How is your life going on after doing an MBA from an IIM?

Happiness can't be pursued, it must ensue - chasing happiness is self-defeating, chase the reason to be happy instead.

People have enough to live by, but nothing to live for.

Let me tell you a story.

Mohit is a fresh IIM graduate. He has recently joined his job. He works in a company that is a market leader in consumer electronics loans.

It is Thursday evening. His manager calls him, and informs him that he is supposed to be there at an electronics store of a well-known national electronics chain from morning till the store closes in the night from Friday through Sunday of the same week to learn the process from the point of loan approval to loan disbursement.

He is supposed to meet the ground sales staff of his NBFC present in the store, who take care of the tasks ranging from pitching the zero interest (on a majority of products) finance options to the customer to processing them in the store itself, learn from them, and present his learnings and suggestions for improvement in customer experience on Monday. At the thought of working on the weekend, he agrees, albeit grudgingly.

He peers through the cracks in the blinds on the glass walls of the office building. In a minute, he finds himself at the balcony of the building, having a wistful glance at the iron-grey monsoon sky, reminiscing the good old days of college, when they used to pull off weeks - not days - without a single holiday. He returns to his desk, with a clear head - devoid of any qualms about the impending slog on the weekend.

On Friday morning, he arrives at the store. After arriving at the counter of his NBFC in the store, he meets the salesmen. He finds them pretty humble and kind. He starts observing the way customers are pitched, treated, and the technology-driven way of loan processing. He jots down the points he thinks are worth taking a note of.

As the day passes by, he finds the value communication of zero interest loans to the customers pretty intriguing. He starts understanding how the products they manage sitting in the luxury of the air conditioned office are sold by the sales staff at the bottom end of the hierarchy of the organisation.

He finds out that the patience of sales staff is a well that never dries. There is no sign of exasperation on their faces when he asks them silly questions notwithstanding their insane workload of handling tons of customers. He is amazed to observe their work ethics and commitment towards their duty. He is awed when he notices them offering their chair(s) to the customer(s), in case the ones present fall short, and processing the loan on the system while standing.

He grumbles about him having to work on the weekend while his friends will savor the much awaited Saturday, only to find out that the sales staff works for as many as thirty days in a row without a holiday in the peak season of the year. A lump of gratitude passes through his throat.

He leaves the store at 9:30 pm on Friday. The next day, he meets a newly married couple who have come to buy a refrigerator of 20,000 Indian Rupees. On being informed about the zero interest instant finance facility offered by his company, they take away a TV, a Refrigerator and a Home Theater System worth 1,20,000 Rupees - by paying the down payment of the same 20,000 Rupees they had brought with them. The excitement on their faces of embellishing their new home with the electronics durables of their desires makes him experience the concept of customer delight he had studied in the classroom.

With each passing day of his store visit, his excitement and desire to spend more time there keeps soaring in his heart, like snow collecting on a wall, one flake at a time. On Sunday night, he bids adieu to the sales staff. He books a shared Uber to his flat, sharing it with some girls, who are headed towards a pub that was supposed to screen the India-Pakistan cricket match. When the cab driver and Mohit talk about India's defeat in the match, the girls are aghast - not at the fact of being unaware that India has lost, but at the fact that there will be no screening for them to enjoy the weekend. They start searching for other places to go to, without even asking how India lost. Mohit chuckles with his lips closed.

Come Monday morning, he is back in office. He is supposed to present his findings of the visit. Having a fair understanding of the process, the customer experience and the scope of in-store marketing, he prepares a report. He presents it later in the day, answering a few questions, stumbling at a few others - leaving everyone in the room pretty satisfied. He returns home late.

After having dinner, he dozes off only to wake up in the early morning shivering from cold due to the breeze flowing through the window of his room. He finds out that he has fallen ill. Notwithstanding the ongoing summer season, he places an online order for an air condition summer quilt at 5:30 am. Now, he starts reading the biography of Sam Walton (Founder of Walmart).

After some time, he leaves for office along with his flatmates. On reaching office, he realises that the three days spent at the store were the best days of his hitherto fifty-day long journey in the organisation. Scrambling to understand a plethora of things that he is supposed to learn from his seniors in the office, who carry the badges of their alma maters, designations, and the number of years of experience on their chests, he reminds himself of the humility of the sales staff at the store.

Exhausted through the day, he realises that his throat infection and fever have worsened. He decides to walk for the 1.5 km distance from his office to home, to buy medicines, fruits et al along the way. After returning home, he falls on the bed, only to wake up to have his dinner, and discuss the proceedings and gossips of the day in the office with his flatmates.

Lying on the bed, with the fan off, medicine pills gobbled, he browses Quora, finds this question, and decides to write an answer to it.

Would his life have been different had he not been from an IIM?

Probably wouldn't.

Would he have prepared himself for work on the weekend as easily had he not been from a college where he had slogged on almost all the weekends?

Probably wouldn't.

Is his life happier than his peers' who are not from an IIM?

Can't say. Life after an IIM is not two half-moons of white and black colors; it’s a thousand shades of grey peppered with glimpses of happiness and otherwise.

The same goes for life beyond an IIM, or for that matter, any other institute.

Ten Signs Your Boss Is A Manager -- But Not A Leader By Kranti Gaurav

A simple way to answer the question "What's the difference between managing and leading?"

Managing people means watching them to make sure they do what they're supposed to do.

The concept of traditional supervision is rooted in the fear that working people will misbehave or make mistakes if someone isn't watching them to make sure they don't.

A manager marches backwards, watching their troops like a hawk in case somebody is marching incorrectly. They cannot look out over the horizon when they're marching backwards!

