7 Leadership lies you need to stop believing

1. "All managers are leaders." Truth: some managers can lead and others don't or cannot. Management is a subset of leadership, not its equivalent.

Managers are good at setting up, monitoring and maintaining systems and processes. They hire people. But if they can't bring out better performance in people and take the organization beyond where it is, they aren't leading.

Leadership always involves change, improvement and growth.

2. "Some are born leaders." Truth: even someone with a predisposition to lead must learn the skills of leadership.

A young person who is 6'6" might have the predisposition to play basketball, but he or she still needs to learn the skills before they can play successfully.

Leadership might be more latent in some than others -- and you can't always tell -- so focus on what is developin

g someone's behaviors, not their biological background.

3. "Leaders always have the right answers." Truth: leaders ask the right questions and know where to find the best answers.

If your people always come to you for answers, you're stunting their ability to think. And if everyone in your company keeps asking the same questions, I assure you, you're not that innovative.

Without questioning and curiosity, leaders simply manage by using familiar answers long after the marketplace has started asking different questions. It isn't about knowing the answers as much as it is about knowing who to ask and where to look.

4. "You need a title to lead." Truth: to lead you only need to know when it is appropriate to do so and how to do it.

When I stay at a hotel, the majority of people I encounter -- from the front desk to housekeeping to foodservice -- have no formal title or power over people, yet they are responsible for creating my experience there -- good or bad. Good staff willing to take the lead are as important (and probably more) than the official leaders at the top.

Leadership is about making things better, and the best organizations teach everyone to take responsibility for leading.

5. "Leaders are focused." Truth: Leaders create a shared focus.

If your team isn't focused, it doesn't matter how focused you are on doing what matters. A manager is usually focused, but a leader creates shared focus and doesn't waste resources by allowing team members to do work that doesn't matter.

Being focused is about self-responsibility and discipline. Creating shared focus is about engaging others in the leadership agenda and making it specific to their jobs.

6. "Leadership is about ambition." Truth: leadership is about the greater good.

There's nothing wrong with ambition, but it primarily serves the ambitious. If what you're doing serves only you, you almost certainly aren't leading.

When others are served better as well -- customers, colleagues, vendors, the community -- that is the sign of effective leadership.

7. "Anyone can lead." Truth: Nobody can lead if they lack the desire to do so.

You can't make people lead any more than you can make a horse drink once you've led it to water. Desire is the sine qua non of effective leadership.

And you, Mr. or Ms. Leader, cannot become better without the same desire. I've observed that nobody improves by accident. Getting better is about getting past the common thinking, lies and misconceptions and digging for wisdom. Once you know the truth, it can set you free and make you a better leader.

datta chevle: TATA Facebook

datta chevle: TATA Facebook: All tech buddies wanted to know where the social networking tend to move this one is for you. Facebook is seeing...

datta chevle: TATA Facebook

datta chevle: TATA Facebook: All tech buddies wanted to know where the social networking tend to move this one is for you. Facebook is seeing...

TATA Facebook

All tech buddies wanted to know where the social networking tend to move this one is for you.

Facebook is seeing a decrease in daily users - especially teenagers. Photograph: Image Source/Corbis

