Social Insanity

Image: Instachaaz I came across a ground breaking research piece from Harvard Business Review (HBR) which really hit home for me and evoked a lot of introspection around ‘werk, werk, werk, wellbeing and life’ titled ‘If you are so successful, then why are you working 70 hours a week? Soundbite was its due to ‘insecurity’. Analogous to the problems we solve in investment consulting, there are new and profoundly complex leadership challenges that professional firms (e.g. accounting firms, law firms, consulting firms) and other white-collar jobs are facing. We hear like this over and over again from people in noted white-collar jobs - that chronic overwork is bad for our mental and physical health and can seriously jeopardize the quality of our work (operational/business risk). We wish we could change the way we work, but we don’t really know how?? The new research on professional organizations, shows that our tendency to overwork and bu...

#35 today – wouldn’t change a thing about it and the best years are yet to come! Disclaimer: These are all not my words; I’ve tried to list any many sources as I can or remembered. I haven’t accomplished anything notable or created/destroyed companies or cured cancer. By all standards I’m the just an ordinary person with suboptimal intellect, mediocre talent, below average memory but a life-long learner and a divergent thinker with a horses jaw – you can say my greatest achievement is just EXISTING for three decades. I've always been impressed by the ability of people to concisely articulate arguments in a few words. So here's my poor attempt at it: 1. LIFE is not a movie ; so have a plan for big things or at least for the ones which matter to you. Have an artist’s ambition but an engineer’s mindset. 2. A lot of people don't get what they WANT in life, because they DON’T KNOW what they want in life. 3. Abilities are not prized by associated virtues. Whatever a...