Can We Do Better than CSR? In India, Section 135 and Schedule VII of the Companies Act (2013) relate to corporate social responsibility (CSR). For a few years now, it requires companies clocking over a certain turnover or profit, to spend 2% of (their three-year annual) net profit on CSR activities each financial year. Allotting…
Where Do We Go Now? Google’s AdSense program let’s publishers or website owners have relevant ads show up when users visit those sites. Google earns revenues (via their Google Ads – previously AdWords platform) from businesses wanting those ads showing up to relevant customer groups. In turn, they pass on some of that revenue (based…
My 9 Step Version of the Design Thinking Process This post about my 9-step version of the design thinking process has been long overdue. It is already explained in my book, ‘Design the Future’, but I also wanted to share it here for those interested. The five-step Stanford design thinking process is arguably the most…
Choosing Business Opportunity to Avoid Change As an individual, if you have a habit your core doesn’t fully approve of, you’d find a disconnect that you might, either align with, or from time to time try to fix. It could be diet, fitness or even ethic related. And often, between control or restricting something for…
The Point of disapPOINTment With our high hopes, we do face the occasional disappointment. Not getting that promotion you worked so hard for. Having to postpone a holiday because of some reason, or difficulty in scheduling a meeting because someone’s too busy. How do you deal with such disappointments? Here’s something I have learnt that…
Image: The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from the Ghostbusters movie, 1984 The Stanford Marshmallow Experiment, Delayed Gratification and more In June this year, Jessica Calarco wrote a very interesting article around the famous Stanford marshmallow experiment from the 1960s, which were a number of studies conducted by psychologist Walter Mischel. Mischel was studying correlation between children who…
Lose Your Illusion Sometime last year, I had an interesting conversation with a friend’s girlfriend who is a psychologist. Between drawing inferences from my handwriting to discussing human behaviour in general. She also mentioned the acute dearth of mental health personnel in the country (India) at the moment. I did some reading around that. The…
Are you certain? Or do you think? We live in times that are almost entirely about confidence. The underlying stuff is often of little importance. A bold claim has great impact. The ability to pause to consider two equally strong but opposing possibilities, not as much. Maybe that is also why many of our management…
Democracy has rested on four pillars. The legislature, executive, the judiciary, and arguably the most important, the press. All the pillars need improvement, some far more than others. The world press, for instance, has really become dirty. When in reality, it should be a transparent communication channel between the citizen, the country, and the world….
The Earning of Trust. I recently subscribed to NewsLaundry. It is a very young but self-proclaimed “media critique, news and current affairs portal”. It claims to operate on the obvious but often forgotten premise that news should be for the masses. And not for advertisers, or to distort reality for the masses. Current times are seeing…