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Articles by Deepak Jayaraman
What leads to a midlife crisis and how can we avoid it? A new book offers suggestions
Midlife has traditionally been described as the passage of play between the forties and fifties but given that we live longer, and that our lives are getting more complex and non-linear, some of the phenomena that are typically attributed to midlife could possibly be felt by people in their thirties and sixties. It is that phase where we are at least about five to ten years into our working life and have five to ten years of working life ahead of us.
How to invent your life and career during a life quake
Home > News> Talking Point > How to invent your life and career during a life quake While each individual’s journey is unique, the four domains we need to look at are self, home, work and community /news/talking-point/how-to-invent-your-life-and-career-during-a-life-quake-111653812078380.html 111653812078380 story A host of terms have been used to describe the pandemic—black swan, shock—but I prefer the term “life quake”, coined by author Bruce Feiler.
Building a Life and Career We Care About: Stewart Friedman
Your browser does not support the audio element. Stewart D. Friedman is a professor at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and the founding director of the Wharton Leadership Program and Wharton’s Work/Life Integration Project.
Don’t Talk Yourself Out of Trying a Second Career
As we move through life, we inevitably close doors that cannot be reopened. There is the romantic partner we turned down, the child we had or did not have. But some of these doors aren’t really locked; the challenge for us is to recognize which ones still have a key within reach. If we assume a closed door will never reopen, we are building our own prisons, limiting ourselves by default and fear. This is the case with many professional decisions.
How to Make the Most of Your Internship
During the course of the next couple of months several of you undergoing internships (or summer training) will experience what it means to work inside an organization. Some may be enthralled with the projects they are working on, while some might be disappointed because the internship is not what they imagined. I’ll tell you from my personal experience, not all internships are amazing. What if your internship is in the ‘non-amazing’ category?
When You're Not in the Inner-Circle at Office
I was thrilled when I got a foot-in-the-door position at a really hot company. But I was definitely low woman on the totem pole, with a low salary to match. On days that my coworkers rounded one another up for lunch, I literally couldn’t afford to join them, but I wantd them to ask me. They were the office in crowd. Not only did they eat together – they shared weekend plans and tales, and had an easy, comfortable rapport with the boss. They were never mean to me, but I was invisible to them.
Great Leaders Are Confident, Connected, Committed, and Courageous
Brad was leading a difficult turnaround of his company and had decided to fire his head of sales, who was a nice guy but wasn’t performing. Three months later, he still hadn’t fired him. I asked him why. His answer? “I’m a wimp!” Brad (not his real name — I’ve changed some details to protect people’s privacy) is the CEO of a financial services firm and is most definitely not a wimp. He’s a normal human, just like you and me. And he’s struggling to follow through on an important, strategic decision.
Podcast: Amish Tripathi on the Harsh Realities of a Writing Career
NUGGET CONTEXT For every famous sportsperson, there are hundreds who didn’t make it big. For every published author, there are hundreds who met rejection after rejection. How does one deal with being in a profession where a few “winners take it all”? Hear Amish talk about the reality of being an author and how his initial rejections made him go against the grain and market his books innovatively.
How to Get on the Shortlist for the C-Suite
The career question I hear most often from rising senior leaders is this: “How do I get on the C-suite shortlist?” The management literature is overflowing with advice on becoming the boss. Yet the path narrows significantly as executives ascend closer to the top slots. Having played a role in many C-suite successions, I’ve found there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. All organizations are different and every executive brings unique strengths and experience.
How to Improve Your Business English
Chun Hin is a senior manager at a Hong Kong investment bank. Every morning, he listens to Bloomberg radio on his way to work and used to read each issue of the Economist from cover to cover in an effort to continuously improve his English. As a Hong Kong native who grew up speaking Cantonese and Mandarin, Chun Hin has worked hard to become fluent in English. Chun Hin’s story will resonate with many professionals.
A Friend's Support Can Make Women Better Entrepreneurs
The people we choose to surround ourselves with often matter a great deal to our success — especially when we are trying to thrive as entrepreneurs. That’s because spending time alongside other motivated and successful people can have positive effects on our own success. For instance, a 2014 study found that communication with motivated and successful nearby leaders can lead to higher aspirations and better investment behavior.
Podcast: Prakash Iyer on What They Don't Teach You at IIMA
B-school education can often be focused around picking up the “tool-kit” that makes students ready for the world of employment. Prakash talks about some of the non-academic elements that end up mattering so much in the long run. Prakash Iyer is a best-selling author, motivational speaker and a leadership coach. Before he officially became a member of the “Gig economy”, he was the Managing Director of Kimberly-Clark Lever.