Facebook made a startling admission in its earnings announcement this month: it was seeing a "decrease in daily users, specifically among teens". In other words, teenagers are still on Facebook; they're just not using it as much as they did. It was a landmark statement, since teens are the demographic who often point the rest of us towards the next big thing.
Their gradual exodus to messaging apps such as WhatsApp, WeChat and KakaoTalk boils down to Facebook becoming a victim of its own success. The road to gaining nearly 1.2 billion monthly active users has seen the mums, dads, aunts and uncles of the generation who pioneered Facebook join it too, spamming their walls with inspirational quotes and images of cute animals, and (shock, horror) commenting on their kids' photos. No surprise, then, that Facebook is no longer a place for uninhibited status updates about pub antics, but an obligatory communication tool that younger people maintain because everyone else does.
All the fun stuff is happening elsewhere. On their mobiles.
When mobile messaging apps such as WhatsApp first emerged in 2009, they looked like a threat to mobile carriers. Everyone from Vodafone to Dutch operator KPN was mentioning them in sales calls. Mobile operators are estimated to have lost $23bn in SMS revenue in 2012 due to messaging apps, which host free instant messages through a phone's data connection, which these days is often unlimited. Now these apps are becoming a threat to established social networks too.
WhatsApp, the most popular messaging app in the UK and on half the country's iPhones, according to Mobile Marketing Magazine, has more than 350 million monthly active users globally. That makes it the biggest messaging app in the world by users, with even more active users than social media darling Twitter, which counts 218 million. About 90% of the population of Brazil uses messaging apps, three-quarters of Russians, and half of Britons, according to mobile consultancy Tyntec. WhatsApp alone is on more than 95% of all smartphones in Spain. The power users and early adopters of these apps, the ones you're most likely to see tapping their thumbs over a tiny screen, are under 25.
Part of the reason is that gradual encroachment of the grey-haired ones on Facebook. Another is what messaging apps have to offer: private chatting with people you are friends with in real life. Instead of passively stalking people you barely know on Facebook, messaging apps promote dynamic real-time chatting with different groups of real-life friends, real life because to connect with them on these apps you will typically already have their mobile number. The trend flies in the face of recurring criticism of young people – that their social lives are largely virtual – when many more are in fact embracing the virtues of privacy and services like WhatsApp, which shun advertising.
"I only use WhatsApp to communicate and send pics these days," said Natalie West, a twentysomething financial sales associate in London. In the last few years she has used Facebook less and less because she doesn't want "the whole world to know" what she's doing. When people set up events and get-togethers on Facebook, West and her boyfriend tend to reply on WhatsApp instead because "it's more personal". For similar reasons, some 78% of teenagers and young people use mobile messengers to plan a meet-up with friends, according to research advisory firm mobileYouth.
Another factor is the rise of the selfie, often silly self-portraits taken at arm's length with a mobile. Almost half of the photos on Instagram feeds among people aged 14 to 21 in the UK are selfies, according to mobileYouth. Sending those photos via a mobile messaging service is safer than broadcasting them on Facebook, since they're less likely to be seen by a boss or dozens of Facebook friends you forgot you had. Selfies are even bigger onSnapchat, the evanescent photo sharing app that deletes a photo several seconds after it has been viewed. With about 5 million active monthly users, the service has inevitably become a favoured way for teens to send sexy or even naked photos of themselves, an ill-advised practice known as "sexting". But teens also love Snapchat because it allows them to send inane photos of themselves without fear of leaving a permanent digital footprint.The California-based app is seen as so hot, with so much potential for growth, that it has already been pegged with a $2-$4bn valuation in the Silicon Valley tech community. Estimates are even higher for WhatsApp, which makes money through an annual subscription; some observers suggest it could be worth $5bn or more.
The final, big reason why young people are gravitating towards messaging apps is that many of these apps no longer do just messaging. They are social networks. The best examples come out of Asia, with messaging platforms KakaoTalk (South Korea), WeChat (China) and LINE (Japan). All have tens of millions of users, with WeChat boasting more than 200 million, and take their services beyond offering straight messaging to games, stickers and music sharing. Before you write off digital stickers as inane, they are a decent moneyspinner for LINE: of the $58m the company made in sales in the first quarter of 2013, half came from selling games and 30%, or roughly $17m, from sales of its 8,000 different stickers. Some are free or, in Spain where LINE has 15 million registered users, cost around €1.99. Often users choose stickers instead of words when they need to express themselves, one LINE executive said; it's known to have helped couples get over fights more easily by offering multiple stickers to say sorry.
Gaming is another money-maker. With KakaoTalk, which is thought to be on 90% of all smartphones in South Korea, registered users can choose from more than 100 games they can play with one another, and games alone helped the company generate $311m in sales in the first half of 2013. A couple of non-Asian messaging apps such as Kik (Canada) and Tango (US) are turning themselves into full-fledged platforms too, inviting software engineers to create games that run on their apps. They will typically let developers take home half the revenue while taking a 20% cut. App stores such as Google Play and Apple's App Store take the remaining 30%. Tango took all this a step further this month when it partnered with music-streaming Spotify to allow its 60 million monthly users to share music clips with one another. Two years ago Spotify launched a similar partnership with Facebook. "What we're seeing in the messaging space is an explosion in growth," said Spotify's vice-president of strategic partnerships, Tom Hsieh, who hinted there would be partnerships with other messaging apps in the future too. "I don't think there's been a clear winner [among them] yet."
It is worth noting that, with so many of these apps getting into games, stickers and now music sharing, it is becoming harder to define them as messaging services. "I think there is some misunderstanding here in how we categorise these apps," says Pavel Durov, who founded Russia's version of Facebook, VK.com, and recently launched a mobile messaging service called Telegram. "They are social networks. You have a social graph there; a newsfeed; you have profile pages. Many things that are related to social networks by definition." Social chat apps is another way to define them, says Gartner mobile analyst Brian Blau. "People are sometimes using three or four of these apps."
Many of the Asian chat apps such as Kakao and LINE are struggling to appeal to US users, though, because of the stylised nature of their interfaces – vivid colors, manga-style characters and lettering. "We're used to being a little more subdued," says Blau, who is based in the US.
In the race to become platforms with extra frills, the big exception is WhatsApp. Founder Jan Koum has said publicly that he has no plans for his service to start providing games. Koum and his co-founder Brian Acton, both former Yahoo managers who were one of the first to create a mobile messaging app for smartphones with WhatsApp, see it almost as a pure communication utility that should not be saddled with extra features that might slow things down. "That's what's happened with most social networks on the web now," says Neeraj Arora, business manager for WhatsApp, which is based in Mountain View, California. "It tries to do everything for everyone. Our core is communication."
That is a somewhat conservative approach compared to most other messaging platforms, yet WhatsApp is still quietly broadening out. In the same way Facebook first rolled our Facebook Connect in 2008 to allow people to use their profiles to like or comment on other websites, WhatsApp recently unveiled an instruction set known as an API that lets other mobile apps share content through WhatsApp too. The roll-out is still in its infancy, but after one music streaming service in the Middle East added the WhatsApp sharing button, its was surprised to find its users sharing 50% more songs via WhatsApp than Facebook.
The future for these messaging apps is still uncertain. Some in the industry expect buyouts from big internet companies like Google, which was rumoured to have flirted with WhatsApp earlier this year. Facebook already has its own popular Messenger service, while Apple has iMessage – both are popular, but lack the gaming ambitions of Asian chat apps. Still, it is hard to imagine these players consolidating to create a global social network as big as Facebook.
"If you look at the landscape, it's geographic," says Greg Woock, CEO of the US calling and messaging service Pinger. "We dominate the US, WhatsApp dominates Europe, LINE owns Japan." China's WeChat is trying to break out of that mould. Its executives have talked about expanding internationally, and custom building its app to suit local tastes for how it should look. "We have put a lot of thought into how to take it outside of China," Martin Lau, the president of WeChat owner Tencent, said at a recent conference.
Who dies, survives or thrives may ultimately depend on how well any of these players can make money. Snapchat, arguably a photo-sharing service more than a messaging app, has yet to explain how it will do so.
WhatsApp says it is already profitable thanks to its annual subscription fees; Pinger relies on advertisements; WeChat, LINE, Kakao and Kik sell stickers and games. Some of these services are bound to go out of fashion, and a few business models will fail, and they're still a world away from the $2.1bn in sales that Facebook brought in this last quarter.
But there is little doubt that millions of teens will use these apps more and more, and older demographics will eventually join them. There's a good chance that will continue to be at the expense of Facebook.

