Paresh Nanda

1) You can not  contact the hiring manager yourself. Of course you can, particularly if you are not hearing back. 2) You should be paid what your last job paid you, or just a little more. No ! Just because the last employer took advantage of you, does not mean the next one should. 3) Your resume should be full of buzzwords to capture attention of keyword-seeking recruiters. No. Keyword-seeking recruiters are not likely to find you a job. Good recruiters seek value, not buzzwords. 4) If you do not hear anything back, wait and be patient. No ! Let them be patient when you refuse the offer because you found something better. 5) Candidates are doormats, and everyone is allowed to walk all over them. No !!! How they treat candidates shows how they treat employees. Good companies will go out of their way to impress you. 6) You should stay in the job you hate just because you just started there recently. No ! Good hiring managers do not prejudge candidates on the basis of them havi...

85% of jobs are filled via networking. This is a big reason why people start networking. People want to get something out of it. But if you focus too much on what you will get out from networking, you’ll miss the mark. People won’t care about you until they realize how much you care about them . So instead, focus on helping others and you will achieve incredible things. I was terrible at networking when I first started. I treated it too much like a business transaction. I wasn’t human. But then a friend gave me some well-timed advice that I will never forget. The goal of networking is to build friendships. That realization changed everything. I came into networking initially to “network.” But with some tweaks and good advice, I found something so much better. I found real friends. And those friends have helped me achieve more than I ever dreamt possible. I cannot understate that. So, let me say that again: Those friends have helped me achieve more than I ever dreamt possi...

2 in 5 managers fail within their first 18 months according to Harvard Business Review. The main reason is departures or de-motivation of their best employees. Yes, "people do not quit companies, they quit their bosses." Everyone knows that, including those bosses. So why do they not stop their best people from leaving ? 1. They think everyone is replaceable like gloves.  Nobody can be replaced, they can only be succeeded. Not only everyone is unique, and has a unique perspective, but when a good employee quits, gone are: institutional knowledge, key contacts and relationships with clients and stakeholders. Loyal employees are not commodities ! 2. They see best people as a threat to their own position. Insecurity is as bad as ignorance. The secret to my success was to always hire people smarter than me. In my own case it was always easy. No persons should be promoted to management who are so insecure that they would rather see their best people fa...

Are you a different person on weekdays and weekends? Are you a different person right before you step in to office and once you are inside? Are you a different person when with your team and when with your friends? Are you a different person through the year and towards the appraisal process? Are you a different person when working with your colleagues and when eating/drinking with them? Are you a different person at work because you wish to be or you think you are meant to be?   The separation of work and life has caused concepts such as work life balance to flourish in today’s culture And with the concept comes the pressure to “balance” the two – as separate entities on two scales of a weighing machine Does it have to be this way? Can life be such where we stop living two lives? The need to balance work and life, is only if you are living each separately.

If you’ve been putting off your home buying, you’ve done well so far. However, waiting further may not work in your favour. Here are 5 reasons on why you may be better off, acting on it now. 1.    Resurgent housing demand After a relative period of calm imposed due to Demonetization, RERA, GST implementation & more importantly the confusion these brought along with them, there is best ever clarity in the regulatory environment and consumer confidence is getting better.   Buyers are out there looking for homes in end-user driven markets like Mumbai. And while, ill-thought out projects and delayed ones still face the heat, the projects with good design are recording sales each month for the last few months. 2.    Prices expected to climb due to multiple reasons The Real Estate pricing which has either gone west or at best plateaued is looking to leap, given that the regulatory environment is clear and the customer confidenc...

It makes me so sad that the majority of people with a salary still refuse to open their eyes. They even go a step further, if told, they start defending their situation and come up with all (in their mindset) reasons why there is nothing wrong to have a salary. And basically there is nothing wrong in having a salary if you are ok with lowering or giving up your dream(s). If you are ok in being limited in your options, you make yourself dependend of people where you have no influence over and therefore become very vulnerable. People say to me....."Paresh, we need employees and not everybody can be an entrepreneur or is able to become one" Well this is a mindset. I think everybody can become an entrepreneur. It just depends on how you define it. About 100 years ago almost everybody was an entrepreneur and the ones who where not worked for the government. So it is possible. Some people say that some people are not fit to be an entrepreneur. Well I am convinced and have proven ...

