Reaching There

I have always wondered what makes people successful in their lives. Although most of us relate success with only our professional lives. But our lives are a mixture of personal and professional achievements as well as failures. Both of these aspects are so interrelated that it is impossible to prioritize one over the other. There is always a need to see and continuously evaluate an holistic views of our lives.  All around us are people that we admire for their success. The success is not limited to monetary amounts but includes all possible roles we play during our lifetime. Success is about being a caring parent, an eager student, a loving son, a doting husband, a courteous clerk, a helpful manager, a great dancer, a passionate artist, a hard worker or just about anything we do in our lives. In all of these roles there a few similarities that stand out among other that all these "successful" people share. So what do all of the successful people share among themselves?...

Inside an Actors Studio: Steven Speilberg I recently watched Steven Speilberg's interview on James Lipton's Inside the Actors Studio (on youtube!). One of the biggest piece of adivce was his answer to how he direct child actors in his movies. There are quite a few movies in which his story was told from a point of view of a child (Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., Empire of the Sun). He answered "I don't treat them like children I treat them like my peers". He further added that the moment he begins treating them like children he would become the overbearing adult. This gave me an indirect lesson on how manager or a team leader should treat his team members. He should treat them like individuals who have their own individuality, personality, aspirations and emotions. He should respect their existence in the team and listen to their opinion with a "porous" mind. The reason I used "porous" mind because such a listener gives the oppor...

Revenue Management (Source: www.wikipedia.org) Please donate to Wikipedia.org. Yield management , also known as revenue management , is the process of understanding, anticipating and influencing consumer behavior in order to maximize revenue or profits from a fixed, perishable resource (such as airline seats or hotel room reservations). It is a method of price discrimination wherein a firm charges different customers different prices for goods or services which are otherwise identical. A typical example is airline tickets. For three different seats in the same row different passengers would have paid different amount depending on conditions like their seat preference, time of booking etc. An interesting article was published in NY Times recently about how airlines are charging more for "that extra leg room". It is another innovative way to understand the consumer behavior and improve revenue for the airlines. Here is the link for that article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/...

God has blessed us with an remarkable instrument which is responsible for our actions. Mind is described as the seat of the faculty of reason. Jagadguru Kripaluji Maharaj says "Mind alone is the cause of both bondage and liberation". Kripaluji Maharaj further says "It is the inherent nature of the mind that it cannot remain still even for a fraction of a second/ And the consequence of our devotion depends on the attachment of mind/ It's our mind that has to devotion not our physical senses". Even Albert Einstein said "The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift". This leads me to my question "Why is mind considered so important?" Before we even try to understand the importance of mind we have to define it in simple words. An uncomplicated definition can take us farthest in our quest. Mind is comprised of intellect, memory, im...

Recently I read two articles which have given me a unique insight into two different things but essentially they point to the same ability. I'll just quote a portion from them one by one and in-between add my own thoughts. 1. http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/bregman/2009/07/why-you-need-to-fail.html In this blog at www.harvardbusiness.org the author, Peter Bregman talks about having a growth mindset. He says "If you have a growth mindset, then you use your failures to improve. If you have a fixed mindset, you may never fail, but neither do you learn or grow. " He adds further, "A growth mindset is the secret to maximizing potential". The "growth mindset" is the ability to take risks and if that risk ends in a failure learn from it. He talks about settings goals that will enhance your performance. These goals at first sight don't look easily achievable. To someone else your goals may even look foolhardy. But a reason behind setting these goals is ...

When Hamlet said "To sleep: perchance to dream:—ay there’s the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come", he was referring to the pains an afterlife might bring. There was no way he could be sure whether there would be a relief from the sufferings he is in now. However he was sure that "To be, or not to be: that is the question". Now what is the purpose of bringing up probably the most famous soliloquy ever written in English literature? The reason is simple it portrays two emotions which we all go through in our lives at some stage or even throughout our lives. The first emotion is the desire to bring a change in our lives and second the indecision that follows it afterwards. So what can we learn from Hamlet's soliloquy? The answer lies in his thought process. We can learn something from his thought process and use it in our daily lives. For Hamlet it was a question of life or death. For us it may not be so severe but the effects of our decisions ...

This would be my theme picture for my blog header. It is about a man standing next to a door, looking into the vastness of nature in front of him. The question is what is he thinking? Or is he waiting for something? Or he is just simply enjoying the stillness of beauty in front of him? These and other questions alike keep us haunting in our minds continuously. The mind is like a fly inside a jar it is continuously buzzing around probably unable to understand what is it should do. So it is time we slowdown and relax a bit. Try and watch the beauty and marvel of simple things around us. Then perhaps when we are able to enjoy small thing we may enjoy bigger thing even better. Take a deep breath and for a moment try and feel the happiness inside your mind.

