manedge

A bewildering blizzard of email, phone calls, yet more email, meetings, projects, proposals and plans. This must be familiar territory — your average day at work. David Rock, a consultant and leadership coach who advises corporations around the world, has collaborated with world-renowned neuroscientists to find answers to the following: – Why do our brains feel so taxed; – How do we maximise our mental resources; – Why is it so hard to focus; – How do we manage distractions better; – How do we keep our cool in difficult situations; – How do we collaborate more effectively than others; and – How do we get more effective at changing other people’s behaviour? In his new book Your Brain at Work , Rock travels inside the brains of the two main characters as they attempt to sort the vast quantities of information they’re presented with and figure out how to prioritise, organise and act on them. Rock says while the brain is exquisitely powerful, it has some surprising performance limitations ...

IN 1995 Captain G.R. Gopinath, a retired military officer, had a chance encounter with an unemployed helicopter pilot that got him started on setting up India’s first helicopter company. He spent three years lobbying government bureaucrats to obtain the necessary licences and sold all his possessions and mortgaged his house to raise capital. Even in his darkest years he never had any doubt that he was destined for success. “I knew this could not go wrong. I knew the money would come,” he says. And sure enough his business eventually took off. That allowed him to pursue a new vision—cheap flights. Why should Indians travel the length and breadth of their huge country on trains when Americans got on planes? He established India’s first low-cost airline, Air Deccan, pushing the government to relax regulations. Entrepreneurs operate in all kinds of ways. Some see a market opportunity and draw up a business plan to take advantage of it. Others are more like the captain, driven by an inner f...

Music composer Elliot Carter celebrated his 100th birthday last week with a concert at Carnegie Hall. It featured a 17-minute piece for piano and orchestra that Carter wrote when he was 98. Carter has already lived three times as long as Schubert and 65 years more than Mozart. Yet his first opera premiered in 1999 and he produced seven works in 2007 and six more this year. Since he turned 90, the composer who many critics rank among the greatest ever, has churned out more than 40 pieces and he shows no signs of slowing down. Aficionados say he’s still writing at the top of his form and every piece has new ideas that he’s trying out along with subtle refinements of those presented earlier. At an individual level, Carter’s life offers a heroic example of unwavering faith married to unstinting effort. This can be particularly inspiring to younger contenders who fear loss of heart and burn-out. If he can be that productive at 100, just imagine how much you could do even if you make a fresh...

Randel S Carlock, the first Berghmans Lhoist chaired professor in entrepreneurial leadership and director of the Wendel International Centre for Family Enterprise, has reviewed Oliver Stone's latest film W in INSEAD KNOWLEDGE. The review has useful tips for parents. And as Carlock observes, had George W Bush been groomed differently by his parents, the world would have been a different place altogether. The new Oliver Stone film W explores an important concern for business and wealthy families – how parent-child relationships shape a child's personality development and, specifically, individual drives and motivations. The coming of age drama could be many family businesses where a feckless son struggles to redeem himself by overtaking his preferred younger sibling to succeed his father as head of the family dynasty. The Oedipal conflict between father and son, an ever present mother-father-son triangle, an oldest son's birth order expectations and a dose of sibling riv...

Mike Brearley is a qualified psychoanalyst. He is also among the game’s legendary captains. Brearley’s strategic skills and leadership qualities transformed England into a formidable force from the mid to late 70s. Captaincy was always his strongest attribute whether leading Cambridge, Middlesex or England. The 66-year-old Brearley retains his passion for the game. A part of the English media covering the India-England series, he shared his thoughts with 'The Hindu' in an interview. Q. What is captaincy? How would you define it? A. You cannot really define captaincy. Can you define female beauty? I think captaincy is a lot about having a passion for tactics…getting the best out of people. Each cricketer is different and you first need to understand a player, his strengths and his weaknesses. I don’t like the word man-management, which is more about sitting in a chair and sending out instructions. Captaining a cricket team has several more dimensions to it. A captain has to reac...