Make Your Work More Meaningful
Have you noticed the rising chorus in the management literature proclaiming that work must have meaning? On this very site, for example, several authors have published research-based blog posts on how managers can create the conditions that support meaningful work. This is a very positive development, because work is a huge part of life, and meaning in life is not just a “nice-to-have”. We need it in the way we need oxygen.
Four Ways to Bounce Back From Setbacks
Today’s business world is increasingly challenging–with economic unrest and rapid changes in infrastructure. Many good people have recently found themselves facing job insecurity and layoffs. I contacted my good friend and best-selling author Karen Salmansohn for some tips on bouncing back and even thriving in the face of adversity. 1. To those of you who have just endured a career adversity, join the crowd–and by the way, it’s a very distinguished successful crowd.
The First Requirement for Becoming a Great Manager
Among the many requirements placed on those who take responsibility for the performance of others, there is one that is rarely mentioned. Yet, ironically, it may be the most important because so much else depends on it. We don’t just mean the courage to make hard decisions or take tough actions, such as giving difficult feedback, denying a promotion to someone who’s good but not good enough, cutting popular but unsuccessful programs, or even laying off people when the economy goes bad.
Podcast: Vedika Bhandarkar on Investment Banking as a Career
NUGGET CONTEXT Vedika discusses her perspectives on Investment Banking as a career and how B-School students should think about the option. On a related note, she talks about the wrong reasons for which people often end up joining Banking. She also lays out the key inflection points in the journey. GUEST Vedika Bhandarkar is the MD in India of Water.org, an organization that empowers families with access to safe water and sanitation through affordable financing.
Podcast: Nandan Nilekani on How to Select the Right Co-Founders
NUGGET CONTEXT Nandan talks about one of the seminal choices that entrepreneurs often have to make: Selecting a Co-Founder. He provides his thoughts around what they should bear in mind in this process. He also talks about what it takes to make the relationship work over a prolonged period of time. ABOUT THE GUEST Nandan Nilekani is an Indian entrepreneur, bureaucrat and politician.
4 Habits of Highly Effective Learners
People who are always learning have these habits.
Questions to Ask Yourself Before Accepting a Job Offer
While watching Flipped a couple of weeks ago, I had the most interesting afterthought. Written by Wendelin Van Draanen, Flipped was voted as a Top 100 Children’s Novel for the 21st Century by School Library Journal, and went on to become a Warner Brothers feature film. The scene that got me thinking shows the father and daughter having a casual conversation while the father is painting. He asks his daughter about a boy at school that she seems to like.
The Skills You Need for Tomorrow’s Jobs (that Don’t Exist Yet)
85% of jobs that will exist in 2030 haven’t been invented yet and 65% of children starting school would one day hold jobs that do not exist as of now. Recent studies show that the average young person today goes through eleven jobs on average in their career. Data from the 2018 Deloitte Millennial Survey shows that 43% of millennials expect to leave their jobs within 2 years, reinforcing the same (see chart below).
Podcast: Z-KITBAG -- Communication lessons from the Army with Capt. Raghu Raman
Become privy to one of the army’s most efficient framework approaches Z-KITBAG!: the Raghu elaborates on this acronym and talks about how this structured approach can be used in any scenario- whether you are preparing for a talk or mobilizing your team for a launch. This is an edited nugget of the interview. GUEST Raghu Raman has possibly one of the most unique career profiles spanning over 25 years.
Podcast: Zia Mody on Law as a Career Choice
NUGGET CONTEXT Zia talks about what it takes to be a successful lawyer. She also teases out the difference between traits that are good hygiene in any profession and what is specific to law. She also talks about how optionalities have changed over time for people with a law background. ABOUT THE GUEST Zia Mody is an Indian legal consultant and considered an authority on Corporate Merger and Acquisition Law, Securities Law, Private Equity and Project Finance.
Keeping Your Options Open Could Be Hurting Your Career
Are you the seven-foot superhero, the conniving villain, the strong-willed woman, or the family-man cop? You’d better be one of them, or risk being cut from the cast. After studying Hollywood actors for three years, MIT Professor Ezra Zuckerman found that actors who typecast themselves (PDF) early in their careers tend to earn more money, have longer lifespans, and enjoy more fame compared to generalist actors.
Physical Fitness Is the Foundation of High Performance.
Peak performance in business has often been presented as a matter of sheer brainpower, but we view performance as a pyramid. Physical well-being is its foundation. Above that rests emotional health, then mental acuity, and at the top, a sense of purpose. The Ideal Performance State—peak performance under pressure—is achieved when all levels are working together. Rituals that promote oscillation—the rhythmic expenditure and recovery of energy—link the levels of the pyramid.
There’s a Proven Link Between Effective Leadership and Getting Enough Sleep
In our hyper-connected, 24/7 world, many of us are losing sleep — literally. Our own survey of more than 180 business leaders found that four out of 10 (43%) say they do not get enough sleep at least four nights a week. Such sleep deficiencies can undermine important forms of leadership behavior and eventually hurt financial performance.
