What do you think?
Rate this book
The Art Of Management: Managing Yourself, Managing Your Team, Managing Your Business
Careers are changing, and the capabilities required to stay relevant are changing even more rapidly. We seem to have endless choices, at least at the beginning of a career, but these start narrowing after middle management. How does one think about one's own life and career in this changing decade?
The whole discipline of career management now has three elements to
Managing yourself;
Managing your team; and
Managing your business
In this book, Shiv Shivakumar points out that today, unlike in the past, all the three elements are your responsibility. With in-depth interviews with top leaders across the spectrum and an insightful foreword by Sachin Tendulkar, The Art of Management is a must-read.
The whole discipline of career management now has three elements to
Managing yourself;
Managing your team; and
Managing your business
In this book, Shiv Shivakumar points out that today, unlike in the past, all the three elements are your responsibility. With in-depth interviews with top leaders across the spectrum and an insightful foreword by Sachin Tendulkar, The Art of Management is a must-read.
288 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 9, 2022
32 people are currently reading
85 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
November 4, 2022
The last two years, 2020 and 2021, posed many challenges to professionals, their lives, their careers and families. The challenges were posed at a larger philosophical level, but also at the level of rethinking the life and career model. Are today’s professionals future-ready, considering the way society and the talent markets are changing?
The Great Resignation, in which more than 20 million Americans left their jobs in six months, and the fact that nearly 61 per cent of Indian professionals say that they want to look for a new job in 2022 are not surprising. Professionals are re-evaluating their priorities and their life and career approach. Managing life and career today is different from the past, and that’s what I intend to cover in this book. Many of the old principles might still apply, but the way to think about them will be different.
───
The first is: Is a career in a company valuable? We tended to equate getting into a good company with a visa and saw the company as a place from where one could retire. But ‘hire to retire’ doesn’t exist today. Why so?
The company is no longer a continuing entity in the way we have known it to be. The average life of a company has dropped from about sixty years in the 1960s to about twenty years today, or even less. The average employee tenure in a company is less than four years; the average tenure of CXOs, too, is less than four years.
Things change quickly in a career and sometimes irreversibly. So, staying in a company or in a business unit that might not exist in the future, or gets repositioned, is not a preferred option for professionals.
So the longevity of companies and loyalty of employees are not a happy bundle any more.
Now for the second question: Is the MNC job still attractive and safe?
A lot of people want to join an MNC for its systems, processes, the scope it presents for learning and possible global postings. This might still hold true in a few cases. However, many MNCs have shut shop in emerging markets, and many have sold off their unprofitable or underperforming businesses over time. General Electric (GE) shut down, or got split up. GSK sold Horlicks to Unilever India. Unilever sold Dalda, the edible fats brand, to Bunge and recently tried to get out of the tea business. Electrolux and Philips Consumer Electronics closed down in India. A part of the Citibank consumer business is up for sale.
If you look at the auto sector, General Motors, Ford, Harley Davidson, Fiat, MAN Trucks have all quit India.
PepsiCo franchised its beverages business, and none of the experienced PepsiCo employees stayed in the franchised unit. Pepsico is now transferring the manufacturing of some parts of salty snacks to franchise partners. Pizza Hut and its associated brands were 100 per cent franchised a few years ago, and all the senior and middle managers moved out in new directions.
Carrefour, the French retail giant, has left India, as also the Japanese pharma giant Daiichi Sankyo.
MNCs are deepening their home-base presence and investments this decade. In the 1960s, there were 7000 MNCs globally; in 2006, this number went up to 80,000.* MNCs find it challenging to operate in volatile economic conditions and also in a fluctuating regulatory framework economy. Twenty-five per cent of German-based MNCs are planning to exit China.
GE, one of the world’s largest conglomerates, has consistently reshaped its business line and geography focus, so much so that it is now three different companies.
I think this decade, MNCs will look at safe-haven countries and safe-haven categories, and technology MNCs will adapt differently. If technology companies do not adapt to local conditions, we will see the rise of local digital giants.
Now to the third question: Is a series of jobs in start-ups attractive now?
