Four ingredients for success !

• Intelligence.
• Imagination.
• Self - Confidence [ Do you belive in you first ? ]
  
• Failure [ Do you have the courage to accept failure on the way to success ? ]

Source: One night @ the call center by Chetan Bhagat.

Key to building a great company - Narayanamurthy

First of all, we need good leadership. I don't know of a single great company that has not had good leaders. Great leaders raise the aspirations of their followers; they make people more confident, energetic and enthusiastic.

Such leaders make people embrace the adage: a plausible impossibility is better than a convincing possibility.

People, who are motivated by great leaders, dream big, make sacrifices and achieve miracles. It is not sufficient just to have great leaders. We need a mechanism to identify, train, empower and mentor successive generations of leaders.

Such leadership training and mentoring has to become the responsibility of the current generation of leaders.

Second, we have to create a grand, noble vision which elevates the energy, enthusiasm and self-esteem of everyone in the company while ensuring that everybody sees a benefit in following the vision.

Third, a company has to benchmark itself on a global scale in every area including sales, production, human resources, R&D and finance. It creates an open and confident environment where first-raters recruit first-raters.

Fourth, a great company continuously measures and improves the following attributes: meritocracy, fairness, justice, openness, speed, imagination and excellence in execution.

Finally, a great company practices an enduring value system, and follows the finest system of corporate governance.

Source ..

Narayanamurthy on the essence of leadership

A leader is an agent of change, and progress is about change. In the words of Robert F Kennedy, 'Progress is a nice word; but change is its motivator.'

Leadership is about raising the aspirations of followers and enthusing people with a desire to reach for the stars. For instance, Mahatma Gandhi created a vision for independence in India and raised the aspirations of our people.

Leadership is about making people say, 'I will walk on water for you.' It is about creating a worthy dream and helping people achieve it.

Robert Kennedy, summed up leadership best when he said, 'Others see things as they are and wonder why; I see them as they are not and say why not?'

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Narayana Murthy's 5 tips for success

Source

There are five elements of success. They are:

• Openness to learn: Openness to subordinate your ego to take ideas from others.
• Second, meritocracy: The best ideas are adopted and implemented using data to arrive at the best decision.
• Third, speed: Assuring you do things faster compared to yesterday and last quarter.
• Fourth, imagination: You continually bring better ideas and better innovation to the table.
• And finally, excellence in execution: That is implementation of these great ideas with a higher level of excellence today than yesterday.

I tell my colleagues that there is no guarantee we will be in business five or 10 years from now. The only guarantee is the opportunity for us to use these five attributes.

If we embrace them, we'll be in play five and 10 years from now. But the day we forget these, we'll disappear like dew on a sunny morning.