My columns published (or soon to be published) in The Today Paper
Newspaper column in Today on 8 Aug, 2007.
Technical knowledge is not always a good for you in the modern workplace. Unless you are careful, others will take advantage of your expertise and dump their responsibilities on you. You may not mind it as long as they respect your expertise. But, they often hog the credit for your work and present their ability to evade work as people management skills. […]
Newspaper column in Today, 8 Aug. 2007.
Stress is as much a part of our corporate careers as death is a fact of life. Still, it is best to keep the two (career and death) separate. This is the message that was lost on some hardworking young souls here who literally worked themselves to death. So do a lot of Japanese, if we are to believe the media. […]
Newspaper column in Today, 28 July 2007.
[…] The conversation between two tired minds usually lacks an essential ingredient — the listener. And a conversation without a listener is not much of a conversation at all. It is merely two monologues that will end up generating one more setback to whine about — spousal indifference. […]
Newspaper column in Today on 21 July 2007 on talent shortage in Singapore.
Singapore needs foreign talent. This need is nothing to feel bad about. It is a statistical fact of life. For every top Singaporean in any field — be it science, medicine, finance, sports or whatever — we will find about 500 professionals of equal caliber in China and India. Not because we are 500 times less talented, just that they have 500 times more people. […]
Newspaper column in Today on 14 July 2007.
We go through this ordeal every year when our bosses appraise our performance. Our career progression, bonus and salary depend on it. So we spend sleepless nights agonizing over it. In addition to the appraisal, we also get our key performance indicators or KPIs for next year. These are the commandments we have to live by for the rest of the year. The whole experience of it is so unpleasant that we say to ourselves that life as an employee sucks. […]
First newspaper column in Today, 7 July 2007 (07/07/07 :-)) on handling staff resignations.
Hold on to your pants, your key staff has just tendered his resignation — your worst nightmare as a manager! Once the dust settles and the panic subsides, you begin to ask yourself, what next? [..]
I wrote this piece on the World Malayalee Conference 2008 for a Singaporean newspaper. I was away in India during the conference (22-25 August, 2008) and did not see it in print. This post is about my home state of Kerala, its language Malayalam, and those who speak it – the Malayalees. If those words make no sense to you, you may not be interested in this post.