Would you agree to be operated by a great doctor whose rate of fatality in a surgery is 90%? Then how is it sound advice to join organizations or invest in companies that only achieve 10% success in implementing strategies? In their book “The Balanced Scorecard”...
A net not a hammock. What if Martin Luther King in his legendary address back in 1963 said, “I have a second favorite dream”? What if Kennedy said “We choose to go to the moon, if not, we’ll settle for a sub-orbital flight”? Do you think all of the individuals who...
A recent Korn Ferry study suggests that the average tenure of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) is the lowest in the C-Suite: 4.1 years versus 8.0 for the chief executive officer (CEO) and 5.1 for the chief financial officer (CFO). Even the chief information officer...
Last week at a management retreat someone asked why acquisition after acquisition had failed to deliver to expectations in spite of all the auditing and assessment that goes into them. All of us have read and heard about high profile acquisitions like that of Cadburys...
Five years ago I set up a trust in Calcutta for the retired teachers of the St. Xavier's Collegiate school. I spent 15 years in that institution, from the age of 6 to 21. After a 150 years the building blocks of any institution like this must be its teachers. If I...
Its May this year. It's Toronto. Over dinner an old family friend from Calcutta is lamenting the invasion of the boisterous immigrant Chinese into her once quiet township of Richmond, Ontario. I ask why she needs to be so xenophobic, given that she herself is an...
Two weeks ago I woke up to a cryptic text from a senior journalist friend of mine: “HE’s BACK…AND HOW!” Not the most illuminating as communications goes, you would agree, but I knew him well enough to understand his excitement. Mr. Murthy (for whom he has very high...
Last month my dear friend and former boss Tom Blackett sent me a revealing annual report from an organization call the WIPO WIPO is the UN body for Intellectual Property and has been around since 1967. The body recognises the vital role that intellectual property...
Sitting on the boards of entrepreneurial businesses can be very interesting. They are all characterized by high energy ownership and very sincere operating leadership. But many of them do not have or appreciate the notion of management by metrics. I was recently...
