Abhijit Bhaduri’s Blog
I write about careers, skills and the world of work. The cartoons and sketches are mine.
Book Review: No Rules Rules by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer
Talent Density is all about constantly culling the average performer. Think of it as the dreaded bell-curve on steroids. The Netflix culture site says, "Our version of the great workplace is a dream team in pursuit of ambitious common goals, for which we spend heavily. It is on such a team that you learn the most, perform your best work, improve the fastest, and have the most fun."
Book Review: The Secret Life of Organizations
The Secret Life of Organizations written by Shalini Lal and Pradnya Parasher is that map that tells the young Indian professional how to make sense of the chaos in organizations. The authors use their own experience of working across a variety of organizations and their expertise in Organizational Psychology to tell the novice how to decode what they see. They do so with short cases and examples.
Book Review: Great at Work
The way to do this is to redesign your work so as to focus on value, not goals. Looking at your work in terms of the impact you are creating for others helps you discover your passion and purpose. Spending just 15 minutes a day of “deliberate practice”. While regular practice might include mindless repetitions, deliberate practice requires focused attention and is conducted with the specific goal of improving performance – like Jiro crafting each piece of sushi.
Book Review: Just Start
The authors of the book "Just Start – take action, embrace uncertainty", create the future says just that. That’s what serial entrepreneurs do. They don’t wait for the fog to clear. They start moving as soon as they have an idea. They try to stay within what they would define as an “acceptable loss”. They create a prototype and wait for the reaction of the consumer or potential consumer.
Book Review: Barking Up The Wrong Tree
Success is not the result of one single quality. It is also about having the right skill and being in the right role where that skill (and your weaknesses) can be an advantage. A job that leverages your natural extraversion or introversion plus a network of people ready to help will take you further than going solo. When you have a story that connects you to the world, you are motivated to work hard at your goal.
Book Review: Stories at Work
When you come across an old photo, you recall a story. Suddenly a date becomes significant. Milestone events get etched in our mind because our brain has created a little PostIt note and created a special place for it. By the way, where were you on 11 September 2001? You may be racking your brains to leaf through the pages of your memory. But as soon as you read the story, everything falls into place. Can you use stories in the workplace?
Your Happiness Was Hacked: Book Review
The deluge of information pouring in constantly causes technostress and blurs the line between work and home. Tech makes it convenient to connect and its ease of use has changed how we work. No one speaks enough about the way tech runs our lives.Not just adults, children are impacted very deeply. Children are spending fifty percent less time playing outdoors than their parents. The children spend less time playing with other children and more time with screens. This book tells you how to take back control of your life from tech.
Business Line reviews The Digital Tsunami
It’s useful not just for top management and HR practitioners, but for employees too, as it gives you tips on how to navigate the future office.
Career-Hopping: The Hot New Trend
There are new trends at play now. We are moving from so-called job-hopping to actual career-hopping. People are throwing caution to the wind to pursue their passions and be their own masters. Most of us know someone who has spent some years in the corporate sector, given it up to pursue their passion for a sport or to travel, and then, a year down the line, become an entrepreneur by setting up a restaurant or some other business. That’s what’s fuelling the Indian startup dream. Then there are those to give up materially comfortable lives and high-paying jobs to work in remote areas for the uplift of people. Read more
How digital is disrupting careers
Could a tsunami be nature’s way of warning us about massive changes? Look at the timing of the four tsunamis. 1782 and 1883 roughly coincide with the first and second industrial revolutions. Work shifted from agriculture to manufacturing as factories became the main sources of employment. This saw the rise of the blue collared workforce.
The Digital Tsunami: Driverless And Jobless
What is it with search engines? First it was Google who is building a driverless car. Now the Chinese search engine Baidu testing autonomous cars in California. There are enough people worrying about the millions of drivers who will lose jobs because of driverless cars whenever that happens.
The Digital Tsunami: HR
Will HR be replaced by chatbots and machines? The answer is nuanced. The machines are not good at understanding shades of emotions, sarcasm, humor etc. Machines are good at doing “mindless” repetitive tasks. These are the tasks that humans can do without giving it any thought. Routine, repetitive tasks that machines can be trained to do more efficiently than humans will be done by machines. But jobs that depend on social skills and involve complex human interactions will stay with humans. Those who learn to work WITH machines will thrive. HR will certainly need to learn to work with robots who will be part of every workforce. But that is not all. HR will need to be reimagined...