The start-up space has become attractive but overhyped in the last few years, with technology and direct-to-consumer/customer business models gaining traction.
Access to technology, access to cloud networks, access to high-quality talent and access to capital have made the start-up ecosystem super competitive vis-à-vis the slow legacy companies.
Legacy companies didn’t exploit niches and didn’t look to grow niches; they started with a mass idea and stayed with that idea. Start-ups are exploring every niche and making it bigger. A consumption economy helps this immensely.
Any industry that has high physical transaction costs is ripe for digital disruption. We have seen this in books, music, travel, entertainment, etc. The financial sector will see the biggest digital disruption now as in financial services globally, regulation and a benign, helpful central bank were the moats. Now, they will go away, with crypto, the challenge to reserve currencies and decentralized finance.
And finally, the billion-dollar question: How does one manage life and a career in a future world?
The whole discipline of management now has three elements to it:
Managing Yourself
Managing Your Team
Managing Your Business
───
When an aircraft encounters dark clouds and bad weather, the pilot first slows down, reassesses the situation and sees what detours he needs to take to go past the weather hurdle on way to the destination. Life and careers are similar when you face dark clouds. You need to pause and rethink what’s happening to you. For this to happen, you need a few emotional anchors, people you can share your situation with, people who will tell you the raw truth while being empathetic. Many people have an ostrich attitude in tough times; they blame their life on karma or the boss or the company.
───
Managing your relationship w
───
ith the organization is important, as it determines how people perceive you as an organization man/woman or as a bystander. The relationship between you and the organization should be one of pride, else you should not be working in that organization. This is much like the pride a soldier has in working to protect the country. If there is no sense of pride, then it will show in many slippages at work and also in your communication. Whatever you do, do not run down your organization at any external forum.
───
India has 1.8 million companies registered with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs. In 2019, 30 per cent of these companies, or 6,80,000 companies, closed down, either because of poor performance or because of non-compliance with regulatory filings.
───
Agility in an organization will come from using technology and pushing horizontal collaboration. This is against the grain of those organizations that have been a collection of vertical hierarchies. The leader of the next decade will push for significant fluidity in structures.
───
### Section I: Managing Yourself
Managing your time
b. Managing your ambition
c. Managing your learning
d. Managing your energy
e. Managing your relationship with your organization
───
On-time people and cultures are well organized. On-time people see time as linear. They manage their calendars, and once a time is given, very rarely do they need reminders or rarely do they postpone the event. Countries which are on-time are the USA, Denmark, Switzerland, Germany, Japan and the UK. In the US, Japan and Switzerland, coming on time is late.
Cities which have an on-time reputation are Mumbai, Hong Kong, London, New York and Geneva. In many of these cities, time is money, and everyone works to a schedule—the system places a premium on time and these cities monetize time as a variable.
───
Flexi-time cultures view time as being fluid. Time in these cultures is event- and person-dependent. Being late is forgivable in these cultures. A lot of African and Asian countries, including India, fall into this bracket.
In 1959, anthropologist Edward Hall described cultural rules of ‘time’ as ‘the silent language’ in his book of the same title. According to Hall, time conveys clearer messages than words. In many of these cultures time is a socio-economic status marker.
In these countries, it is common to thank the chief guest or guest of honour for sparing time from his/her busy schedule repeatedly in every speech made at an event. In high-power-distance cultures, people of higher status are always late, and it’s a privilege for people to get an audience with them.
───
Let’s now look at some possible reasons why some people manage time poorly:
The first reason is that some people can never say no. They keep asking for more work; they are not able to prioritize or even understand what the work entails. Being busy is a ‘badge’ for such people.
───
Some people are perfectionists—they always want the presentation or job or response or anything to be 110 per cent right, and hence end up wasting time. In tomorrow’s world, with more information and more forgetting, this perfectionism will be a sin. A good example in a company is the annual planning process. Companies waste far too much time on many things they don’t control and still want a point of view on.
