Welcome to Shortlist Your Employer: Acquire Soft Skills to Achieve Your Career and Leadership Success to Excel as a CEO. This book emphasizes the importance of soft skills to enhance your employability to achieve your career and leadership effectiveness.

Writing a book is never a solo project. I am immensely grateful to many people whose expertise, wisdom, and encouragement kept me going. My wife’s and children’s (Ganesh Sai and Ramakrishna Sayee) encouragement and sacrifice made this book possible, and for that I am forever thankful. My wife, Padmavathy is a symbol of sacrifice and support for my books, and also is an immeasurable blessing in my life.

This document contains Contents.

During my leadership development training programs in companies some executives asked me how to fasttrack their careers to grow as CEOs. Some of them raised questions on soft and hard skills. And many of them do not know what really the soft and hard skills are! I thought there is an urgent need to author a book highlighting the significance of soft skills to fast-track career to grow as CEOs. Since I earned my Ph.D. in soft skills and provide soft skills training to companies, I authored this book.

People often ask me how I have achieved my success in most of my training and teaching programs. Most high achievers respond with passion, hard work, and smart work etc.

Most students who pass out from educational institutions encounter the major challenge of unemployability rather than unemployment. They are not adequately equipped with employability skills which are also known as graduate attributes globally.

Once I was invited to inspire engineering students who were selected by a prestigious Information Technology company in India. I shared with them some corporate challenges and enlightened them the following timeless tools to fast-track their career:

Soft skills are different from hard skills. It is a new discipline catching up globally as companies realized its importance to improve interpersonal relations to enhance bottom lines. The term, soft skills were referred with different names in the past, and are often mistaken for emotional intelligence, interpersonal skills, communication skills and behavioral skills. In fact, soft skills are all about your personality, attitude and behavior. Soft skills are the way you put across the things in a positive, polite, pleasing and polished manner.

I read Bruce Rosenstein’s authored book Create Your Future the Peter Drucker Way: Developing and Applying a Forward-Focused Mindset which highlights about creating future. The book underscores Peter Drucker, the father of modern management who successfully predicated future and coined several management concepts including management by objectives and knowledge workers. He balanced both profit and nonprofit during his lifetime. He was a great example who balanced his personal, professional and social life to provide meaning to his life and make a difference to the world.

Do you want to shortlist your prospective employer or do you want the prospective employers to shortlist you? If you want to shortlist your employer you must build your career capital clearly and consistently. There is a huge demand for the right talent in the corporate world. Unfortunately, the corporate world is unable to identify the right talent to grow from good to great. To get spotted with talent, you must know what is all about career capital.

Students can choose lots of careers to grow professionally. Unfortunately, they are not aware of some careers that are highly lucrative with exciting opportunities. Most of them opt for conventional careers to play safe and grow conventionally. However, there are a few students who opt for unconventional careers and achieve amazing career success in their lives. It all depends on the awareness of various careers and right guidance at the right time.

It is a great opportunity if I were made as a CEO for a day. In fact, I can unlock my potential and prove my capacity to create a better organization. There are many people in the world who don’t know their passion and don’t know how to reach the position of CEO. Hence, I consider it a great opportunity to bring the revolutionary changes through innovative leadership methods, if I were CEO for a day.

Most chief executives lead from the front based on their past experiences, observation and learning. But rarely do they avail opportunities to learn from executive coaches who are specialists in executive coaching. They don’t realize their blind spots but lead their organizations just because they were successful in the past and were appointed as chief executives. Does it work for them? Does it enhance their leadership effectiveness?

Research shows that in the United States, women represent more than 50 percent of leadership roles in nonprofit organizations, but this number diminishes to a mere 3 percent when looking at Fortune 500 CEO positions. And Mexico has the lowest percentage (1%) of women CEOs followed by Hong Kong and India, both with 2%. In contrast, the countries with the highest percentage of women CEOs are China and the Philippines, both with 7%. It is obvious from these research findings that there is a gender gap prevailing in organizations globally and it is more in Indian companies where the female CEOs are a few in percentage.