Few years back, one of my colleagues was boasting that he gets 250+ mails a day at work, hinting about his rising importance in the company & with clients. I looked at him & asked ‘How do you want to solve this issue?’ He was surprised by my question. I told him, getting more mails isn’t a sign of more productivity or influence. In fact, if you are getting over 60-80 mails/day, it means you need to consciously fix the issue. There is a problem somewhere.   In 2015, an average worker got 122 mails/day. It’s set to increase to 140/day by 2018! Now, this means you need to probably spend all day just to read/respond to mails! Who will do the actual work?  You need to understand why are you getting so many mails? Is it because you have too many reportees, handling many clients, or trying to spread yourself thin by doing too many things. All these could make you unproductive.   Next, stop emailing people when you can talk to them. Essay length mails are a strict...

2018 has started with a bang. TIME’S UP is taking New Year’s resolutions to a whole new level, with 300 of Hollywood’s most powerful women coming together, putting real initiatives and real money behind breaking the cycle of harassment and inequality in Hollywood and working-class jobs. That includes $13 million in a legal defense fund for individuals who have suffered sexual harassment, assault, or abuse in the workplace. In other words, these women are using their clout and economic power to catalyze real change. Not just for themselves, but for others: women (and men) who don’t have the same financial power that they do. Financial power is something you may have heard us talk about at  Nanda Paresh before. Because money is not just money. It’s a means to drive change. It’s freedom; it’s confidence; it’s take-this-job-and-shove-it; it’s giving to a cause that you care about and that can make the world a better place. Money is power. It’s being able to come tog...

“People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” – Simon Sinek There are Challenger brands which bring new innovations, newly improved products by adding some extra tweaks and there are other brands called Disruptor brands, which comes into the market and changes the total structure of the industry. I believe Patanjali and Jio are Disruptor brands rather than mere challenger brands.  A disruptive innovation is all about the companies which focus on customers future needs and come up with a new solution to disrupt the market, while patriotic branding is about branding the company initially by ingesting a sense of national pride among the consumers for persuading them to buy the offerings of the company. Patanjali , a name of a company which has the power to pass cold shivers to the most reputed MNC brands in India and   Jio , which flabbergasted whole India with its ground level pricing strategies in the telecommunications world. Actually, I think, there is no ...

VP of IBM's Watson IoT Consumer Business, who highlighted four key trends. Interestingly three of those trends were around convergence with other distinct yet highly corelated technologies. This underlines the principle that data is the fundamental ingredient of digital transformation. The technologies predicted to make big waves in the coming year – including IoT, artificial intelligence, blockchain and edge – are all methods of collecting, analyzing and storing information. AI will make the IoT smarter and more productive to work with Artificial Intelligence (AI) is undoubtedly the buzzword of the moment – everyone is talking about it but a lot of people still aren’t quite sure what it is. According to Greenstein, however, 2018 is the year that understanding of its role as the brain running IoT systems will spread. As more and more devices become connected and capable of speaking to each other, AI – deep learning, natural language processing, image recognition and neural-ne...

Over the past six months i’ve written in our   Today in Technology   series about historical tech developments and the insights they provide for our current day. As the calendar flips to 2018, we are looking back at the top tech issues of the last year, offering our perspectives for the coming 12 months, recapping what i’ve learned, and sharing how Microsoft is helping to address these issues. The following are our top 10. 1.  Cybersecurity:   From WannaCry and electoral attacks to a Digital Geneva Convention 2.  Immigration:   From the travel ban to DACA to the green card backlog 3.  Technology for Rural Communities:   Ensuring a fair shot for everyone 4.  Diversity and Tech:   A watershed year 5.  Privacy and Surveillance : More milestones in an eventful decade 6.  AI and its Role in Society:   The future of technology 7.  Sustainability and the Paris Accord:  ...

It’s customary for us at the end of each year to take stock of the months gone by and possibly predict what’s to come in the New Year. I'm not attempting the later but here’s a quick roundup of key events that shaped the Retailing Industry (mostly) in our country. January   - The country has not yet recovered from the demonetization impact. Organized Retail is initially impacted - however sales numbers are gradually returning to their original levels. ASSOCHAM predicts that online customers in the country will cross the 100 million mark. India also expects to add 11 million square feet of Brick and Mortar space. Ironically in the same month, Jumbo Electronics announces their intent to leave India for good. Meanwhile in the US a very uncomfortable change of government has the whole world on tenterhooks. The world is about to learn a new term – ‘Fake News”. India is awaiting FDI in multi brand Retail. February   – Oracles foretold future in olden times. The modern day ...