Happiness is natural and stress is a disease

Brahmakumari Sister Shivani, Spiritual & Motivational Teacher addressing AIMA’s 4th National Leadership Conclave 2018 on the theme ‘Leading Self to be Innovative, Inclusive & Invincible’. Read Excerpts:

Brahmakumari Sister Shivani addressing AIMA's 4th National Leadership Conclave.

Brahmakumari Sister Shivani addressing AIMA’s 4th National Leadership Conclave

Last week in the Times of India, There was a proposal by the Government of Delhi saying that they want to introduce a subject called ‘Happiness’ in every Government school in Delhi, and they had asked proposals from NGOs and spiritual organisations to submit a curriculum that they would like to execute for school children in a subject called ‘happiness’. Most of us must have seen that page, but did we pause to reflect where are we heading? Our children have to have a subject called happiness because what they’re experiencing today is something different from happiness.

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WhatsApp and Google are Front-ending India’s UPI

Arvind Gupta, CEO, MyGov addressing on the theme ‘Reimagining the State: Government as Service’ at AIMA’s 4th National Leadership Conclave 2018. Read Excerpts –

Arvind Gupta, CEO, MyGov addressing AIMA's 4th National Leadership Conclave

Arvind Gupta, CEO, MyGov addressing AIMA’s 4th National Leadership Conclave

The whole concept of Government as a service is very new especially in a vast country like India, the learning from countries like Estonia with 1.3 million people and a few more million in Singapore are vast. But you know their digitization came before they tried to leapfrog into fourth industrial revolution. India didn’t have a choice, we are doing digitization and we are leaping into the fourth industrial revolution parallelly and in that parallel universe we have a citizen who is still not connected to the internet probably, has a basic mobile phone, lives in a remote corner of northeast, Rajasthan, Jammu & Kashmir or in Kerela but what has connected all of them is this unique thing that we talk about, Aadhar. Today almost 99% of the adult population has Aadhar. Now we can keep debating its issues on the privacy and the security and that’s in the national interest and that’s the right thing to do but it is really enabling us to deliver the government as a service.

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Making India Easy & Simple – Amitabh Kant, CEO, NITI Aayog at NLC2017

Mr Amitabh Kant, CEO, NITI Aayog talks about how the current government’s reforms to make India Easy and Simple; at AIMA’s 3rd National Leadership Conclave 2017.

Amitabh Kant, CEO, NITI Aayog sharing his thoughts on Government and Business: What Should be the New Equation? at #AIMANLC

Amitabh Kant, CEO, NITI Aayog sharing his thoughts on Government and Business: What Should be the New Equation? at #AIMANLC

It’s great pleasure to be here on this very fascinating subject of government and business. My belief is that the government’s job is to lay down the policy framework and the private sector’s job is to create wealth in society and if you look at India over the years, the government had itself made India very complicated, very complex and a very difficult place to do business because over the years we have added a lots of rules, regulations, procedures, paper work, acts, all of them. And these procedures and paper works have made it very difficult for the private sector to create wealth and therefore this particular government in the last two and half years has attempted to make things extremely easy and simple. They have scrapped  1198 laws. This is unparalleled, unheard in India’s history so a lot of laws have been scrapped. It has tried to make India easy and simple for the private sector to do business. For instance, the number of forms for import and exports was 11 and 9 which has been brought down to a mere 3. You can register a company in one day today. You can register startup in just about an hour and MSME in just 5 minutes today. So the entire focus of this government has been to make India easy and simple, cut down paper work,  digitize everything and put everything online. And since most businesses are done in their state, the government’s view is that states become easy and simple and therefore we initiated the competition among states. We ranked states, we said we will name and shame states.States were ranked, a year before Gujarat came number one. But last year in the ease of doing business Gujarat was dethroned and Telangana and Andhra became number one. But the good part was that Jharkhand and Chattisgarh moved up. And they have done a lot of reforms. So similarly my view is that the government must create a huge sense of competition among the states and put it in public domain. And we are doing the same thing in education, in health, in water management from NITI AYOG on outcomes.

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Shashi Tharoor speaks on India’s SoftPower

shashi tharoor speaking on India's Soft Power

shashi tharoor speaking on India’s Soft Power

Mr Shashi Tharoor, Member of Parliament, Lok Sabha and Chairman, Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs speaks on India’s SoftPower at AIMA’s 3rd National Leadership Conclave 2017.

