Ravi Bhuthapuri

When Abraham Lincoln took office as President of the United States in 1861, the Civil War had just begun. Many abolitionists (these were former slaves, religious leaders, writers and politicians who fought to end slavery) and members of his own Republican Party urged him to immediately declare the end of slavery. However, Lincoln understood that […]

In my previous post, I wrote about our Comfort Zone, a space we sometimes have no wish to vacate. While the example I had given was of a time of discomfort, the experience was not one I would describe as a deep personal struggle. I thought back to a time when I had come to

When a client asked me a few years back if I could deliver a 2-day workshop on Design Thinking, I was excited but also a bit hesitant. I told my client that I had never delivered such a workshop before. I added that while my knowledge of the methodology was pretty decent, I did not

A few years ago, my friend called me from Mumbai out of the blue. Her first words were, “Can you talk? I am going through a rough time. My husband is between jobs and it is getting a little stressful at home.” Thanks to old habits, without a second’s delay, I asked her to send

A few years ago, a bunch of us went down from our office in a tech park to the food-court to have lunch. As I was about to commence my lunch of a meat biriyani, a senior colleague looked at me from across the table and rather loudly said, “Ravi Bhuthapuri, are you eating a

One of the key abilities of an effective leader is having difficult conversations with team members whose performance shows no improvement even after they have been given helpful feedback multiple times. When exploring this topic and how we can acquire this much needed skill using a structured tool in a recent learning program, I was

In the wonderful Fresh Air interview from 2003, the actor Michael Caine talks about an early lesson he received on handling unforeseen problems: “I was rehearsing a play and there was a scene that went on before me, and then I had to come in the door and they, they rehearsed the scene and one

Many years ago, when I was in a support role in the IT department for a large Financial Services company, there was a failure in one of the many overnight batch jobs. The impact of this failure was not insignificant: the positions of the traders in the Fixed Income desk were not current. Any transactions

In the 1930s, Japan’s leaders came to believe with great passion and certainty that it was their country’s destiny to dominate Asia. Towards realizing this ambition, they pursued aggressive expansionist policies, which drew their nation into broader conflicts. This mindset and a gross underestimation of American might led to an attack on Pearl Harbour in

When Bernie was a 19-year-old officer in the Indian Army in 1945, he was part of the Allied forces that reclaimed Burma from the Japanese. What he saw as his platoon advanced towards Rangoon, he would never forget. As the Japanese retreated, village by village, they left no survivors. What really horrified Bernie was that