When Satya Nadella became the CEO of Microsoft, the global media started to eulogize Indian CEOs, and a number of articles have featured in prestigious international magazines and newspapers to analyze the reasons for Indians’ excelling as CEOs in America and other European countries. Especially Indian media was over the moon over Satya’s international elevation. Apart from Satya Nadella who has become the most powerful Indian-born tech executive in the world, there are other Indians who are doing a great job globally. The list includes1 Indra Nooyi, CEO of PepsiCo Inc., Anshu Jain, Co-CEO of Deutsche Bank AG and Ajay Banga, CEO of MasterCard Inc, Shantanu Narayen, CEO of Adobe Systems, Nikesh Arora, chief business officer at Google Inc., Ajay Waghray, chief information officer of Verizon Enterprise Solutions, Ajit Jain at Berkshire Hathaway Inc., Harmit Singh at Levi Strauss & Co. and Padmasree Warrior at Cisco Systems Inc.

This book contains interviews of CEOs and thought leaders from male and female leaders and from civilian and military leaders. It explores the real-life experiences of a wide variety of leaders from different industries, sectors, and countries to bring to light new lessons on the importance of life-long learning. Consisting primarily of a series of probing interviews with 31 senior and high-profile leaders, Good Leaders Learn: Lessons from Lifetimes of Leadership pulls important and useful perspectives into a robust theoretical framework that includes the importance of innate curiosity, challenging oneself, risk-taking, and other key elements of good leadership.

I am excited to share with you that I regularly get many enquiries across the world for resolving their problems. At times, organizations approach me for solutions to their problems. Usually institutions and individuals approach me through search engines like Google and my social media network for my ideas and insights.

We all make decisions in our daily lives. But how to go about them is a major challenge. It is true that all decisions cannot deliver fruitful results as we make decisions based on the present position, available information, and on our head, heart and gut.

In the month of March 2014, I received an invitation to attend an international conference on strategy and innovation. I checked my calendar whether I was free. I did not have any training program. I decided to attend the conference for a change to understand the latest developments. I also thought of my followers who are regularly in contact with me through social media who were mostly engineering students.

The words ‘Satyamev Jayate’ were taken from Mundaka Upanishad and its meaning in English is ‘truth alone triumphs’. Hence, in this chapter, I will write about the social evils in India without any fear or favor. First, let me share with you that I have interviewed some people to find out the present social evils in India. They have listed out lots of evils but the top three on priority are— corruption, poverty and gender discrimination. Most women responded that gender discrimination was the main issue and they felt that atrocities on women are rising alarmingly.

Indian students are highly ambitious and hard working. They want to achieve success quickly. They have access to internet and are able to acquire knowledge the way the faculty acquires. They are in a position to compete with faculty. It is a very big challenge for ordinary faculty. For extraordinary faculty, it is an opportunity to do intensive research in their areas to add value to themselves and also to students to earn respect.

I receive lots of requests to include their names in my personal Facebook account. I look at the profile of the person and also any common connections I have with that person to ensure safety of my account. Once I received a request for inclusion from an unknown woman into my Facebook account. I checked her profile who is connected with my friend - an international celebrity from America. And then I accepted her request. The moment I accepted the request she thanked as she was available online. She informed me that she had seen my international profile and sent her request me to add her name.

In April 2014, I conducted a workshop on ‘Ethics in Public Life’. It was an interactive session where participants posed lots of questions at the end of the workshop. I would like to highlight a few questions with answers as some of you may have similar questions on your mind:

I have a good friend of mine who is an acclaimed American author and an international speaker. We have friendship for the last eight years and we value our relations profoundly. He endorsed some of my authored books and wrote foreword for one of my 30 leadership books. We regularly exchange our knowledge over e-mails. In one of his e-mails, he mentioned that in America, relations are valued on reciprocal response. His viewpoint was thought provoking and I decided to explore it to enlighten my readers.