Procrastination. Some people procrastinate like mad. A series of twenty questions for every aspect … What if X happens? What if Y says so? What if they don’t accept? A series of what-ifs. I am not saying don’t ask questions, but just keeping on asking the same questions endlessly gets you nothing of value.
Lack of empathy. Some people don’t empathize with what others go through when you keep them hanging around or don’t have time for them. In many Eastern cultures, we accept this as normal.
Laziness. Some people are lazy. They can only do one task at a time and don’t want to take on more. Such people talk up their work, so that you don’t find out that they do little. They expand work to fill time.
Poor preparation. We see this all the time in presentations and speeches. Managers tend to pack their slides with all they know about the topic, and hence a slide ends up looking like a pasta bowl. Worse, managers will want to read every line and explain. My way of making slides is to have a visual and a maximum of twenty-four words per slide. The narrative is more important than what’s on the slide. I typically take 2–3 minutes per slide, and if I have a twenty-minute presentation, I will go in with a maximum of 6–10 slides. Preparing speaker notes and running through the slides will help you manage time better in any presentation. One can easily make out people who come ill-prepared or unprepared for meetings. This is a drain on everyone’s time, because everyone is required to go through the basics when they could have been driving higher-order conversations leading to decisions.
Lack of follow-up. Some people don’t know how to follow up with others who have to do their jobs in order for the former to complete their job. Sometimes work happens in series in an organization, and lack of follow-up makes people poor time managers when it comes to their work. One has to know when to follow up with peers and bosses in order to get your work done on time.
Habit of postponing. Some people just postpone work. They tend to move simple, everyday parts of a job unnecessarily to the next day or week. Closing work or closing parts of a job that can be completed today actually help you close more aspects of your job. So don’t postpone to tomorrow what you can complete today.
Lack of job-chain awareness. Managers do not recognize how their work and job add up to a larger picture, and hence they don’t see completing their work on time as an important element to the chain of work.
Plain time-wasting. Many managers waste time at work. They spend a lot of time idling, gossiping, walking around the office and drinking endless cups of tea/coffee with anyone who is available. Social media is actually a big time-wasting distraction at work. Some managers spend more time on social media than on their company agenda.
───
They are organized in everything they do, they maintain a calendar, they stick to a calendar, they rarely cancel meetings, and if they do, they give you an alternative time slot. So run a proper calendar is my first tip.
Good time managers come fully prepared for meetings. We spend more than 25 per cent of a day in meetings. These are places to move work, to brief about work and to take decisions. Being well prepared for every meeting is a gift you can give to your organization and team.
They make copious notes, and the notes help them develop a good memory for subsequent meetings. Good time managers maintain journals like nobody else, and this gives them a huge advantage.
They delegate what can be delegated effectively.
They follow through on promises they have made personally or on behalf of their team.
Good time managers prioritize when they see a conflict; they make a choice.
They know when to multitask and when to avoid multitasking. It’s better to avoid multitasking when your full attention is needed on a topic for discussion. The cellphone and messages in a cellphone are the biggest distractions for multitaskers. So, keep the phone aside in important meetings and discussions.
They have regular breaks in their schedule, either to stretch their legs, to get a cup of tea/coffee or to return missed calls.
They always respond. They respond to emails, messages and return all their missed calls.
They believe that time management is a multi-way benefit system. If they manage time well, they can influence the system and manage it better, and hence good time management has multiple benefits overall.
───
I want to start by saying that ambition is good. Ambition propels individuals, teams, companies and society to do better. Ambition starts with some desire to achieve something, but more important is the tenacity to work towards achieving it. Ambition does not have entitlement built into it ever. Everyone aspires to be something, but they might not have the ambition to go for it. So, please make that clear distinction between what you want and what you are willing to do or not do to get there.
Ambition doesn’t have a ‘safe’, well-understood definition in any company. There are some professions where ambition is on steroids, like stock market trading, investment banking, journalism, car racing. There are other industries or professions where you don’t want to see super ambition, like in doctors, in policemen, in guardians of the law, etc.