After months of procrastination I finally joined a local fitness center to get myself in a better shape. I have always been on a leaner side but a desire to improve my posture has always been there. But that is another story. The reason I am writing this blog is during the past few weeks I have learned a few important lessons during my workout sessions. I have tried to generalize these lessons and here they are: You always have to start small and gradually build up strength. You can't expect yourself to bench even few tens of pounds from the start itself. You have to start small and gradually push your way to higher levels. The qualities that help you during this course are such as patience, honesty and self-consciousness. The reason for patience is obvious you have to go through it during a course of time; instantaneous results are not always beneficial. The reason honesty is there because you have to continue with these efforts during this course of time. You can't expect to ...

This post is inspired by a movie called " Dead Poet's Society ". In it Robin Williams inspires his students to bring more randomness in their lives and he tries this through poetry. All of us sometimes feel this urge to break out of the shell that seems to have blanketed us and made us apathetic to the beauty & wisdom of the world around us. But how do we get rid of this blanket and cry out loud to the heavens to shower us with this mysterious rain of emotions and discovery? The feeling does not lie in feeling the felt, reading the read, seeing the seen but going out of our limits that we have created for ourselves. We have to bring forth the little Einstein or little Whitman or little Lincoln or little Premchand or little Presley inside of us and let it flow free for at least some time during the course of our mostly mundane lives. Only then can we truly enjoy what we're doing and create/achieve something new in our lives. The more frequently we make these small ...

Here is a small exercise you can do to find something relevant (or totally irrelevant!) about yourself. Interested? Here's what I want you to do......write ten line each on the following topics: Your childhood memories Your school/college memories Your profession memories so far Your aspiration Remember just ten lines each. Now copy the stuff you've written. Now go to a website called http://www.wordle.net/ and paste it in their " Create your own." section. Now see what words stand out among the word cloud your words have created. Here what my words made: Please do read about their privacy notice before publishing your wordle on the website. It would be better if you just take the screenshot for you records. The website agrees too!

I recently participated in an online discussion on why engineers resist change? Almost everybody agreed that engineers don't resist change, in fact they are the one who suggest change in the first place. So was the topic of the discussion an incorrect interpretation of an engineer's mind? No, I don't think so. I believe nobody resists change but everybody resists the desire to change. I am assuming the change here is in the direction of betterment (like the trees shed their leaves, but in a beautiful way; that's why the picutre if you have been wondering!). How many of us agree that we should be in a better physical change? But most of us resist the desire to workout and give various reasons on being unable to do so! So we can all agree that change is inevitable and most of the time uncontrollable. But it is not unmanageable! We can always deal with the change in the most beneficial way. The management of a change decides how we will get through it. I can think of two p...

Hi, I made a presentation on Effects of Globalization & Risk Management on Supply Chain a while back. One of the most interesting topic in the current economic scenario. The reason being realizing and increasing visibility across a company's supply chain helps to remove unwanted waste and improve quality as well. It encompasses every activity which originates from getting the raw material till delivering the finished goods to a customer. Another concept which is emerging is managing the demand chain. Think of it as the other side of a scale. Unless both the sides are not balanced the scale would always be tipped to one side. This would lead to unnecessary waste and reduced quality. After all we all seek for balance in our lives as well! Let me know what you think! Thanks. Supply Chain Globalization View more presentations from pbajpai2 .

Continuing from my previous post about trying to define a dream and some basic reasons behind our dreams. In this post I'll try to explore the types of dreams we have and can we align the different types of dreams into a single wholesome dream? The world has been continuously changing ever since the man decided to explore his surroundings. As a human being we like living in a small world of our own. We try to make our professional and personal lives as comfortable for ourselves as we can. But in the very thought of making our lives more comfortable lies the inevitable change from the current. Sometimes this change is difficult to comprehend from our "sensible" mind so we dream about it! So we can say that a dream is an instrument of change. The question that arises next is what are the "things" we can change using this instrument? To understand this we have to delve into our everyday life. In today's world an everyday life is lived at various fronts. But her...

A dream is a cherished desire within us which always gives us with a hope of doing something better with our life. As a kid we've fantasies of becoming a fighter pilot or an astronaut when we grow up. As a kid we're influenced by movies and our childhood dreams are normally of gigantic proportions. Would a kid dream of becoming a mechanical engineer (by the way I've a mechanical engineering degree) or a dentist (and I knew a very smart guy who is a dentist)? Although the answer is "no" but there are two important underlying aspects associated with it. First of all as a kid we're used to dreaming big, the reason being we haven't faced failures in our lives. Secondly we don't know how the world really works, for kids the world is a giant circus. As a giant circus the kids see the clowns, bears, elephants believing this is the reality. We don't understand the clown is a guy who has to make a living out of it and the animals are living a life of captiv...

http://www.betterprojects.net/2009/09/storyboarding-as-requirements-tool.html Came across this link in one of the LinkedIn discussions. One of the guys in the video talks about pushing on the story from every aspect possible and working out every aspect of the problem. The interesting thing about this is how in it's simplicity the storyboarding is showing us a way to go about any problem.

I decided to open my own blog a few days back. I'll have to figure out how I can use it in an interesting way!