Good morning to all of you here.  I can take a little bit of credit for having brought this issue (Soft Power) into the Indian context. In fact I was in the States and a fairly good friend of Joseph Nye, so I asked him do you mind if I try and apply your theories to India and he didn’t mind at all and so about 15 years ago I wrote a piece about India’s soft power and sent it to him and said what do you think and he was totally supportive and ever since I have sort of gone on a bit of a crusade in this country both before returning to it full time and then subsequently after my return to India delivering multiple lectures and it finally had the effect that the phrase ‘soft power’ entered into our lexicon and the ultimate gratification came when the Prime Minister of India, Dr. Manmohan Singh started using this in his speeches.

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Importance of Creativity & Storytelling in a Digital Age – Rishi Jaitly, CEO, Times Global

Mr Rishi Jaitley, CEO – Times Global & Former Twitter India head sharing his top 5 insights on the topic ‘Strategies for a Data Economy’ at AIMA’s 3rd National Leadership Conclave 2017.

Rishi Jaitly at NLC 2017

Rishi Jaitly at NLC 2017

Hi everybody, it’s great to be here and particularly in a conference where we are not just talking about the data economy but I know the theme of the gathering is about Asia more generally and how we ought to be thinking about the next 10 years.

I am going to take a slightly different approach. What I want to talk about is that; we are existing in an economy that is increasingly data driven, where consumers are being asked to engage digitally and I think the question I would ask does it change how we as businesses, as nonprofits, as brands, as leaders interact with consumers and if so, how? And I guess what I’m going to suggest that in a data economy, creativity, storytelling, culture matter even more. So if you’re interested in reaching consumers in a noisy era where they are living on digital increasingly, where personalization is a turnkey service offered by vendors everywhere. I guess what I would poses and what I’m going to run through is the personality of your brand, the extent to which your product thinks about culture, behaves like a human and touches people emotively, emotionally matters even more in that economy. And so I’m going to run through five insights that I think might help guide how you think about going to market in this new world. And all of these issues, by the way, are particularly true in Asia and of course in India where I think consumers are in any case more likely to be moved by what I call culture storytelling and more.

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TV Mohandas Pai talks about ‘Automation’ at 14th HRM Summit

AIMA organized its 14th HRM National Summit on 1st December 2016 at New Delhi. The Summit featured some of the top HR professionals and delegates from Industry, Government, Media, and Academia. Over 250 professionals from across India participated in the Summit.

Below is an excerpt from a very informative speech by Mr. TV Mohandas Pai, Sr. Vice President, AIMA and Chairperson, Manipal Global Education Services at 14th National HRM Summit on the topic ‘Jobs in the Era of Automation’.

Mohandas Pai at AIMA's 14th National HRM Summit

Mohandas Pai at AIMA’s 14th National HRM Summit

” For the last many years AIMA has been holding the HR summit and every time we chose a cutting edge topic, primarily because we believe in the power of ideas. Ideas have moved civilizations, ideas have moved societies, and we believe at AIMA that we must be at the cutting edge with new ideas looking at what is happening in the world and that’s why we’ve chosen this very important topic – Jobs in Era of Automation.

 Automation has been there for a pretty long period of time starting with the invention of the steam engine. Imagine the world before the machine was invented. The world was based upon labor, human muscle, and animal power. And the wealth of a nation depended upon the size of the population. So China and India, were the richest countries and the greatest countries in the world because they had very large population. And in the mid 18th century China-India made up to 45% of the world GDP and there was trade from Europe with the rest of the world. But then a very singular event happened in the Great Britain when the steam engine was invented and suddenly you could use kinetic energy for motive power and create the machine which could do the work of many human beings, particularly where there was heavy use of human or animal power. And it meant that the heavy work and heavy lifting suddenly could be done very differently, it could be repeated, it could be standardized, and that set off a chain of events which changed the face of civilization on the planet.

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Indestructible Brands – D Shivakumar at 2nd National Leadership Conclave

Below is an excerpt from the speech of Mr. D Shivakumar, Chairman and CEO, PepsiCo India Holdings Pvt Ltd at AIMA’s 2nd National Leadership Conclave on the theme “Indestructible Brands: Building Brands to Survive Disruption”.