How to Handle a Heated Argument
Redirect the conversation without looking like a jerk.
Can You Really Not Afford to Change Jobs?
Over the past decade, I’ve become something of an expert in personal disruption, after quitting a high-profile position on Wall Street, pursuing several entrepreneurial paths, co-founding two investment firms, and reinventing myself as a writer and speaker. If you are going to disrupt your career there are a lot of questions. But maybe the biggest hurdle is the “can” question: “Can I afford to make the change”? The answer hinges, in part, on the job you hire your career to do.
Podcast: Dr. Pramarth Sinha on Consulting as a Career Option
Pramath talks about how he ended up joining McKinsey in Canada instead of pursuing a career in academics which he had originally intended when he completed his PhD. He also talks about how students should think about evaluating consulting as a potential career option including the common mistakes people make when they consider a career in consulting. ABOUT THE GUEST Dr. Pramath Sinha has worked in diverse fields spanning business and strategy, consulting, leadership and academia.
How Your Leadership Has to Change as Your Startup Scales
When it comes to new tricks, sometimes new dogs are just as hard to teach as old ones. At least, that was what went through my mind as I sat in on a recent senior team meeting at a fast-growing, two-year-old e-commerce company. I winced when Daniel, the 32-year-old CEO, said, “Come on, guys, I need you all to focus more on execution. If we’re going to scale successfully at the pace we’ve laid out, we’ve got to execute faster and delegate more. I want you pushing hard on your teams.
How to Run a Meeting Without Talking Too Much
Have you ever left a meeting feeling that you dominated the whole thing — and not in a good way? You talked a lot, and in the end, you felt that nobody else had enough time to speak. This is a bad dynamic for several reasons. People don’t want to attend meetings that are just an opportunity for one person to deliver a monologue. And with one person taking up the airspace in a meeting, team members no longer feels that they’re working together.
The Comparing Trap
When I joined the Harvard Business School faculty, I received cards and letters from friends and family congratulating me on achieving one of the ultimate brass rings of academics. I felt pretty good about myself until I visited my assigned office in Morgan Hall. In an adjacent office was a colleague who had written something like 12 books and was an internationally recognized scholar in the area of organizational innovation. He had a beautiful summer house near Cape Cod.
Why You Won’t Quit Your Job
When I began writing Passion & Purpose, I met Susan, a young woman on the brink of quitting her investment banking job to pursue her lifelong passion of starting a nonprofit. A year later, when I asked how her new venture was going, I was surprised to hear that she “couldn’t bring herself to quit” in the first place. And when we bumped into each other last week, I found her toiling away in exactly the same role, still dreaming of her nonprofit venture, but now more depressed than ever.
What Doesn’t Motivate Creativity Can Kill It
Management is widely viewed as a foe of innovation. The thinking goes that too much management strangles innovation (just let a thousand flowers bloom!). But we have found a much more nuanced picture. You really can manage for innovation, but it starts by knowing what drives creativity in the people who generate and develop the new ideas that, when implemented, will become tomorrow’s innovations.
How to Find Out What Your Strengths and Weaknesses Are
SARAH GREEN: What is the ground work you should do before you start even looking for a job? JODI GLICKMAN: It’s very important to know what you are good at and what you enjoy doing and think about what you’re not so good at or what you don’t like doing. And think about career opportunities that are going to lend themselves to the former. And of course, you need to weigh that against your financial goals.
Four Lessons From the Best Bosses I Ever Had
My first boss at Bell Labs had a habit of yelling. While he was an equal-opportunity yeller, when he shouted at me in my first department meeting, I got up, told him when he wanted to talk, not yell, I’d be in my office and walked out. I was 20 years old, just out of undergrad, and sitting among a group of aghast Ph.D.’s . Perhaps this was not the best initial career move. But about 30 minutes later, he walked into my office and apologized.
How Managers Can Lead a Good Fight
In the most effective teams in organizations, people fight with each other. As the boss, is it your job to try to stop that? No, quite the contrary: Creating conditions where people feel safe to fight is a hallmark of the greatest bosses. In this post I’ll offer some Queensbury rules to make sure the fights stay focused on ideas and take place in an atmosphere of mutual respect. But first I’ll come out swinging, by taking on anyone who thinks fighting should be suppressed.
Take Ownership of Your Actions by Taking Responsibility
Are you stalled in a project at work, waiting on someone else to take initiative to get things moving? Are you in a broken professional relationship — with a manager, coworker, or employee — hoping the other person assumes blame and fixes the issue? Are you looking for an easy way to get focused or improve your productivity — a silver bullet from an unexpected source?
