Thursday, July 18, 2013

Quotes that I read everyday :)

There are different ways people stay inspired, for me reading quotes and success stories gives the extra push to go that extra mile.

I found this post on LinkedIn and could not help but post it here:

Be careful reading these quotes, they might just inspire you to do things you dreamed of doing, they might help you succeed and might even make you happier.




"All our dreams can come true - if we have the courage to pursue them"



Walt Disney



"Your time is limited, don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living the result of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinion drowned your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition, they somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."



Steve Jobs



“Life is short, live it. Love is rare, grab it. Anger is bad, dump it. Fear is awful, face it. Memories are sweet, cherish it.”



Proverb



"Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresea, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein."



H. Jackson Brown Jr.



"Fear less, hope more, eat less, chew more, whine less, breathe more, talk less, say more, hate less, love more, and good things will be yours."



Swedish Proverb



“Accept responsibility for your life. Know that it is you who will get you where you want to go, no one else.”



Les Brown



"When one door of happiness closes, another opens, but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us."



Helen Keller



"Happiness is not something you postpone for the future; it is something you design for the present."



Jim Rohn



"Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude."



Thomas Jefferson



"The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack in will."



Vince Lombardi



"It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed."



Theodore Roosevelt



"Success does not consist in never making blunders, but in never making the same one a second time."



Josh Billings



“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”



Michael Jordan



“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”



Wayne Gretzky



“In order to succeed, your desire for success should be greater than your fear of failure.”



Bill Cosby



"It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that things are difficult."



Seneca



"It is only the very wisest and the very stupidest who cannot change."



Confucius



"Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do."



Johann Wolfgang von Goethe



"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit."



Aristotle



"Vision without action is daydream. Action without vision is nightmare."



Japanese Proverb



"A goal is a dream with a deadline."



Napoleon Hill



"Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another."



John Dewey



“Build your own dreams, or someone else will hire you to build theirs.”



Farrah Gray



“There are two primary choices in life: to accept conditions as they exist, or accept the responsibility for changing them.”



Denis Waitley



“Good things come to those who wait… greater things come to those who get off their ass and do anything to make it happen.”



Proverb



“The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.”



Lao Tzu

Original blog: 25 quotes to inspire

Movie Thoughts: 20 Entrepreneurship Lessons From The Croods

For all you young CEO's here is a piece of article i wrote after watching Croods:

http://under30ceo.com/movie-thoughts-20-entrepreneurship-lessons-from-the-croods/

Saturday, January 12, 2013

Awesome Stuff Online this week (ASO) - 1

I am in Volga conference room (Infosys towers office) - doing our final checks before we go for our big beat launch in Orlando (FL). For some reasons, I have always loved working on weekends it gives me an adrenal rush. I have also noticed on weekends my productivity is almost twice my productivity during weekdays :)


Okay, now coming to main topic. I have been reading some awesome blogs in recent past and wanted to share them with all my readers and wasn’t sure how do I do it. Now here is a million dollar idea :) I will post a blog every week that say’s: ASO this week. It will cover various aspects of life, management gyan, online stuff, social media tips and what not!! You name it you will find it here.

Without any further delay – here you go:

I have been a huge fan of Claire Diaz-Ortiz – she writes awesome stuff on social media. She has been working on a very interesting stuff “Bringing Vatican Pope onto Twitter”. During this project here are some awesome lessons she learnt:

http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130112014211-52397036-five-things-i-learned-about-life-by-bringing-the-pope-to-twitter

I love her first point: In 2013, Everyone Needs to Be Social (Even the Pope).

Have you faced a rejection off late? How does it feel when someone rejects your proposal, idea, thought or anything??? I know it SUCKS :(

Read this:

http://www.entresting.com/blog/

Here is a quick look at rejection therapy by author himself:

“I was turned down by a prominent investor. I wanted the investment so bad that I had dreamt about it on five different occasions. The final rejection hurt as if Santa Claus showed up in person and told me he’s not real, and then ran away with my gifts.

I then turned inward, and wanted to focus on building myself with the necessary entrepreneurial skillsets. My experience revealed that my fear of rejection was real, so I wanted to tackle it first. I searched, and found Jason Comely’s Rejection Therapy concept through FounderDating Forum. I liked it so much and decided to do it right away, and vlog it to keep myself accountable to going through the whole 100 days.”

