The "events", so to speak, involved no less than a typical decorated delivery truck on one hand (The event where, apparently, his amazon.in CEO called out Jeff as his 'Baap' [try here]). And, on the other hand, there was him meeting with the Indian Prime Minister in Delhi and talking about things (in e-retail in the most promising e-global economy with the world's 3rd largest open internet userbase, of course).#1: What was the hardest moment of your life?
Jeff: My experience of raising the first million dollars to start Amazon.
Nothing over the following two decades of founding Amazon compared to that. I reached out to 80 odd investors and how they thought my idea of selling books over the internet was crazy.
#2: How do you hire people?
Jeff: I look at two things: one, does the person consider himself to be fortunate? And two, how good are they at making decisions without data... I'm biased and I prefer people who consider themselves as very fortunate [...] they will make or do things better because they are thankful to the way their lives are shaping up. The others will waste their lives looking over their shoulder and complain about how life is not satisfactory. “Those kind of people I don’t want on my team”. [...] While data is an extremely important element of decision making, you have to first listen to your gut, what feels right. Usually, the gut is right and you have to substantiate it with data. But you should not start the other way round, where you look at data first and then suppress your instinct and do what the data says. That will not necessarily make you do great things.
#3: Would you hire a philosopher and/or an entrepreneur?
[Jeff pauses for a bit], I would hire a philosopher and not an entrepreneur. [...] a philosopher will take my mind where nobody else has taken it. And then, he will find the entrepreneur to make that into a reality.
#4: What are the fundamental tenets of your business?
Jeff: There are three things -
1. Customers rule: That is an obsession at Amazon. At any meeting that we have, we have a chair for the customer. I say, ‘there’s a customer sitting here, and are we doing things right for the customer?’.
2. An incessant appetite for innovation: This has to be there in every walk of life, and it’s not an annual activity, but an everyday thing: we have to do things better.
3. Operational excellence: When you are running a successful corporation, the fundamental building block is phenomenal operational excellence. Everything will happen the way it is planned to happen and that we actually execute and deliver on the promise.
#5: What next?
Jeff: I’ve only just begun.
(For a perspective, today Amazon ranks #35 in Fortune500 list - compared to Google's #46, and Microsoft's #34).
"It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small." — Neil Armstrong
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| [Source: wikimedia.org] |
“Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.” - Immanuel Kant (Categorical Imperative. try here)In this rather short video clipped from the BBC documentary - "Justice: A Citizen's Guide to the 21st Century", Prof. Michael Sandle picks up an ethical dilema from a real-life kidnapping case that took place in Germany in 2002, and bounces it off to a Kantian activist and journalist, and to Peter Singer, the utilitarian Bioethics professor at Princeton University.
This diplomat from the East was deputed to their embassy in Washington DC, in the United States. Having come to live in a Western country for the first time, the little man decided to pick up the holy book and began studying it in hopes of getting acquainted to the new culture more thoroughly. After a while when he met with a professor of religious studies at one of the colleges in New York, the humble man pronounced his predicament that after reading through the book almost three times over, he couldn’t figure out any religion in it.Nothing could be more illuminating in terms of human mindsets. For example, to an Eastern mindset that is used to live a life with abstractions and of elemental powers, such as the dance of the Shinto priests who proudly claim to have no theology; or with millennia old traditions of having religion a part of the daily routine as naturally as sun-drying the woodblocks with Indian sandalwood to gain aroma out of stove; understandably it could be a difficult comprehension in considering a given narration about a certain ruling family of a given tribe of Levantian peoples as a dictum of mainstream and organized religious practice, with due respects that it being the most successful, loved and practiced one in our contemporary world.
). And most apparently, should sugarcoat the bitterness of the aftertaste of other fictions like iCon (try here
). Initially, the title suggested that the book is a collection of leadership lessons, if not psychological analysis, about this enigmatic personality at the helm of Apple Inc. It turned out to be a gross error of judgment: First, there cannot be leadership lessons here, for Steve is not a leader in the classical sense of modern leadership. (In the contemporary sense of classical leadership? A "Great intimidator"? Perhaps yes, like many Generals in the army with their typical command-and-control leadership). And secondly, it is most likely that any attempt of psychoanalysis would end up in a lawsuit.
to check out the book at Amazon.
"While a win by the Indian cricket team has no statistically significant upward impact on stock market returns, a loss generates a significant downward movement in the stock market.Edit: included score details from the 2nd Test match between Australia and India.
India's main index, the CNX Nifty, shows that the Nifty index was generally flat the day after a win, but the day following a loss, the index dropped by an average of 0.231 per cent. The drop following a loss was more than seven times greater than the movement following a win.
In the 100 matches in which Tendulkar played and India lost, the average return the day after the match was 0.328 per cent, an 18 per cent higher drop compared to the average drop after losing a match (which Tendulkar did not play).
A feeling of sadness might make investors withdraw from the world and the stock market, thus resulting in reduced trading for a while, whereas anger might make them behave in an impulsive manner, which might involve selling of a lot of the stocks."
"If blood to be shed, let it be our own.
Let us cultivate the calm courage to die without killing."