Podcast: Atul Kasbekar on Transitioning from Engineering to Photography
About the Guest Atul Kasbekar is an award winning photographer (first Indian to win the prestigious International Food and Beverage Creative Excellence awards 2005, held in London for his work on Kingfisher Calendar), Film producer (His film Neerja won the National Award for the Best Feature Film in Hindi in 2017) and works with the who’s who of the Corporate World and Bollywood through Bling! Entertainment Solutions (a Celebrity Management Company) and Corporate Image (a Specialist Imaging...
Podcast: Chadramouli Venkatesan on How to Win at Work
Chandramouli Venkatesan (Mouli) has a strong corporate track record of over 25 years. He is an alumnus of XLRI, Jamshedpur and spent his initial years in Sales and Marketing in Asian Paints, GE Capital and Onida. He worked with Cadbury’s from 2005 till 2016. Over that time Cadbury metamorphosed to Kraft Foods and Mondelez and his last role there was Managing Director for India.
4 Ways Women Can Break Barriers by Breaking the Rules
One evening in February 2016, writer and filmmaker Ava DuVernay met with two top Disney executives about the possibility of directing an adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s classic novel A Wrinkle in Time. DuVernay, 44 at the time, had overcome many challenges to reach that moment. She had launched her career 12 years earlier with no connections — she just picked up a camera and started making small-budget films, including one she financed out of her own savings account.
How Will You Make Your Team a Team?
What do you do when the whole of the team you’re leading appears to be less than the sum of its parts? Everything seems to be in place: solid people, a demanding but ultimately reasonable plan, sufficient resources. Yet there’s still something missing from the effort, and finding a solution to this problem falls squarely on your shoulders. No, leaders can’t single-handedly boost performance, but they can guide the tone, the tempo, and the mechanisms that create the opportunity for better things.
When Your Team Turns on You
It can happen to even the most competent leaders. Your team members disengage or stop coming to meetings. They refuse to, or simply don’t do, what you ask of them. They begin meeting without you. When these things happen, it may be that your team has turned against you. For a leader, this can be a disheartening and terrifying experience, but it is not irreparable.
Podcast: Vinita Bali on Navigating the Sea of Career Options
“What should I do with my life” is often a question that we grapple with at different inflection points in our life. Vinita talks about the various dimensions along which she evaluates opportunities that have come her way at different points in her journey. This is an edited nugget of the conversation.
Podcast: Vinita Bali on Navigating the Sea of Career Options
“What should I do with my life” is often a question that we grapple with at different inflection points in our life. Vinita talks about the various dimensions along which she evaluates opportunities that have come her way at different points in her journey. This is an edited nugget of the conversation.
Enhance Your Execution Skills by Playing (Video) Games
How video games make you up your game at work.
How to Make the Most of Your Internship
During the course of the next couple of months several of you undergoing internships (or summer training) will experience what it means to work inside an organization. Some may be enthralled with the projects they are working on, while some might be disappointed because the internship is not what they imagined. I’ll tell you from my personal experience, not all internships are amazing. What if your internship is in the ‘non-amazing’ category?
If You Can’t Take a Vacation, Get the Most Out of Minibreaks
Summer is here and, for many of us, it makes us nostalgic for our childhood vacations: long, carefree days spent by the beach, in the woods, or with friends and family. However, as adults, those memories can seem all too far away. If you’re American, you probably take drastically less vacation that workers elsewhere. First, most U.S. employers only offer 10 paid vacation days, versus the 28 in the UK and 30 in France.
Podcast: Papa CJ – Demystifying His Journey in Stand-Up Comedy | HBR Ascend
My guest today is Papa CJ, a world-renowned stand-up comedian. He has won awards for both Asia’s and India’s Best Stand-up Comedian. Forbes Magazine called him ‘the global face of Indian stand-up’ and Toastmaster International called him one of the most influential comedians around the world. He has performed over 2000 shows across five continents. His work has been broadcast on NBC, BBC, Comedy Central, Showtime, MTV, Paramount, The Comedy Channel, ITV and a host of other international networks.
How to Manage Your Team’s Attention
Most people answer, without hesitation, that it’s time. It certainly is finite, but I would argue that time isn’t actually your scarcest resource. After all, everyone has the same amount of time, and yet individual differences in productivity can be enormous. A better answer might be your attention — your personal capacity to attend to the right things for the right amount of time.
When It's Hard to Celebrate Your Colleague's Success
How do you feel when one of your sales colleagues closes a big deal? Or when a fellow manager is recognized for leading one of the best projects in the company? Or when a co-worker is selected for a special assignment or training program? The politically correct answer is that we’re supposed to feel pleased. When people that we work with are successful, it’s not only good for them but it also benefits the entire organization.
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