Top messenger apps

WhatsApp
Started in 2009 by two ex-Yahoo staff, this smartphone messaging system handles more than 10 billion messages a day and is reckoned to have more than 250m users worldwide. One of the most popular paid-for apps on any platform, and a threat to telecoms companies which charge for texts.
Snapchat 
Allows users to send "view once'"photos, specifying how long the photo will remain on the recipient's device. "Snap an ugly selfie or a video, add a caption, and send it to a friend (or maybe a few). They'll receive it, laugh, and then the snap disappears," says Snapchat. The company is valued at $800m and users send 350m messages per day, up from 200m in June.
WeChat
The Chinese social media app, which handles voice messages, snapshots and emoticons, has more than 200m subscribers. The vast majority of users are in China, though it also has subscribers in the US and UK. It is being tipped as the first Chinese social media application with the potential to go global.
KakaoTalk
A Korean messaging app with more than 90m users that generated $42m of revenues in 2012, ending the year with users sending 4.8bn messages a day. The company recently launched KakaoHome in its home country: a similar app that provides "a customised home screen experience on your smartphone" with widgets, notifications and deeper integration of the main messaging service.
• This article was amended on 10 November 2013. Snapchat has 5 million active monthly users, not 150 million. This has been corrected.

Have I made it LARGE

Have I made it LARGE

Have I made it Large?? if SRK can ask this question to himself after having RS(Royal Stag) then no one will bother, i asking Have I Made it Large (to be frank i am sobar). Mind dig deeper why SRK need to ask this question after having name and fame in the industry and not to forget MANNAT which is Jannath. Is it his real quince to find the real aim of SKR or is it the courtesy of (RS). what so ever it may be he will find out till the time he gets films. 
Y am i hunting for the ans to this question? Y at this point of time? Do i feel i have made it lager? Do i feel there is still scope to be make it larger then what it is? Is it the unsatisfied mind? OR have i not yet reach where i actually wanted to? where do i actually wanted to go? Hell lot of question and above all..Have i made it LARGE. Every soul around me want to make it LARGE but none knows what exactly the LARGE is? i am one among them.

Real Retail Issue

Retail - Real Issue

Atlast the current battle of FDI in retail come to an end (probably as of now) with the voting in the two houses of Parliament, It may be advisable  for our politicians and bureaucrats to get down to some understanding of what the retail business is all about — not only in India but globally too. Problem is not with the FDI 100% but the real problem surrounds around the current economic situation of India in Perticuler and entire world economy in general. Perhaps the irony would not be lost on either the UPA or the principal opposition party that there are bigger and more critical issues that India should be debating inside and outside Parliament. There are at least five very fundamental issues currently engaging the attention of leading multinational retailers as they grapple with low growth or even no growth, and flat or declining profitability. 

