Sudeep D'Souza

In the 2001 movie Along came a spider, there is an interesting quote by Morgan Freeman where he says "You do what you are" and then he further goes on to explain "I mean, you do what you are. You're born with a gift. If not that, then you get good at something along the way. And what you're good at, you don't take for granted. You don't betray it."  Ive always wondered while watching the numerous talent shows, how the hell do they do what they do or sometimes you see someone do something at work and they are just so amazing at it. Corelating this to what Morgan Freeman quoted in the movie, they are just born with that talent to do it or it is through sheer hard work that they learned to do it. I believe that you would put in the hard work only in two circumstances, one if you are in a perilous  situation and you have to learn to do it you don't have much of a choice or you love what you are doing and want to become the very best at it.  Finding o...

This is an interesting illustration that resonated with a discussion I was having recently about doing ones best. It perfectly encapsulates how you need to give your best each day, but the outcome is not always better than the last.  Some days the outcome is amazing, a high that you need to cherish and the next day as you give your best, the outcome might not be as good or better than the last. This should not lead to disappointment and dejection. It is to be expected as we are not machines, and we have our good days and our bad. We are also influenced heavily by the environment around us and circumstances each day that may not be in our control that will not allow the same.  Enjoying what one does makes it easier to give ones best. When you do not enjoy what you do it is hard to commit yourself to it whole heartedly. So find what is it you enjoy doing and then master that and deliver your best to get the best outcomes. 

13 years ago I wrote about how " Having pride is key to quality " and this was written in the context of the software services industry. But having worked since then mostly in the services industry, I have come to realize more and more that one needs to have "heart" in their work to give their best.  What do I mean by putting your heart in what you do? It essentially means you care. You care about how the service is delivered, you care about the quality of the service, the timeliness of the delivery, you care about the happiness of the customer.  When one cares, automatically every detail is addressed. This ensures a high quality of delivery, the customer experience is great and you end up with a happy customer.  Happy customers end up giving you more business.  Putting ones heart in what they do, has to come from within each one. It cannot be thrust upon or commanded. So find the job that you want to put your "heart" into what you do and excel at what you...

In his autobiography Steve Jobs said "The people in the Indian countryside don't use their intellect like we do, they use their intuition instead, and their intuition is far more developed than in the rest of the world. Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. That's had a big impact on my work," Jobs later recalled to Walter Issacson, the biographer. We see this in everyday life - the Indian intuition. If you observe how traffic moves on Indian roads it looks chaotic and crazy. It looks like everyone is going to crash into one another and we are going to have one big crazy pile up. But we defy reality - there is a method in the madness, there is an implicit understanding between the drivers and pedestrians of what each one is going to do next. Before you drive on Indian roads you have this feeling that its impossible to drive and that you will probably kill a million people if you drive. Hence there is a deep reluctance to ...

I was playing with my daughter yesterday and I asked her to sing a new nursery rhyme with me and she told me "I cannot do it papa because it is difficult". Two phrases in that sentence caught my attention "cannot do it" and "difficult". Which made me wonder, when is it in life do we learn to say that we cannot do things because it is difficult. There are so many things that I remember finding difficult to do and wanting to give up but I had the right support system around me that persisted with me to continue trying or the circumstance at that point of time forced me to learn it. I was then able to overcome the initial hardships to be able to enjoy it now. One example is driving the car. I always had this fear to drive on Indian roads but the circumstance of needing a car with a blossoming family forced me to learn to drive and take the car out. It was very hard initially but I enjoy driving now. The earliest memory that I have of something that I foun...

I was watching Jungle Book with my daughter today and some of the words of the song " The Bare Necessities " struck me as very interesting. Look for the bare necessities The simple bare necessities Forget about your worries and your strife I mean the bare necessities Old Mother Nature's recipes That brings the bare necessities of life We all have worries and strife but we should look for the bare necessities the simple bare necessities of life. And don't spend your time lookin' around For something you want that can't be found When you find out you can live without it And go along not thinkin' about it I'll tell you something true The bare necessities of life will come to you This part of the song is very interesting - we spend a lot of time looking around for something that can't be found, but do we stop when we realise that we can go on with life without it. Very rarely we do - but the song goes on to say that if we go on not thinking about it we...

As a follow up to my article on Life is an equation you balance all the time I will talk about imagining the management of teams to be similar to managing or solving simultaneous equations. So if you have not read the first article please do so before continuing. In the first article I looking at managing oneself as similar to managing an equation with multiple variables and coefficients and having a constant on the right hand side. Now when you associate multiple individuals together each one of them having their own little equation to manage it starts to get a bit complex. Teamwork is being able to manage the equations in such a way that everyone in the team has similar goals (variables) and these responsibilities have similar priorities (coefficients) since the constant on the right hand side is always going to be the same. If everyone in the team have differing goals and priorities then you will never be able to solve the simultaneous equation and that is when the team work just ...

I had an interesting thought the other day - why can't we look at life like an equation that needed to be balanced all the time. On the left hand side of the equation the coefficients represent the priorities and the variables represent the commitments that exist. On the right hand side of the equation you can either use the constant for 24 hours for a day, 7 days for a week, 30/31 days for a month, 365 days for a year - but it is always a constant. The equation may look something like this 3x + 4y + 7z + 2a + 4b + 5c + ... = 24 The commitments never really go away they keep going down in priority and come up again and so the variables always stay in the equation its just that the priorities of the commitments keep changing and so the coefficients keep moving themselves up and down. Life is all about balancing this equation. The key is to never get any one coefficient so high that it gets out of hand. You need to always manage all the coefficients within manageable levels as they k...