It is fair to say that all companies want ambitious employees, which simply means that companies want tasks, challenges and work completed ahead of time in order to benefit the company agenda. Companies tend to equate high-productive employees with ambition and vice versa.
Ambition that is unchecked can lead to catastrophic results, as in the case of Enron, Barings and a few start-ups. Aristotle is believed to have said that men’s ambition is the root cause of many an injustice.
I have seen that excessive ambition damages careers and relationships at work, and leads to failure. I have seen a few of my peers who were unbearable at work, who blatantly wore their ambition on their sleeves and who would run down their peer group at the drop of a hat. I am glad that a number of them didn’t make it to CEO roles, as that would have been a wrong template for a successful leader in any company.
───
Source: https://psychology.fandom.com/wiki/Co...
───
The world is changing so quickly in so many areas, and there is so much information available in the public domain now. If one does not learn quickly, then one will be termed ‘educated unemployed’ or ‘educated but living in the past’. Lack of access is not a barrier to learning any more.
In many countries, learning is a process that helps one secure some marks and get a degree or a certificate. Marks are a measure of intelligence, but that’s an outdated concept in a future world. True learning is about thinking about each concept, its application, trying variations of the concept in your mind to see what is possible.
Workplace learning is very different. There are no marks there, except class-participation marks in a meeting and the marks/stripes you get when your concept is accepted and executed to deliver results. So, workplace learning has much more trial and error built into it, as opposed to the traditional learning which everyone goes through.
───
There are various approaches to learning:
Self-learning: I have seen people pick up a book or a bunch of books, go speak to experts, watch videos on a topic, etc. This type of learning requires focus; it requires you to take time out, understand what you need to learn and then evaluate learning in your own way. This is self-development at its best. Self-learning people are curious. According to a Harvard Business Review analysis, curious people at work are 34 per cent more creative.
Learning by watching others: This is something we do innately at work. We watch the way the boss presents his ideas, we watch the way someone answers questions in a press conference, we watch the mannerisms of people, we copy the ones we think are worth it and junk the ones that we don’t like. We watch the way people conduct themselves in formal and informal situations, we watch the way people dress. This is possibly the most normal form of learning at work.
───
Image source: https://www.freepik.com/
Source: https://www.dovico.com/blog/2018/03/0...
───
Learning by doing, aka experiential learning: This is a theory of education postulated by American philosopher John Dewey. He applied this at the University of Chicago. It is based on the philosophy that we learn more about something when we actually ‘do’ it. We apply concepts at work, we try new processes, new methods of dealing with people, we try new ways to create value for customers and ecosystem partners. In this method we tend to vary the variables we value and tweak them to achieve the desired results. There are simple life examples: we learnt swimming by doing, we learnt to ride a bicycle by doing, we learnt to drive a car by doing, and we learnt how the experience works and doesn’t work for us. In tomorrow’s world, we can try a lot more things at work because tests can be done either with a design for one or a design for a billion. Technology allows us to experience learning differently. So I would encourage you to test, test and test again to learn.
Learning by attending courses: This is standard practice in most organizations where there are a number of courses offered by internal and external faculty. I see that people want to go to a training course if it’s an exotic location or there is rockstar faculty or there are a number of their close friends attending the course. If these conditions don’t exist, then people keep dropping off courses at the last minute.
The Great Resignation, in which more than 20 million Americans left their jobs in six months, and the fact that nearly 61 per cent of Indian professionals say that they want to look for a new job in 2022 are not surprising. Professionals are re-evaluating their priorities and their life and career approach. Managing life and career today is different from the past, and that’s what I intend to cover in this book. Many of the old principles might still apply, but the way to think about them will be different.
───
The first is: Is a career in a company valuable? We tended to equate getting into a good company with a visa and saw the company as a place from where one could retire. But ‘hire to retire’ doesn’t exist today. Why so?
The company is no longer a continuing entity in the way we have known it to be. The average life of a company has dropped from about sixty years in the 1960s to about twenty years today, or even less. The average employee tenure in a company is less than four years; the average tenure of CXOs, too, is less than four years.
