Career Bloom

Your source for authentic and practical career advice

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about

Over last 25 years, I have experienced multiple R&D roles in small startups and large multinationals, across multiple geographies (China, US, India) and domains (payments, e-learning, edtech). I consider myself a mix of leader & strategist, entrepreneur & org builder, product creator & problem solver, and now, researcher & systems thinker.

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All posts of the site

  • Managing Expectations

    Here is the background on this series, and here is the previous post on this series (Managing Work). In this post, we are going to try answering the question: How does a manager as important as him (and holding as many resources) manage expectations from other senior managers and executives without over-committing his team or…

  • Managing Work

    Here is the background on this series, and here is the previous post on this series (Managing 1-1s). In this post, we are going to try answering the question: While Ravi is the smartest guy and the leader in the team, he is also the bottleneck. How can he manage his work (delegation or empowerment…

  • Managing 1-1s

    Here is the background on this series, and here is the previous post on this series (Managing Performance). In this post, we are going to try answering the question: What is the most efficient way for someone to manage their 1-1s when one has many direct reports (in my friend’s case, 9). Effective 1-1s is…

  • Managing Performance

    See my previous post for background on this series of posts. The question we are attempting to answer is: How does someone (in this case, my friend Ravi who has 9 direct reports) set performance objectives for teams and individuals so that he does not have to spend too much time directing day-to-day activities? There…

  • Management Challenges

    While talking to one of my friends (I will call him Ravi) who has 9 direct reports and 4 indirects (and who doesn’t have enough time to spend on each of his reports on non-technical topics), I realized that having more reports than you can handle is a serious but common problem, especially in places…

  • Managing the boss for better career management

    I have had my fair share of good and not-so-good bosses, and everyone I know of has a boss story to tell! Whether you like it or not, ability to manage your relationship with your boss is critical skill for anyone serious in managing their careers. In Managing your boss, Julie Poland lists a number…

  • Social Networking and leadership

    In the blog ‘Social Leadership‘, Lois Kelly has more sobering view of the role of social media in any career management, unlike my yesterday’s post. Here is how she starts: Some days I get so sick about talking and reading about social media. Here’s why: most of the fundamentals of  marketing and leadership are the same…

  • Leveraging social network in career management

    I went through an interesting blog ‘The pros of social networking and career management‘, which talks about leveraging social networking for enhancing and managing your career well. The case study in the blog gives the advantage of using social networking (in this case, LinkedIn) to find a suitable job. Here is a sample of the…

  • Knowing yourself

    This Wall Street Journal Article talks about knowing yourself via self-assessment tests before changing your career. This is important, because many assessment tests point to your profile in terms of your interests, personality, strengths, etc. There are a large number of such tests available online and offline, a quick google query brings up about 300K…

  • Career Astrology or Career Management?

    Recently I came across ‘Career Astrology’ section of MonsterIndia, the leading job portal in India. Some site indeed! If you are willing to shell out Rs. 500-1000, it will tell you how your stars can predict good time for changing your job, or things which are likely to go wrong in your career.Here is the…