Enlarge. Excel. Evolve.

What is the purpose of business? How does a leader contribute to the purpose of the organization? These are two very critical questions and the answers are not easy. How narrow or broad the purpose of the leader is, equally narrow or broad is the purpose of the organization which he/she leads. Helene Ploix, CMD, Pechel Industries and Pechel Industries Partenaires, France says, “I think the purpose of the business is to create wealth to the company and to create wealth for a larger number of people without harming the others. This should not be done just for yourself or for a few others, such as managers or owners. I think that the purpose of my own organization and for business in general is creating wealth for the largest number of people-to contribute.” An organization is nothing but a group of people with defined roles and structures. To bring out the peak potential of the organization, the peak potential of each individual member of the organization must be harnessed. If the ...

Back in the “good old days” when I worked for another consulting company, my colleagues used to tease me by calling me “the king of alignment” because it was all I ever wanted to do and all I ever wanted to sell to clients. Now, having worked with so many wonderful clients over the years, I have a lot to say about alignment, and I am still learning every day. I never go out anymore to sell alignment – I just meet with people to hear what their organizational issues are, and almost always my proposed approach is to start by aligning the executive team. I do it because it works. People ask me, “What are the common challenges of team alignment?”, and here are a few: ·     Hardly anybody understands the importance and power of team alignment .  Thus, the first challenge of team alignment is for the team to have any attention on it at all. Here’s a phenomenon that is so common that when I say it, everybody knows what I am talking about – team members in meetings no...

The increasing popularity of the Triple P concept (Planet, People and Profit) fills us with hope that the corporate world is moving in the right direction and is symbolic of holistic corporate growth in the future.. The corporate world has become symbolic of never ending greed. Gandhi rightly said that there is enough in the world for everyone’s need but not enough for a single man’s greed. Two classic examples of leadership with balance, grace and sustainability at its core are Ratan Tata (Taj Terror attack case) and Amber Chand (USA). In fact, personally I was so overwhelmed by the Taj terror attack case that I decided to teach it as a case study to my students (and warned them not to cry, at least in the classroom). Amber Chand, born to Indian parents in Uganda, is a superb example of rising from the ashes like a Phoenix and is well known for her foundation which supports international artisans in conflict zones. In a way both the cases are related with conflict and supporting peop...

“Each individual creature on this beautiful planet is created by God to fulfill a particular role. Whatever I have achieved in life is through His help and an expression of His will. He showered His grace on me through some outstanding teachers and colleagues and when I pay my tributes to these fine persons, I am merely praising His glory. We are all born with a divine fire in us. Our efforts should be to give wings to this fire and fill the world with the glow of its goodness.” Dr APJ Abdul Kalam, Wings of Fire Dr Abdul Kalam has been one of my role models for his passion and compassion besides being a pioneer in the missile bastion (I wanted to be atomic research scientist at one point of time). If only we could ignite the divine within us and others, the world would be a different place altogether. I have always believed that life is like a stress interview being taken by Supreme Consciousness. If we refuse to get stressed and instead consider problems as learning opportunities...

We live in a world where we look everywhere for solutions, for problem creators, for literally everything everywhere except within. Sometimes I have found my students feeling shy in telling that they meditate as they would become a butt of jokes among their peers. When I conducted a learning styles test and found that three students in the class of thirty had intrapersonal styles, I briefly talked about spiritual tools like meditation, how society needs them badly and how one can even make money ethically by teaching such practices. The three students who had intra personal styles were hanging their heads in shame while the other students remarked that they could become some Baba (saint). The truth is often bitter and let us accept this bitter truth. While the elite of the western as well as eastern world is slowly accepting spirituality, the middle class still considers it as an aberration and exception. If there is something close to panacea to cure most of the social ills, it i...

As soon as a friend saw, I was sitting on my desk, writing on love and leadership, he immediately objected, “Why are you mixing oil and water? There is absolutely no relationship between love and leadership.” I was equally firm, “Open the parachute of your mind, my dear. Love is the highest ideal of leadership. It is difficult to mix them of course but they are like a husband and wife who become the most compatible after the long battle during the honeymoon is over” We tend to have narrow definition of love (and Valentine’s Day) equating it with man-woman or life partner emotion. But love is the essence of spirituality, once you understand the unity and oneness of humanity, you discover the bond of love which connects us. Love means care, it means warmth, it means nurturing, affection, trust and so on. Four well known international leaders who have written on love and leadership include Janiece Webb, (Sr VP, Motorola, USA), Lars Kolind (CEO, Oticon, Denmark), NS Raghavan, (Jo...

The universe is pulsating with limitless information, which comes to us at conscious and unconscious levels in various ways. We may receive information through our senses, dreams, intuition and divine. What are the barriers which stop the natural flow of this information? Are these barriers internal or external? How do we break these barriers? These are some of the questions which come to our mind as we grapple to use our intuition to make decisions. We must struggle with forces such as fear, negativity, illness, stress and lack of faith in higher consciousness, which act as barriers. The best tool we can use to break and destroy these barriers is spirituality. Once we are able to do that our decision making (one of the most critical skills for leadership) becomes very easy and natural. In the beginning of our spiritual journey, more and more questions arise in our mind, and then we receive few hints at answers, later we start receiving complete answers and over a period of time a stro...

“Awareness is the flower which blooms but never dies, but keeps on growing as we grow in awareness.” With the ever increasing pressures of the materialistic society we live in, we are becoming more and more absent minded. We can’t notice the people (and their actions and behavior) around us, leave alone things like nature. The stress is taking the light away from our mind, causing the opposite of enlightenment, an endarkment. To become more and more aware and bring light back in our minds, the first thing which we need to do is to live in the moment. But that seems a very difficult task to people today as either we live in the past-the guilt, the grudges, the memories or we live in the future-the expectations, the plans, the worries and the gift of the present is ruined in the process. Living in the moment is itself a type of meditation (called mindfulness). Mindfulness is an opportunity to experience joy and to appreciate the present moment. It is all the more important for leaders to...