Happy reading :)

Monday, December 10, 2012

Social Media Marketing Honeymoon is over – HELL NO. IT JUST STARTED

Friday sunny morning Рback-to-back meetings and I am glad I am working on some of the big bet product launches @Infosys with veterans. I landed on this article today morning: The Social Media Marketing Honeymoon Is Over which primarily says social media marketing is no more a preferred channel for marketing. David says Social media, social media marketing, and social networking have been the subject of much hype, buzz and marketing budget disruption for big and small business alike. May be true but the other side of story is many organizations have leveraged social media in multiple ways. For example we have had a phenomenal year @ Infosys in terms of Employer branding Рwithin no time our FB page reached 1 million fans. Social media is not a pass̩ it is the way organizations will do business for years to come.

Here are few points on how to create and sustain social as channel for an enterprise:

1. Create a Social Media strategy for your organization

2. Start treating social media like a tool that reaches out to customers

3. Stop believing it can magically conjure sales, if only you get it right

4. Realign your expectations to meet reality

5. Create a strategy to build on the achievements of your social media marketing

6. Be creative and innovative in how you look to further increase trust and engagement online

7. Make sure you know ways to measure your Social ROI

8. Re-visit your social media strategy

9. Be very relevant, honest and conversational - across all your social channels

If your organization does not have a social media strategies make one today. I will soon be writing about organizational social media goals for 2013 :)































Tuesday, December 04, 2012

Social Media DO's and DONT's for fresh grads and interns

It’s been close to six months I have been conducting various programs for students across various B-Schools in Bangalore. One question that I have come across more than 100 times in almost all my sessions was “HOW do I get my job or internship using Social Media? Does my presence on social matters for my job hunt?”


Here is a small write-up on how graduates can leverage social media for their job or internship hunt. Social media is a great networking resource when you’re looking for a new job, your first job out of college, or an internship.

I have been working on extensive hiring at Infosys, I’ve sifted through lots of resumes and internet stalked my candidates, like every (smart) hiring manager in this day and age will do. I wanted to share some of the DO’s and DONT’s with you, so you can avoid these snafus. Keep in mind that every hiring manager is looking for different things; these are few generic things that a hiring manager in India may take into consideration.

Here are top 10 things you should NOT BE DOING:

1. Don’t have a profile on LinkedIn

If you’re not on LinkedIn, you basically don’t exist. That’s clearly an exaggeration, but I’m much more likely to bring in a candidate if I can find his or her profile on LinkedIn. LinkedIn provides job seekers a place to showcase their work experience and projects they’ve worked on, share their website(s), and gather recommendations. Recommendations are something that you can’t find on a resume, and I’d much rather see some glowing compliments before interviewing a candidate.

Being “just an intern” isn’t an excuse for not being on LinkedIn. You can still list your extracurricular activities, prior internships, and part-time gigs, and gather recommendations from your managers and peers.

2. Write negative about prior job or internship in your blog

Most people like to find an outlet to blow off steam. No job or internship is 100% perfect. But if you’re looking for a new gig, don’t let that outlet be your blog. In today’s day and age, anything you write under your own name is findable online. And smart hiring managers will do their homework. We want to work with motivated people who will take one for the team without publicly bashing their job for all the world to see. And if you do complain about your prior internship in your personal blog, for goodness sake, don’t link to it from your resume. This happened. True story.

3. link your personal blog on your resume

It is great to maintain a blog and write regularly. If it’s a professional blog, or even a personal blog about your hobby, please add it to your resume/cover letter/LinkedIn. It gives hiring managers more insight about who you are as a person, and what you might be like to work with. If your blog is an “uber-personal” blog in which you rant about life, post pictures of scantily-clad women, or stress about your latest breakup, that’s fine. Just don’t link to it from your resume/cover letter/LinkedIn, or even your Twitter bio (while you’re job searching). It’s not appropriate, and makes you seem less of a business professional.

4. Irrelevant updates and photos on Facebook

While hiring managers will want to see what you look like on Facebook, we don’t need to see pictures of you doing keg stands with your buddies. So be careful about your privacy settings. Don’t make yourself completely invisible to search (so that your own real-life friends can actually find you), there’s no need to be that paranoid. But just make sure that you only display the photo albums and status updates you wouldn’t mind hiring managers to see publicly.

5. Tweet TV shows, movies and friends on Twitter

It’s generally best-practice to stay away from mundane updates on Twitter, even if you’re not looking for a new job. You may notice a dip in followers if you consistently post about sitting on your couch, eating pizza, or watching TV. But be especially careful when you’re on the job market. Tweet smartly, and include relevant articles to your industry, informative blog posts you’ve written, and insightful comments you have about your work, classes, and culture. Just stay away from the mundane. And of course, just as you shouldn’t rant about your job on your blog, you shouldn’t rant about it on Twitter either.