Things change quickly in a career and sometimes irreversibly. So, staying in a company or in a business unit that might not exist in the future, or gets repositioned, is not a preferred option for professionals.
So the longevity of companies and loyalty of employees are not a happy bundle any more.
Now for the second question: Is the MNC job still attractive and safe?
A lot of people want to join an MNC for its systems, processes, the scope it presents for learning and possible global postings. This might still hold true in a few cases. However, many MNCs have shut shop in emerging markets, and many have sold off their unprofitable or underperforming businesses over time. General Electric (GE) shut down, or got split up. GSK sold Horlicks to Unilever India. Unilever sold Dalda, the edible fats brand, to Bunge and recently tried to get out of the tea business. Electrolux and Philips Consumer Electronics closed down in India. A part of the Citibank consumer business is up for sale.
If you look at the auto sector, General Motors, Ford, Harley Davidson, Fiat, MAN Trucks have all quit India.
PepsiCo franchised its beverages business, and none of the experienced PepsiCo employees stayed in the franchised unit. Pepsico is now transferring the manufacturing of some parts of salty snacks to franchise partners. Pizza Hut and its associated brands were 100 per cent franchised a few years ago, and all the senior and middle managers moved out in new directions.
Carrefour, the French retail giant, has left India, as also the Japanese pharma giant Daiichi Sankyo.
MNCs are deepening their home-base presence and investments this decade. In the 1960s, there were 7000 MNCs globally; in 2006, this number went up to 80,000.* MNCs find it challenging to operate in volatile economic conditions and also in a fluctuating regulatory framework economy. Twenty-five per cent of German-based MNCs are planning to exit China.
GE, one of the world’s largest conglomerates, has consistently reshaped its business line and geography focus, so much so that it is now three different companies.
I think this decade, MNCs will look at safe-haven countries and safe-haven categories, and technology MNCs will adapt differently. If technology companies do not adapt to local conditions, we will see the rise of local digital giants.
Now to the third question: Is a series of jobs in start-ups attractive now?
The start-up space has become attractive but overhyped in the last few years, with technology and direct-to-consumer/customer business models gaining traction.
Access to technology, access to cloud networks, access to high-quality talent and access to capital have made the start-up ecosystem super competitive vis-à-vis the slow legacy companies.
Legacy companies didn’t exploit niches and didn’t look to grow niches; they started with a mass idea and stayed with that idea. Start-ups are exploring every niche and making it bigger. A consumption economy helps this immensely.
Any industry that has high physical transaction costs is ripe for digital disruption. We have seen this in books, music, travel, entertainment, etc. The financial sector will see the biggest digital disruption now as in financial services globally, regulation and a benign, helpful central bank were the moats. Now, they will go away, with crypto, the challenge to reserve currencies and decentralized finance.
And finally, the billion-dollar question: How does one manage life and a career in a future world?
The whole discipline of management now has three elements to it:
Managing Yourself
Managing Your Team
Managing Your Business
───
When an aircraft encounters dark clouds and bad weather, the pilot first slows down, reassesses the situation and sees what detours he needs to take to go past the weather hurdle on way to the destination. Life and careers are similar when you face dark clouds. You need to pause and rethink what’s happening to you. For this to happen, you need a few emotional anchors, people you can share your situation with, people who will tell you the raw truth while being empathetic. Many people have an ostrich attitude in tough times; they blame their life on karma or the boss or the company.
───
Managing your relationship w
───
ith the organization is important, as it determines how people perceive you as an organization man/woman or as a bystander. The relationship between you and the organization should be one of pride, else you should not be working in that organization. This is much like the pride a soldier has in working to protect the country. If there is no sense of pride, then it will show in many slippages at work and also in your communication. Whatever you do, do not run down your organization at any external forum.
───
India has 1.8 million companies registered with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs. In 2019, 30 per cent of these companies, or 6,80,000 companies, closed down, either because of poor performance or because of non-compliance with regulatory filings.
───
Agility in an organization will come from using technology and pushing horizontal collaboration. This is against the grain of those organizations that have been a collection of vertical hierarchies. The leader of the next decade will push for significant fluidity in structures.