The first is changing trends, Several trends are enabling the rise of a new class of retailing called ‘vertically-integrated e-tailing’. While these are early days for this new breed of retailers that includes Bonobos, Shoedazzle and Stelladot, their revenues are already in excess of $1 billion, and rising. This trend, along with the ‘traditional’ e-tailers such as Amazon, can take some more business away from general merchandise (non-food and non-FMCG) brick-and-mortar retailers, putting even more pressure on their revenue growth potential. 

Second question is cross culture management:-question mark now being raised in the boardrooms of some of the more internationally-aggressive retailers about the viability of taking their successful home-grown retail formats to new countries. After some success achieved in the 1980s and 1990s by retailers such as Carrefour in making their business truly global, the 2000s have been a mixed bag of success for many. Even some of the most experienced and resourceful retailers like Wal-Mart, Tesco, Carrefour Marks & Spencer, among others, have found the going really tough in some foreign markets and, often, as is the recent case with Tesco’s misfired foray in the US, led to an expensive retreat with huge financial losses. 

 The third big challenge is the potential disruption of relatively recently established supply chains. Low-cost supplier countries such as China are no longer so lowcost and the trends are that many such low-cost supply bases are likely to see steadily rising cost of manufacturing. High energy prices are also leading to increasing cost of shipping and other logistics. With severe challenges in passing on these cost increases to customers in the developed but economically-stagnant markets, most retailers are engaged in the task of rejigging their supply chains so as to maintain margins and profitability without losing revenue.
The fourth — and somewhat related — challenge facing many large global retailers is enforcing a supply chain-wide compliance with ethics, workers’ rights and fair-trade practices without adding very significantly to the overall cost of sourcing. Recent disasters in factories in countries such as Bangladesh where lives of hundreds of workers at supplier factories were lost due to fires have only highlighted the slippage in enforcement of compliance by many of the leading global brands and suppliers to retailers in developed countries.
The fifth issue is to maintain differentiation from competitors. Almost all retail businesses now talk about improving customer experience, increased customer engagement, delivering more ‘value’, and offering more and better assortment. Most are becoming multi-channel using a combination of offline and online mediums to reach out to the consumer and micromanaging relationships with customers at an individual level thanks to rapid advances in technology and high penetration of smart phones.
With no immediate sign of a major revival in the economic conditions in major developed countries — the countries of origin of major internationalised retailers — only a few exceptions would have a real appetite to invest in new markets, no matter how much the relative consumption growth differential and retail growth potential may be. In India’s case, the challenges are even more intense, starting from the current multi-brand retail policy itself that has several highly-restrictive operational clauses, near non-availability of high-quality and rightlypriced real estate, the diversity of consumers and their shopping habits, the extremely fragmented and relatively inefficient domestic supply chain, onerous taxation regime that varies from state to state, and the long list of permissions and procedures retailers have to comply with for every new store.
It would be interesting to see, a year or more from now, if those billions of dollars from international retailers do actually find their way into India before we start worrying about their impact.

 

Excuse me Mr. Manmohan Singh

The  word manmohan is an adverb first use to describe the quality of the lord SHRI KRISHNA as he use to attract and bind the minds of all around him so he was called as maan mohan, well that was the satvyug.. To remind you this is Kalyug and kalyug ka Manmohan is the Prime Minister singh I will be calling him just Singh not Manmohan Singh.

Well Mr Sing here’s the challenge for you. As like NAYAK Anil kapur I challenge you to live the life of common man for one day (24 hrs). hope by then you will realize what kind of TANDAV you are doing by sitting  at 10 Janpath. Sure m not the first one to blame you and you make sure that I will not be the last one. Many will come and blame but you will be the same. I dought are you the same Manmohan who Introduce the LPG model in 1991 and change the Indian Economy. By your performance in 2012 its hard to belive..ohh may be because you had become most powerful person you are not afraid of anyone(except Sonia).

My concern is. Boss why so big hike in LPG & Diesel…you might have increase it rupee by rupee. Look we public are use to this Rupee by Rupee wala hike..but if you increase by 5 Rs its indigestible boss. I think you forgot the Add..MIRINDA..Jor Ka Jhatka Dihrese lage. Jokes apart….but this is again a big joke ki this is AAM ADMI ki Sarkar.

Our salaries are stable and on the verge of decline, no job security. Thanks to the credit card companies atlist we are living on their mercy less caring about the repayment.

Finally I would like to thank you for all that you did for the economy and to the common man..I know this is not the end and you will add more fuel to the fire. Picture abhi bake hai.