A leader faces forward and marches confidently, assuming their troops will follow them because they trust their troops and themselves.

Leaders are confident enough to hire people they can trust and let them do whatever they do best with a minimum of oversight.

Managers cannot relax into trust. They are keyed up, judgmental and certain that dire consequences will befall them if they ever let their vigilance flag.

Managerial fear is the great unaddressed workplace topic that sucks vision, creativity, collaboration and profitability from organizations large and small!

It is hard to talk a fearful manager into adopting a confident leader's mindset because to do so the fearful manager would have to gain a level of self-awareness that they do not understand.

Because they sit in fear, they assume everyone is guarded and political the way they are.

They cannot see trust. They believe that without their constant inspection and evaluation, their department would fall to pieces.

We have been so well-trained in the concepts of fear-based management that we do not recognize there is another way to lead. We can lead without reams of policies and rules.

We can lead people by involving them in decision-making and inspiring them to band together to accomplish something cool.

It is a human urge to create and collaborate unless we thwart the urge by rating and ranking people relative to one another and by tying them down with pointless daily and weekly yardsticks.

When we make work a zero-sum game where my triumph is my co-worker's downfall, we are not only cruel but bad business people, also.

Here are 10 signs your boss is a manager — but not a leader.

1. They don't ask for their teammates' opinions before making decisions. They do not dare to share their authority with anyone. They believe their authority to make decisions without asking for input is the source of their power.

2. They do not acknowledge their employees for their effort or accomplishments. They are afraid to thank and recognize their teammates because they need to keep the unequal power relationship intact.

3. They cannot be wrong. Even when everybody knows the manager is wrong, no one will say it because of the force field around the manager. They pretend the manager is not wrong and the manager pretends to believe it, too.

4. They cannot handle dissent or even polite debate.

5. They can only take advice from their subordinates when they are behind closed doors with one person.

6. They do not allow their employees to interact with higher-level managers for fear that a higher-up leader might trust their team member's advice more than their own.

7. They do not stand up for their team members when they could. They will not spend political capital on anyone except themselves.

8. They don't give their teammates visibility into the future, even when it would help the employee and the company to do so. They have taken the adage "Knowledge is power" to heart. They hoard whatever information they acquire, and dole it out in tiny doses.

9. They discount any information or feedback that feels threatening to their political status. When they say "I'll take that idea under advisement" they want to shut you up. They have no intention of considering your idea.

10. They are more concerned about maintaining whatever status, prestige or organizational power they have accumulated than in doing the best thing for the organization.

How do fearful managers keep their jobs? They keep their jobs because they deliver one kind of business result — the  numeric kind — for a limited period of time.

They deliver that result by managing through fear.

Over time, a fear-based manager will fail because they have no credibility. No one trusts them.

Fear is a good motivator in the short term but useless over the long term as person after person realizes that the little-tin-god manager has very limited power over them.

If your manager is stuck in fear, your first assignment is to start building an escape hatch.

Life is long, but it's still too short to waste your time and talent working for someone who doesn't deserve you my dear Friends.

Stay Fit, Take Care & Keep Smiling :-)

God Bless !!

Kranti Gaurav
XLRI Jamshedpur

Office Office - A Short Motivational Story to Inspire Great Teamwork

A team of about 35 employees had come together for a team building event. They were a young, bright and enthusiastic team.

However, one big problem this team had was they wouldn’t share information or solutions with each other. The leader felt they were too focused on self and not enough on team.

So she started off with a fun team activity that would allow her to teach the importance of each team member working together and sharing more.

She brought the team into the cafeteria. All of the tables and chairs had been stacked and put away. Placed around the room were fun decorations and hundreds of different colored balloons.

Everyone was excited, but not sure what it was all about. In the center of the room was a big box of balloons that had not been blown up yet.

The team leader asked each person to pick a balloon, blow it up and write their name on it. But they were instructed to be careful because the balloon could pop!

A few balloons did indeed pop and those members of the team were given another chance, but were told that if the balloon popped again they were out of the game.

About 30 team members were able to get their name on a balloon without it popping. Those 30 were asked to leave their balloons and exit the room. They were told they had qualified for the second round.

Five minutes later the leader brought the team back into the room and announced that their next challenge was to find the balloon they had left behind with their name on it among the hundreds of other balloons scattered in the large cafeteria. She warned them however to be very careful and not to pop any of the balloons. If they did, they would be disqualified.

While being very careful, but also trying to go as quickly as they could, each team member looked for the balloon with their name. After 15 minutes not one single person was able to find their balloon. The team was told that the second round of the game was over and they were moving onto the third round.

In this next round the leader told the team members to find any balloon in the room with a name on it and give it to the person whose name was on it. Within a couple of minutes every member of the team had their balloon with their own name on it.

The team leader made the following point: “We are much more efficient when we are willing to share with each other. And we are better problem solvers when we are working together, not individually.”

Often times members of teams create obstacles that get in the way of teamwork by solely focusing on their own pursuits and goals. They hoard information, avoid collaboration and distance themselves. It is bad for the team and it is bad for that individual.

Every member of a team should ask themselves on a regular basis what they are doing for the team  and can do for the team my dear Friends.

Stay Fit, Take Care & Keep Smiling :-)

God Bless !!

Kranti Gaurav – Inbound Marketing Certified From HubSpot Academy

What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing helps you attract customers with content designed to attract qualified prospects, convert them into leads and customers, and grow your business. Inbound marketing is a technique for drawing customers to products and services via content marketing, social media marketing, search engine optimization and branding.