───
### Section I: Managing Yourself
Managing your time
b. Managing your ambition
c. Managing your learning
d. Managing your energy
e. Managing your relationship with your organization
───
On-time people and cultures are well organized. On-time people see time as linear. They manage their calendars, and once a time is given, very rarely do they need reminders or rarely do they postpone the event. Countries which are on-time are the USA, Denmark, Switzerland, Germany, Japan and the UK. In the US, Japan and Switzerland, coming on time is late.
Cities which have an on-time reputation are Mumbai, Hong Kong, London, New York and Geneva. In many of these cities, time is money, and everyone works to a schedule—the system places a premium on time and these cities monetize time as a variable.
───
Flexi-time cultures view time as being fluid. Time in these cultures is event- and person-dependent. Being late is forgivable in these cultures. A lot of African and Asian countries, including India, fall into this bracket.
In 1959, anthropologist Edward Hall described cultural rules of ‘time’ as ‘the silent language’ in his book of the same title. According to Hall, time conveys clearer messages than words. In many of these cultures time is a socio-economic status marker.
In these countries, it is common to thank the chief guest or guest of honour for sparing time from his/her busy schedule repeatedly in every speech made at an event. In high-power-distance cultures, people of higher status are always late, and it’s a privilege for people to get an audience with them.
───
Let’s now look at some possible reasons why some people manage time poorly:
The first reason is that some people can never say no. They keep asking for more work; they are not able to prioritize or even understand what the work entails. Being busy is a ‘badge’ for such people.
───
Some people are perfectionists—they always want the presentation or job or response or anything to be 110 per cent right, and hence end up wasting time. In tomorrow’s world, with more information and more forgetting, this perfectionism will be a sin. A good example in a company is the annual planning process. Companies waste far too much time on many things they don’t control and still want a point of view on.
Procrastination. Some people procrastinate like mad. A series of twenty questions for every aspect … What if X happens? What if Y says so? What if they don’t accept? A series of what-ifs. I am not saying don’t ask questions, but just keeping on asking the same questions endlessly gets you nothing of value.
Lack of empathy. Some people don’t empathize with what others go through when you keep them hanging around or don’t have time for them. In many Eastern cultures, we accept this as normal.
Laziness. Some people are lazy. They can only do one task at a time and don’t want to take on more. Such people talk up their work, so that you don’t find out that they do little. They expand work to fill time.
Poor preparation. We see this all the time in presentations and speeches. Managers tend to pack their slides with all they know about the topic, and hence a slide ends up looking like a pasta bowl. Worse, managers will want to read every line and explain. My way of making slides is to have a visual and a maximum of twenty-four words per slide. The narrative is more important than what’s on the slide. I typically take 2–3 minutes per slide, and if I have a twenty-minute presentation, I will go in with a maximum of 6–10 slides. Preparing speaker notes and running through the slides will help you manage time better in any presentation. One can easily make out people who come ill-prepared or unprepared for meetings. This is a drain on everyone’s time, because everyone is required to go through the basics when they could have been driving higher-order conversations leading to decisions.
Lack of follow-up. Some people don’t know how to follow up with others who have to do their jobs in order for the former to complete their job. Sometimes work happens in series in an organization, and lack of follow-up makes people poor time managers when it comes to their work. One has to know when to follow up with peers and bosses in order to get your work done on time.
Habit of postponing. Some people just postpone work. They tend to move simple, everyday parts of a job unnecessarily to the next day or week. Closing work or closing parts of a job that can be completed today actually help you close more aspects of your job. So don’t postpone to tomorrow what you can complete today.
Lack of job-chain awareness. Managers do not recognize how their work and job add up to a larger picture, and hence they don’t see completing their work on time as an important element to the chain of work.
Plain time-wasting. Many managers waste time at work. They spend a lot of time idling, gossiping, walking around the office and drinking endless cups of tea/coffee with anyone who is available. Social media is actually a big time-wasting distraction at work. Some managers spend more time on social media than on their company agenda.
