Manoj's Review on Books

My life in full is a sparkling biography of how much an individual can accomplish despite humble middle class background rooted in a city of Chennai, India which is not known for corporate women leaders. From a US citizen perspective, Indira is a women of colour from a third world country and practically possess no chance of a seat in a leadership position in fortune 50 company, let alone the possibility of attaining the crown.    Indira, true to the title of the book, narrates her entire life right from childhood days, born to deeply cultural brahmin couple who emphasized on education, her grandfather who stimulated her intellectual thought process, growing along with siblings who were exceptionally bright themselves, masters in IIM Calcutta, initial stint in an organization focused on wholesale textiles market, moving over for her second masters in Yale, meeting her husband Raj and driving through her experience in BCG, Motorola, ABB and finally her point of destiny which is Pepsi Co

A tightwad is someone, largely gender neutral, who refrains from spending on essential products or services wherein he or she should have while a spendthrifts opens up their purse on unnecessary items pushing themselves well beyond what was needed. In short, tightwads experience pain in spending while spendthrift are carefree to a point of even going bankrupt. The expenses in consideration includes the entire spectrum ranging from food, clothes, housing, education and entertainment as well. As per research, the combination of tightwad and spendthrift forms 40% of the spending diaspora while the remaining 60% fall in an unconflicted zone of being at a relative balance in their expense factor.  For a start, such an analysis is extremely hard to conduct since a meaningful conclusion can only be unearthed after considering a wide sample covering different geographies and observed over a long longitude dimension cutting across decades. Scott's reasoning is based out of secondary researc

Atman in Hinduism is the universal, eternal self, the individual soul, that resides within the essential self. The self is the witness, or observer, of an individual's actions and deeds. The Upanishad describes three types of Self (atman): the Bahya-atma or external self (body), the Antar-atma or inner self (individual soul) and the Param-atma or highest self (the Brahman). In essence, Jiva-atman is eternal but is imprisoned in an earthly body at birth.  Every life undergoes a continuous cycle of birth and death while the idea of salvation, which is a release from the cycle of birth happens to be a mirage to many. Hermann Hesse narrates the learnings, path and fall of events when two highly illustrious characters meet at a junction in their lifetimes, one of them is Gowthama Buddha who is regarded as the only soul to have attained moksha while the other one is a fictional character named Siddhartha.   Siddhartha, a handsome and nimble young boy who exhibited high degree intelligenc

An organisation can have outstanding delivery capabilities but can it scale without effective storytelling ability ? Moreover, if corporate presentations are all about data and plain text will it attract talent, investors or leaders ? When the emotional cord is missed in the narrative, an organisation is mostly likely to evoke a damp squib response despite a remarkable product line or solution. Paul Smith makes a valid point that storytelling can never be out of fad and will work across demographics in a timeless fashion to aid an individual's decision making process.  Smith lines out ten questions that can capture the attention of all the stakeholders in an organisation, it’s important to realise that one may not have a truly resonating storyline for each question. Thus it makes prioritising the questions based on the standpoint and context of the respective firms. The questions are  Where we came from Why we can’t stay here Where are we going How are we going to get there What do

  An orphan who had lost his parents to a terrible accident at the age of 10, ends up spending his better part of the childhood years and early teens in the kitchen of langar. The kid learns about the finer nuances of tasty cooking which leads him to Canada and eventually scales himself as a top rated Michelin Masterchef. Rajiv Mehra, the masterchef protogonist of the story, leads a high flying life being a poster boy of leading magazines and flies across the globe in private jets to execute his assignments.  Rajiv's excellence in his field of work gets him on a close range with India's top business leader Mihir Kothari and his family. The frequent interaction earns Rajiv a certain affinity with the family and an initiative to open an international chain of restaurants under Rajiv's leadership is under consideration, by all means he has scaled heights that are beyond one's imagination. As a preferred chef for all key events, Rajiv is called upon to lead dinner orchestra

Bernard’s Big Data in practice was launched in March 2016, the crux of the narrative is to highlight the importance of data in just about every industry. At the start of the book, he gave a good reference point on predicting the amount of data which is likely to be created every day across the globe by 2020, which happens to be 170 GB per day, the actual numbers in 2020 worked out to be 1 billion GB per day, he has missed the mark by a factor of 5.8 million times. It goes to show the explosion of data in the real world and its importance is foolhardy to undermine.  Bernard Marr has assessed Big Data implementation and use cases in 45 different companies, a few of them happen to be truly path breaking. In the aftermath of 9/11 terrorist attack on WTC twin tower, the US security agency had the added responsibility of identifying bad people from 7 million visitors who checked into the US about a decade back. Irrespective of the number of highly trained folks deployed in the airport securi

  Harit Nagpal has been the CEO of Tata Play over the last 13 years and spent four decades of his work experience in B2C segments with companies ranging from Vodafone, Marico, Pepsi and Lakme. He has tried to pick 10 case studies pertaining to B2C segments, created fictional leaders who drove their respective business entities, narrate unique problem statements in each of the case studies and finally an adaptive element that brought in a reliable solution. At the end of each business story there are ten checkpoints that Harit expects every reader to answer with earnestness, mostly in the binary yes or no responses.  Let me touch upon the case studies that were interesting, the first one that captured my attention was the storyline of how a newly recruited CEO of a leading AC manufacturing unit in Malaysia, was initially in shock to know that their entity lagging behind at 4th place after having been pioneers in AC business for over  a decade. The CEO breaks down the problem statement,

Why is storytelling important? Let me answer the question by picturing a couple of scenes, one is a nobel laureate scientist who calling a long list of statistical data that validates the effectiveness of his solution for problem like Malaria. On the other side, let’s remember Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech, of the two the latter captures our imagination, the reason lies in the power of storytelling. The three-pound mass of complex organ that lies within our hard skull relates to stories but plain data falls flat.    Given the importance of stories, Will Storr has tried to provide a broad framework for creating a captivating novel or a film. Beyond plot, character, struggle and victory, what are the factors that captures the attention of a bibliophile or an avid movie fan. One of the factors that Will Storr discussed in depth was to consistently provide only parts of information which would leave the audience guessing, till the very end.   In an experiment two groups

When someone gets hitched to an eccentric herpetologist which essentially means a person who specializes in the study of reptiles and amphibians, it’s hard not be in love with animals and birds. Having devoured a range of articles on wire and other magazines focussed on reptiles, animals and birds for over a decade, it’s natural for Janaki Lenin, a passionate zoophile, to pick their unique traits and present them through a book. Every creature has a story is a collection of 50 articles that elucidates unimaginable traits exhibited by birds, fishes, insects, reptiles, primates and mammals. There isn’t any structure to the book and hence a bibliophile can pick any of the fifty articles in random order and read through them. Each story has it’s own essence and would take anywhere between 10 to 15 minutes to finish a single storyline. I would strongly suggest the readers to check out relevant youtube videos as a follow-up to each respective article which is bound to enhance their underst