~ Mahatma Gandhi (2 October 1869 – 30 January 1948)
Richard Attenborough writes in his compilation book:
"[Gandhi's] words struck me so forcibly that there and then I committed myself to attempt to make a film about Mahatma Gandhi - a commitment that changed the subsequent twenty years of my life."
"Power is the organization’s last dirty secret." ~ Rosabeth Moss KanterPOWER IS REQUIRED IF ONE WANTS TO GET ANYTHING DONE in any large organization. Unfortunately, Power doesn’t just fall into one’s lap: one will have to go after it and learn how to use it. Stanford University professor for Organizational Development, Prof. Jeffery Pfeffer, argues that being uncomfortable with Power Dynamics has cost career promotions (and sometimes, the job) to many talented people from premier organizations and institutes including Harvard and Sloan. Pfeffer offers a primer on why power matters, how to get it, and how to use it to advance your organization's agenda - and thus, in turn, how to furthering your career, not just incidentally.
Any new strategy worth implementing has some controversy surrounding it and someone with counteragenda fighting it. When push comes to shove, you need more than logic to carry the day. You need power.
Learning to wield power effectively begins with understanding the resources you control. Money is not the only one. Whatever you have - a valuable network, access to information - can be meted out or denied to gain leverage.
You can also push past obstacles through sheer relentlessness. You should avoid wasting political capital on side issues and dispense with opponents in ways that allow them to save face.
You may find such power plays and the politicians behind them unsavory - and they can be. But you'll have to get over your qualms if you want to bring about meaningful change.
If you look at the syllabus, you would notice that we read a number of great and famous books. Books by Aristotle, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, and others. [...] We will read these books, and we will debate these [philosophical] issues, and we will see how each informs and illuminates the other [school of thought]. This may sound appealing and interesting enough, but here I have to issue a warning:[Transcript-ed from the actual lecture. Emphasis added. Official transcript could not be resourced.]
To read these books, in this way, as an exercise in self-knowledge, carries certain risks. Risks that are both personal and political. Risks that every student of Political Philosophy has known. These risks spring from the fact that philosophy teaches us, and unsettles us, by confronting us with what we already know. There is an irony: the difficulty of this course consists in the fact that it teaches what you already know. It works by taking what we know from familiar unquestioned settings, and making it strange. [...] Philosophy estranges us from the familiar, not by supplying new information, but by inviting and provoking a new way of seeing.
But, and here is the risk, once the familiar turns strange, it is never quite the same again. Self-knowledge is like lost innocence; however unsettling you find it, it can never be 'unthought' or 'unknown'. What makes this enterprise difficult, but also revetting, is that Moral and Political Philosophy is a story, and you don't know where the story would lead, but you do know that the story is about You. Those were the personal risks.
Now, about the political risks: one way of introducing a course like this is to promise you that by reading these books, and debating these issues, you would become a better, more responsible, citizen. You will examine the presuppositions of public policies, you will hone your political judgement, you will become a more effective participant in public affairs. But this would be a partial and misleading promise. Political Philosophy, for the most part, hasn't worked that way. You have to allow for the possibility that Political Philosophy may make you a worst citizen rather than a better one. Or at least, a worst citizen *before* it makes you a better one. And that is because philosophy is a distancing, even debilitating, activity. And you see this going back to Socrates [and his dialogue with his friend Callicles who tried to talk him out of philosophising]. [...] Philosophy distances us from conventions, from established assumptions, and settled beliefs. Those are the risks - personal and political.
And in the face of these risks, there is a characteristic evasion. The name of the evasion is skepticism It's an ideal. [It goes something like this] we didn't resolve, once and for all, either the cases or the principles we were arguing about when we began [with the case studies]. And if Aristotle, Locke, Kant and Mill hasn't solved these questions after all these years, who are we to think that we can resolve them? So, maybe, its is just a matter of each person having his or her own set of principles, and there is nothing more to be said about it. No way of reasoning. That's the evasion of skepticism. To which I would offer the following reply:
It is true, these questions have been debated for a very long time. But the very fact that they have recurred and persisted may suggest that though they are impossible in one sense, they are unavoidable in another. And the reason they are unavoidable, the reason they are inescapable, is that we *live* some answers to this questions everyday. [...]
The aim of this course is to awaken the restlessness of reason, and to see where it might lead...
” was at an arm's length at that time and was worth giving a try. Apparently, the prof was right. What follows now is a brief intro before the main business.
; his lessons in leadership
and managing change
offered a very fresh thinking; his passion towards non-profit organizations
were of a true spirit; his “predictions” of corporate events such as fall of General Motors – which he actually helped build in 1950's, make him stand ahead of his time. Same as most of visionaries, perhaps. But if one is looking, there is a pattern to be found in Drucker’s digests – the advices pertain to the fundamentals, they encompass overall entropy of the system and urged to find solutions by referring to the organism’s inherent nature, and they were kept simple, brief and generic at times by cleaver wordplay.
the three key specialities in order of their importance that must be expected from these executive (management grads from primer institutes) are:
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| Greg Chappell at Mysore, Nov'09 [Source: self] |