───
They are organized in everything they do, they maintain a calendar, they stick to a calendar, they rarely cancel meetings, and if they do, they give you an alternative time slot. So run a proper calendar is my first tip.
Good time managers come fully prepared for meetings. We spend more than 25 per cent of a day in meetings. These are places to move work, to brief about work and to take decisions. Being well prepared for every meeting is a gift you can give to your organization and team.
They make copious notes, and the notes help them develop a good memory for subsequent meetings. Good time managers maintain journals like nobody else, and this gives them a huge advantage.
They delegate what can be delegated effectively.
They follow through on promises they have made personally or on behalf of their team.
Good time managers prioritize when they see a conflict; they make a choice.
They know when to multitask and when to avoid multitasking. It’s better to avoid multitasking when your full attention is needed on a topic for discussion. The cellphone and messages in a cellphone are the biggest distractions for multitaskers. So, keep the phone aside in important meetings and discussions.
They have regular breaks in their schedule, either to stretch their legs, to get a cup of tea/coffee or to return missed calls.
They always respond. They respond to emails, messages and return all their missed calls.
They believe that time management is a multi-way benefit system. If they manage time well, they can influence the system and manage it better, and hence good time management has multiple benefits overall.
───
I want to start by saying that ambition is good. Ambition propels individuals, teams, companies and society to do better. Ambition starts with some desire to achieve something, but more important is the tenacity to work towards achieving it. Ambition does not have entitlement built into it ever. Everyone aspires to be something, but they might not have the ambition to go for it. So, please make that clear distinction between what you want and what you are willing to do or not do to get there.
Ambition doesn’t have a ‘safe’, well-understood definition in any company. There are some professions where ambition is on steroids, like stock market trading, investment banking, journalism, car racing. There are other industries or professions where you don’t want to see super ambition, like in doctors, in policemen, in guardians of the law, etc.
It is fair to say that all companies want ambitious employees, which simply means that companies want tasks, challenges and work completed ahead of time in order to benefit the company agenda. Companies tend to equate high-productive employees with ambition and vice versa.
Ambition that is unchecked can lead to catastrophic results, as in the case of Enron, Barings and a few start-ups. Aristotle is believed to have said that men’s ambition is the root cause of many an injustice.
I have seen that excessive ambition damages careers and relationships at work, and leads to failure. I have seen a few of my peers who were unbearable at work, who blatantly wore their ambition on their sleeves and who would run down their peer group at the drop of a hat. I am glad that a number of them didn’t make it to CEO roles, as that would have been a wrong template for a successful leader in any company.
───
Source: https://psychology.fandom.com/wiki/Co...
───
The world is changing so quickly in so many areas, and there is so much information available in the public domain now. If one does not learn quickly, then one will be termed ‘educated unemployed’ or ‘educated but living in the past’. Lack of access is not a barrier to learning any more.
In many countries, learning is a process that helps one secure some marks and get a degree or a certificate. Marks are a measure of intelligence, but that’s an outdated concept in a future world. True learning is about thinking about each concept, its application, trying variations of the concept in your mind to see what is possible.
Workplace learning is very different. There are no marks there, except class-participation marks in a meeting and the marks/stripes you get when your concept is accepted and executed to deliver results. So, workplace learning has much more trial and error built into it, as opposed to the traditional learning which everyone goes through.
───
There are various approaches to learning:
Self-learning: I have seen people pick up a book or a bunch of books, go speak to experts, watch videos on a topic, etc. This type of learning requires focus; it requires you to take time out, understand what you need to learn and then evaluate learning in your own way. This is self-development at its best. Self-learning people are curious. According to a Harvard Business Review analysis, curious people at work are 34 per cent more creative.
Learning by watching others: This is something we do innately at work. We watch the way the boss presents his ideas, we watch the way someone answers questions in a press conference, we watch the mannerisms of people, we copy the ones we think are worth it and junk the ones that we don’t like. We watch the way people conduct themselves in formal and informal situations, we watch the way people dress. This is possibly the most normal form of learning at work.
