Raghu Raman: “Public speaking is like swimming. You need to start doing it. Begin in a shallow pool. Go back to your school or college and talk about your professional journey. Just narrate what you learnt from other leaders. Your talk doesn’t have to be about your achievements, it could be a narration of someone else’s. Start with low-risk audiences and work your way up…Always start with a personal story. For the simple reason that no one can judge you on that. After all, you are the subject expert of you. Plato’s ancient observation that “those who tell stories rule society” holds true even today. The ability to speak in public is probably the most powerful force multiplier that a leader could add to her character skills.”
WSJ: “”Imagine your happiest moments and you will probably think of a time in which you were blissfully free from anxiety. Given a choice, most of us would prefer not to be anxious. But if Samir Chopra is correct, that yearning is misplaced. “To be anxious is to be human” and “to be human is to be anxious,” he writes. “Anxiety is not always a pathology to be eradicated but often an ineluctable and indispensable part of ourselves.” If we treat anxiety as an interloper, rather than a companion, we only make it worse. “We will always be anxious, but we do not have to be anxious about being anxious.””
Charles Duhigg: “The thing about a debate is that a debate is designed to convince the audience. It’s two ideas being presented side by side so that the audience can determine which one they think is most true. If a debate is happening without an audience, then it’s a missed opportunity because it should be a conversation. Because in a debate, you’re not going to convince the other person that you’re right. It might be interesting, but a conversation allows us to say. I want you to understand me deeply enough. And this is where looping for understanding comes in.”
Harit Nagpal: “The problem comes when companies stop listening to customers. Even now, barring the three months of the monsoon, at least two days in a month I am out in the field. My field visits are not just about visiting our own customers. I randomly visit the homes of people and talk to them about anything. The purpose is to fathom their lifestyles, beliefs, aspirations and constraints. In the process, I also check on their experience and expectations from media and entertainment.” More: “When I became a manager, I would challenge the status quo but let them (my juniors) do the job. I learned from my own life—I hated the bosses who would breathe down my neck while I was executing the work assigned to me. You have given the brief, now let me do it. If you are checking on me every hour and giving instructions, I can’t work like that. People don’t leave companies, they leave lousy bosses. I have had 13-15 bosses in my life. Probably three of them taught me what to do, and the rest taught me what not to do. I am actually more grateful to the ones who taught me what not to do.”
Peter Coy: “How many people do you think need to enter a room before there’s a 50-50 chance that two of them will have the same birthday? Just 23. Remember that it’s any two people, not necessarily you and someone else, so there are many potential pairs. Our brains don’t “do” randomness. To prove it to yourself, try spitting out digits randomly as fast as you can. You’ll find yourself stupidly repeating 1, 2, 3 and other obvious patterns over and over. The only way to make your digits sound random is to slow way down, which only means you’re concealing your thought pattern. No wonder we see faces in clouds and portents in lottery numbers. I interviewed Persi Diaconis, a mathematician and statistician at Stanford as well as a former professional magician. “What’s surprising to me is how easily surprised people are by coincidences,” he told me. “It feels to me as if we’re hard-wired to overreact to coincidences,” because it’s often safer to see patterns that don’t exist than to overlook patterns that do exist, Diaconis said.”
