Career Lessons from the movie – Cast Away

Cast Away is an Adventure/Drama from 2000 which has beautifully captured the journey of Chuck Noland a FedEx executive marooned in an uninhabited island. It is a wonderful movie which has a lot of career lessons embedded in it.

It has been a very inspiring movie at various times in my career. I have tried to capture the essence of lessons learnt from it in the post. Do share your thoughts and experience around how one deals with career challenges. After all, we are all in it together.

Steering Clear of the Digital Transformation Debacle

When a Digital Transformation Project ends up “successfully” but customer feels like he did not achieve what he actually needed, it is nothing less than a debacle, considering the time, money and the effort involved in the implementation of the same.

This is one of the top 5 reasons listed as barriers to success in Digital Transformation journey in recently commissioned Wipro Digital Transformation Survey 2019.

In this article, I explore what enterprises can do to avoid getting into this zone. Read on and share your views. Would love to have a conversation on this…

The making of a sustainable business model

If you ever come to Bangalore, there’s very little chance that you will miss out on the “Darshini”s. Ao what’s a “Darshini”, you may ask –  “A Darshini is a simple restaurant offering: fast service, clean and high quality food at low prices, limited free space, and four/three tables with no seats and no waiters. In Darshinis, the operating principle is one of make-to-order, …

VMware India Site Strategy FY23 – Role Model Award

Purpose powers progress. It motivates one not to give up and lug through even during tough times. One core purpose I connect to is building a vibrant Product Management community. Bringing product professionals with diverse perspectives and enabling product thinking to create outcomes that impact millions of lives keeps the fire inside alive. It has given me numerous opportunities to network and exchange ideas …

Book Review: Lord Ganesha’s Laptop

Lord Ganesha’s Laptop: Building a radically adaptive IT Organisation in India: An expat’s story is an engrossing story of how the return ticket for an International trip got extended from 6 months to 18 long years. This is the story of an aspiring engineer who spent the prime of his career in a foreign country building an Agile enterprise from scratch. This is the …

Nifty Innovation to being Plain Vanilla

I was engrossed in summarising the minutes of a just-concluded meeting. There was a knock on my door, It was my elder one. She had her #macbook in her hand & of course with a complaint that couldn’t wait. I inattentively nodded trying hard to multi-task. “Pappa, there is something wrong with Zoom chat”, she declared, seizing my attention. I paused and turned towards her, now …

Find the Watering Hole

Be it a new role, a new company or a new domain, Transitions can be hard. Transitions teleport you to unfamiliar territories. It is usually the consequence of the sage advice to get out of comfort zones. But transitions are inevitable for growth. One of the best advice that I have ever received on tackling transitions, something that I take very seriously and follow …

5S Application & Mindspace

It was a designed silence on online platforms over the last two months. I was transitioning into my new role in the last two months. During this period, I had planned to set aside some time to retrospect, reflect & reset certain aspects of my life. I wanted to share one such thought today in this post. One interesting reflection that emanated from having …

Human Potential

I have learnt many Sanskrit Subhashitas (Sanskrit: सुभाषित) since my childhood. Among them, one of them has remained very close to me. In fact over the years, it became deeply in grained in my belief system and started shaping my views.  In this post I am sharing that core belief of mine.  अमन्त्रम् अक्षरं नास्ति, नास्ति मूलमनौषधम् । अयोग्यः पुरुषो नास्ति, योजकस्तत्र दुर्लभः ।।   …