───
Image source: https://www.freepik.com/
Source: https://www.dovico.com/blog/2018/03/0...
───
Learning by doing, aka experiential learning: This is a theory of education postulated by American philosopher John Dewey. He applied this at the University of Chicago. It is based on the philosophy that we learn more about something when we actually ‘do’ it. We apply concepts at work, we try new processes, new methods of dealing with people, we try new ways to create value for customers and ecosystem partners. In this method we tend to vary the variables we value and tweak them to achieve the desired results. There are simple life examples: we learnt swimming by doing, we learnt to ride a bicycle by doing, we learnt to drive a car by doing, and we learnt how the experience works and doesn’t work for us. In tomorrow’s world, we can try a lot more things at work because tests can be done either with a design for one or a design for a billion. Technology allows us to experience learning differently. So I would encourage you to test, test and test again to learn.
Learning by attending courses: This is standard practice in most organizations where there are a number of courses offered by internal and external faculty. I see that people want to go to a training course if it’s an exotic location or there is rockstar faculty or there are a number of their close friends attending the course. If these conditions don’t exist, then people keep dropping off courses at the last minute.
March 22, 2023
Now as a writer myself, I would not write a critical, negative worded book review for any book. I totally relate to the effort that one puts behind writing a book.
But as a reputed industry leader, highly accomplished speaker and author of best sellers earlier, I am sure Shiv Shivakumar will not mind some healthy criticism.
Not sure why it has to be called Art of Management. it's not such a path breaking book that it will set some new industry standards.
it's heavily influenced by what the corporate world went through during the pandemic.. there are views from lot of people on how they handled it. So it would have been good to laser down to that as a theme.
Really not sure why would a book on management, which has scores of impressive industry veterans and authored by a legend like Shiv, require Sachin Tendulkar to write the foreword. What Sachin has written, is nice, but was not needed for this book.
Now I have been in the industry for a while and maybe the book is not for me but for younger people. But even they would be confused by inputs from people as diverse as Shereen Bhan to Harsha Bhogle to Renuka Ramnath.
The questions that Shiv posed are very specific to each individual and shows lot of effort, but the responses did not evoke an 'aha' or a 'wow' to me, except in a few cases.
The figures, tables and charts are so small and poorly printed, they are an eye-sore.
Anyone wants the copy of the book, happy to ship it across for free. first come first serve !
Activate to view larger image,
Image preview
But as a reputed industry leader, highly accomplished speaker and author of best sellers earlier, I am sure Shiv Shivakumar will not mind some healthy criticism.
Not sure why it has to be called Art of Management. it's not such a path breaking book that it will set some new industry standards.
it's heavily influenced by what the corporate world went through during the pandemic.. there are views from lot of people on how they handled it. So it would have been good to laser down to that as a theme.
Really not sure why would a book on management, which has scores of impressive industry veterans and authored by a legend like Shiv, require Sachin Tendulkar to write the foreword. What Sachin has written, is nice, but was not needed for this book.
Now I have been in the industry for a while and maybe the book is not for me but for younger people. But even they would be confused by inputs from people as diverse as Shereen Bhan to Harsha Bhogle to Renuka Ramnath.
The questions that Shiv posed are very specific to each individual and shows lot of effort, but the responses did not evoke an 'aha' or a 'wow' to me, except in a few cases.
The figures, tables and charts are so small and poorly printed, they are an eye-sore.
Anyone wants the copy of the book, happy to ship it across for free. first come first serve !
Activate to view larger image,
Image preview
June 14, 2022
The insights in this book are more valuable than doing an MBA degree. The insights on managing time, managing self, and managing various types of teams are invaluable. After reading this book, I feel confident in managing my team and seeing my organization from a holistic approach. I would definitely recommend this book to people who desire to manage themselves and their team effectively in corporate jobs.
June 21, 2022
Shiv has chosen 3 important roles that a professional must play in his career. Some of his suggestions are good and some of his interviews also nicely support his theories. Others don't. It is easy reading and some stuff is good.
October 7, 2023
The insights from interviewing actual industry leaders made it worth the read.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews