Year: 2019

When I moved from the engineering ladder to take up management and subsequently enrolled to do my Executive MBA from Jones School of Business, one fundamental question was always in my mind – Who is a good business leader? While there are so many different leadership personality traits that are important, what I realized after 2 years at school and several more years of pondering and harsh life lessons, the answer lies not in the traits themselves but in a few fundamental attributes that are …

When I first came to the United States to do my Master’s degree, the first thing that struck me was the multi-cultural aspect of the American society. Specifically, one would have to figure out the plethora of food choices – Mexican, Italian, Asian, American, and such. If you are a student on a strict financial plan as I was, I’m sure you would appreciate the importance of fast food joints. I would venture going as far out to say that knowing the differences about the …

My friend loves to read the last chapter of a book first. This she tells me, allows her to understand how the author ties the knots together and if they are interesting, she then goes through the other chapters. While personally I like to read the books in a linear fashion, I do see the merits in this non-linear reading pattern. One obvious reason to her of course is that if the ending is not to her liking then she quickly browses through the book …

I walked into a customer business review meeting and was quite surprised to see our scorecard results on cost were lower than my expectation. The disappointment was because we had made significant progress on quality but what we had not taken notice was the significant cost that we incurred in doing so. If you are a supplier in the server industry, then I’m sure that you have heard this feedback from your customers: “How do we reduce cost, increase quality, and time to deploy all …