6. Contradict yourself during an interview

If you’ve recently written a blog post about the “10 reasons why XYZ is bad for the ABC industry,” stick to your guns in person. If you contradict yourself during the interview by saying XYZ is brilliant, your interviewer will know that you’re just trying to appease them. A smart interviewer will have internet-stalked you before your interview, so already knows your opinion on XYZ. Disagreeing with the norm does not (necessarily) make you a complainer. It makes you someone who recognizes flaws and will strive to make a positive impact on the company in which you’re seeking a job.

7. Post not interested in current job updates

It’s absolutely ok to look forward to the weekend. Just don’t publicize the fact on Twitter. Posting “TGIF” or “can’t wait for 5pm” or “today’s going so slowww” can make you come across as an unmotivated whiner, even if it’s not true. Just be careful of public updates like this while you’re applying for a new job.

8. spelling and grammar errors

Avoid common errors like mixing up their, they’re, and there, or you’re and your, even in social media. This will show that you’re detail-oriented and have a solid grasp of writing the English language. If you’re constantly making mistakes online, even if it’s “just” social media, it will making the hiring manager afraid of constantly needing to correct your work.

9. Abandon your social media profiles

If you don’t already have LinkedIn and Twitter profiles set up, it’s great to take the initiative to set those up. But don’t just set them up and abandon them! A blank profiles or Twitter stream is just as bad as not having one at all. If anything, it shows that you can’t finish a project that you’ve started.

10. Spend all day on social media

At the opposite extreme, if you’re spending all day tweeting, that doesn’t look good either. That makes it seem like you’re not spending any time on your actual job or school work! Like anything else in life, moderation is key.

Hope these help you in creating a positive personal social quotient :)

This was originally authored by Diana Urban - she blogs @ u stand out on various social media topics.

Monday, October 22, 2012

Two great things that happend (Young Leader & Speaker at National Conference)

This month has been extremely exciting for following reasons:


• This is a festival season in India – Navratri (I get to eat so many verities of sweets)

• I almost successfully completed teaching a course to my MBA students in Christ University (Subject: E-commerce and ERP)

• Loads of new things to learn at work

• Yukta’s mid-term results are announced and she has done extremely well 

But two most exciting things that happened this month are:

  • I have been nominated for “Young Leaders of India – 2012” program by Economic Times (watch out for more updates on this).

  • I was invited as keynote speaker at “National Conference on Green Entrepreneurship – 2012” hosted by New Horizon Leadership Institute in association with AIMS (Association of Indian Management Schools), NEN (National Entrepreneurship Network), World Academy of Productivity Science and APJMER (Asia Pacific Journal of Management and Research). Here is my PPT:





It was a phenomenal experience to present at a national level conference on topic that I love :) I was delighted to share the stage with delegates from IIT Madras, IIT kharagpur and IISC Bangalore. For the first time I presented to a large audience of (350+ attendees) and it was indeed a dream come true.

I have always enjoyed presenting and speaking at academic events and this was best till date. I will be speaking on the same topic next month at IIM K and hopefully in Jan at another national conference in Bangalore.


Sunday, October 21, 2012

An outstanding Customer Delight Experience


After living in 8 countries and banking with close to 11 foreign banks (Royal Bank of Scotland, National Bank of New Zealand, Bank Of America to name a few) it takes a lot to say a nationalized bank in India is excellent. For most of the folks in IT and especially for people who have enjoyed priority banking with banks like Citi bank a nationalized bank would be the last resort. I have been juggling with the decision to buy a new car for quite some time now.  I have been talking to various financial institutions to decide on the final one to opt for car loan and every bank had enormous enthusiasm in the beginning and gradually started treating me (the prospect) as just another customer. One bank that gave the warmth and comfort of banking was SBH Indiranagar.   

The two key rockstars of this bank are: Mr. Mahesh Murthy and Mr. Pranesh Hunasgi. Mahesh is the branch manager, a very efficient leader and treats the customers with utmost warmth. My very first interaction with him made me feel I was in safe hands. On the other end Pranesh ensures that you understand the process, terms and everything related to your loan that a customer must know.

My relationship with SBH goes back 6 years when I first met their MD (MS. Renu Challa) a true visionary and then their next MD (Mr. Amithab Ghoa) during my tenure with Goldstone Technologies Ltd. This bank is keeping up to their vision statement: “To be the most preferred and trusted Bank”.  They have very nice online banking, Mobile banking and all latest technology adaptations. For more information click here.