hundreds in Mexico; a tsunami pummels an Asian coastline; many die as terrorists plough through pedestrians … we watch all this on the news, quickly condemning the culprit or circumstances, and then just as swiftly shift our attention to ‘Like’ ridiculous posts on social media by popular celebrities.
We oscillate between passive sympathy and intellectual redundancy within seconds. Civil society is shaped by the strength and virtue of worthy conversations that drive collective consciousness towards matters of significance, but today impulsive spurts of abbreviated opinions seem to be the modus operandi of even presidential personalities.
Borders are closing, trade agreements are being ripped up and promises of walls being built rally applause. Big banks brought global economies to their knees a decade ago, and now global stock markets surge to all-time highs; and we have forgotten who bailed out these organisations in the first place. It’s amazing how quickly we forget – the commerce of capitalism could quite easily be defined as immaterial gains in a materialistic world. The mission of profits at any cost leads to mass redundancies, the news of banks and other large corporations making job cuts across the world to meet quarterly targets is something we are well aware of, yet we continue to deposit our money with them as we have no other viable alternative. Our personal economies are held hostage by institutions that want more of everything, at any cost.
European countries are dealing with a wave of immigrants; nationalism, racism and liberalism collide and confuse people as populism hijacks humanism. This is a conundrum of corrupt conclusions, where compassionate minds are considered weak. Given that we are planning the first human expedition to Mars, I would imagine that accommodating and integrating refugees from one continent to another should be cause for celebration, not riots.

The world is changing, perceptions are shifting, consumers are evolving, and this book will ensure your business keeps up.