An Indecisive Indian

I keep saying in my talks, in jest, that I was hardly an accomplished speaker and therefore keep borrowing from superior intelligence, usually my uncles: my great grand uncle, Kabeer , who lived some 700 years back, my grand uncle, an Englishman, Shakespeare , born more than 500 years ago and my young uncle Ghalib who started speaking to me more than 200 years back. And indeed a battery of similar kinspersons who have spoken so abundantly, meaningfully and elegantly that I can simply forage and scrounge and perorate for hours on life, while keeping it topical for this blog, most specifically on management and leadership.   Borrow and speak I will, but without disclaimers. Because what I speak, and now write, about is gold standard on the ‘ proof is in the pudding’ benchmark. They say that the stereotype leader-manager is a specialist of spiel whereas a more seasoned and successful one goes one better and writes. Now that I do both, and also that I hardly have a leadership role anywh

  After a series of talks, newspaper articles, media interviews and yes, my blogs, since late 2018 to date, on Train 18 and the transformations at Integral Coach Factory (ICF), it was natural that I would increasingly be beset by the Déjà vu syndrome . How long can this lather, rinse and repeat process go on in my discourses? It did make me think and reassess the project. To some extent, a timely input from a friend, a professor at one of the IIMs, helped me emend. There are actually two stories from my ICF and Train 18 experience. One is the public leadership story and the other is the making of Train 18.    The Public leadership story is about change and the influence of control. I always present a slid comparing a GM of IR (General Manager of Indian Railways) with a CEO of a private enterprise and show that the former, unlike what many believe, is more empowered to change things.   A senior bureaucrat in India, represented by a GM in my story but equally applicable to across th

Assuming that the entire exercise by Indian Railways (IR) is not about, first boiling the ocean and then blamestorming, but hopefully more like doing nothing by halves, certain sine qua non must be spelt out. This is the aim of this blog.   The RFQs (Requests for Qualification) were received on October 7th, 2020 and the shortlists should be announced sometime this month. Since financials are the main eligibility criterion with prequalification broadly predicated on financial capacity of the net worth of 50% of the indicative project cost of a cluster. A majority of the bids should be found to be eligible in the ongoing evaluation exercise, the successful ones will be issued with an RFP (Request for Proposal) and concessions for 35 years would be awarded based on the share of gross revenue offered. So far so good. I was intrigued to go through the following news item in Indian Express:   https://indianexpress.com/article/india/private-train-operators-must-deposit-security-wit