D Shivakumar at AIMA's 2nd NLC

D Shivakumar addressing AIMA’s 2nd National Leadership Conclave

A digital society changes the way we live work, relate to brands and to each other. We become far more horizontal in the way we work, end of the chain. It’s not a vertical society anymore. India has for a long been a vertical society. Hierarchy somebody orders somebody to do it. And then we follow their order. That’s not true in a digital society. Almost every activity and transaction is horizontal and not vertical. That’s the first point I want to make. The second point I want to make is if you look at the top 10 populations of the world for the last 10 years, Facebook has 1.5 billion subscribers or users and 70% of them come back almost every day. WhatsApp has a billion people. Twitter has 600 million people. Instagram has 400 million people. Now we are conversing individual to individual, group to group, completely on the social network, completely digital. This is what we are seeing right now. Continue reading

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Indestructible Brands: Building Brands to Survive Disruption

A special session on “Indestructible Brands: Building Brands to Survive Disruption” was held at AIMA’s 2nd National Leadership Conclave (NLC) on 3rd & 4th March 2016 at New Delhi.

Below is an excerpt of the Q & A between Ms Supriya Shrinate, Chief Editor-News at ET NOW and Mr Santosh Desai, Managing Director & CEO of Futurebrands India Ltd, Author, Columnist, Social Commentator.

Santosh Desai at AIMA's 2nd NLC

Santosh Desai addressing AIMA’s 2nd NLC

How has brand building changed in India and why are we so obsessed with disruption?

I think we live in a time where things are changing very fast and we have said this for a few decades now. You know there is a sense that things are changing but in the last seven or eight years, in particular, it’s not just the pace of change, It’s as if our foundational assumptions, the way we see the world itself has changed. And I think this creates a very interesting challenge at this particular point in time. I found the subject interesting, ‘indestructible brands: building brands to survive disruption’. Implicit in this articulation, It’s curious because there are certain assumptions that are built into this. It says building brands to survive disruption, not to create disruption. Brands are implicitly imagined as some sort of citadels, fortresses which do not create the new but which somehow must survive the new, which are not found in the source of change but they are under attack from change and they must protect themselves against disruption. This is very interesting. I just find this unconscious mental model of the brands as not being the source of change but being under threat. I also find it interesting that we are yearning for indestructibility. This idea that a brand is a permanent asset that you create once which stays for life and forever and forever, which survives attacks that marauders and invaders make on it and it stands there proud defined over millennia, this is an outdated idea. This yearning, this nostalgia for a permanent notion of a brand, It’s fundamentally at odds with the world that we live in.

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National Leadership Conclave 2015 – Nishant Rao of LinkedIn India

Nishant Rao addressing

Nishant Rao addressing AIMA’s NLC

“Thank you so much for having me here. It’s an honor to be here among such distinguished panelists and an audience like this. I have been in technology for many decades now. I am very passionate about it and I think that it’s changing the way the world works. And I think fundamentally between the internet and social media that’s happening because there is some key ingredient that makes for economic success. Forrester calls this TERA – Trust, Efficiency, Relevance, and Access. Trust is about just being able to tap into the wisdom of the crowd so that you can talk to experts and layman and make an informed decision because you have a lot of information at your fingertips so there is a trust built into that so you are not having a biased opinion. Efficiency comes from just being able to search that and find the information very quickly. Relevance is about just finding the right information and increasingly as platforms are no more about you can actually tailor that content using bunch of fantastic apps come out around that. And then access is obviously about reach.

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‘Making Indian Cities Global Centers of Excellence’ with Vanitha Narayanan, Managing Director, IBM

Excerpt from an insightful speech by Vanitha Narayanan, Managing Director, IBM India on “Making Indian Cities Global Centers of Excellence” at AIMA’s National Leadership Conclave 2015 held on 29th & 30th April 2015 at Hotel Le Meridien, New Delhi.

Vanitha Narayanan, Managing Director, IBM India addressing AIMA's NLC 2015

Vanitha Narayanan, Managing Director, IBM India addressing AIMA’s NLC 2015

“I feel honored and privileged to be on the same panel with Minister Naidu on a topic that has been close to my company’s beliefs and heart for a very long time. We coined the phrase smarter planet almost a decade ago and the smarter cities were a subset of the smarter planet and we didn’t at that point say it was going to be a smart planet, it was going to be a journey, it was going to be a continuous journey because a big part of a smarter planet or a smarter city is a sustainable model. A sustainable model that is ecological, financial, based on physical resources that can rejuvenate and also the human model. So we have talked about it a lot, we have heard about it a lot and I think the need for having a smart or smarter infrastructure is a given.

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