Asia Pacific organisations are having difficulty in executing leadership development strategies as the infrastructure (processes, people, and technology), necessary to truly develop leaders, are not aligned, finds a survey.

Leadership in Asia Pacific

Business Standard

Despite lying on the desk with its cumbersome charging gear attached, a colleague walking by took one glance and declared the Nikon Cool Pix S800c &ldquo;sexy&rdquo;. Undoubtedly, it is. The sleek and almost slippery white body, with silver detailing, appears more of a communication device (it partly is) than the world&rsquo;s &mdash; and Nikon&rsquo;s &mdash; first Android-powered point-and-shoot camera.

Three candid snapshots

Twitter itself is a triumph of pivoting. The business, which in 2011 was valued at more than $5 bn, started life as the offshoot of a web start-up called Odeo. The original plan of Odeo&rsquo;s founders had been to create a platform on the internet for people to create podcasts. The trouble was that Apple then decided to add a podcasting platform to its wildly successful iTunes music download service. It looked like game over for Odeo.

Write your own rules

I can&rsquo;t speak for other leaders, but I do know that my own past greatly influences my own leadership. I never went to business school, so I don&rsquo;t have the formal education that many people running large companies have.

Like parents, leaders make tough choices: Howard Schultz

You are only as good as your last job. Doing Honda&rsquo;s first corporate film in India was a mammoth task and I remember praying to god for his able guidance. As we geared up to do the job, I instantly recalled my trip to Honda Collection Hall in Tokyo three years ago. The sprawling museum showcases the legacy of Honda with all its iconic bikes and cars. The experience will stay fresh in my memory. Creating this campaign was like giving a peek to the audience into the brand&rsquo;s vision statement. You don&rsquo;t get to do something like this very often.

'The journey from surname to name'

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ISBN

The top 10 business bestsellers

    This person was a college dropout with big ideas about products that would reshape human behaviour. From that unyielding vision and the force of his personality, he took a garage startup to the heights of industry, creating products that defined new markets and became part of the vernacular.

The Strategist Quiz (#278)

The quest for making a motorcycle look completely different from other mass-produced machines has made many international custom builders like Arlen Ness, Orange Country Choppers, Roland Sands and Exile Cycles household names globally. So much so that avid motorcyclists can identify their individual styling cues by just looking at the bike.

Few in a million

Like its dozen-odd peers, Tata Motors may be struggling to sell cars, but the company has served an ace &mdash; quite literally &ndash; in another segment. The Tata Ace, India&rsquo;s first mini-truck, has done what no four-wheeler in India has been able to achieve so far &ndash; its sales have crossed a million in exactly seven years and three months.

Tata serves an Ace 

The grey building on Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg, New Delhi&rsquo;s Fleet Street, is built like a cuboid. The small parking lot in front is cramped with cars and bikes throughout the day. There is a Metro station coming up across the road. The broad staircase leads to a lobby. At its end, there is a giant-sized black-and-white photograph of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India.

Paper trail

A long time ago, when Karti Chidambaram was eight or nine, his father P Chidambaram, already a lawyer with a flourishing practice in Madras, moved his office out of his home to a building down the road. Telephones worked only sporadically and frequently clients landed up at home only to find he wasn&rsquo;t there.

The other Chidambaram

Journalist and chartered accountant, Swaminathan Gurumurthy has never been one to shy away from speaking his mind, especially if it concerns the dubious shenanigans of corporate houses and politicians. Which is what makes his coming out in favour of Nitin Gadkari, the BJP president, so mystifying.

Gave Gadkari a clean chit

I have never been to Istanbul, but by all accounts it is among the liveliest places on earth. It thrives even in the busted teens of this century, as if the youthful Istanbullus thronging its many vibrant cafes along the Bosporus were thumbing their noses at the broke Europeans who have gone to great lengths to keep them out for a decade or longer.

Master of melancholy 

A young British woman of Indian origin, a journalist with a flair for words and an eye for the human story, decides to travel around the land of her ancestors, to discover the &ldquo;truth&rdquo; about the country she had lived in briefly &mdash; and vehemently hated &mdash; as a child. And what better way to do it than to travel on Indian trains? She has another brainwave &mdash; why not do it in &ldquo;80&rdquo; trains, the number and the scheme taken from Jules Verne&rsquo;s Around the World in 80 Days? After all, as she finds out on re-reading the Verne classic, the action in that novel had been kicked off by a newspaper report about the launch of a railway line between Rothal and Allahabad, cutting down the time taken to circumnavigate the globe. Monisha Rajesh&rsquo;s Around India in 80 Trains is the fruit of that expedition-adventure.

Trains of thought

Malini Bhupta checks out Serafina, the Mumbai branch of the well-known restaurant in New York, and comes away charmed by the delicate flavours of north Italian cuisine.

Flavours of Italy

My Life My Style: Abhishek Bachchan

Of all the things the average Indian buyer has in mind before making a purchase (any purchase), value for money is paramount. It doesn&rsquo;t matter what end of the economic scale they may be from &mdash; someone who barely makes ends meet will think long and hard before buying one brand of soap over the other, while somebody who has plenty of zeroes in his bank balance will compare the features in two different brands of multi-crore luxury cars before signing on the dotted line.

Vitamin B

The Big Three German manufacturers have all decided to get into the lower end of the luxury market, which can only be a good thing for first-time buyers who can&rsquo;t quite afford a full-sized sedan or SUV, yet want the image that goes with a premium badge.

Think small

Naomi Campbell&rsquo;s party in the &rsquo;hood for her beau may have had a staggering 250 A-listers, but guess who wasn&rsquo;t invited? Peripatetic photographer David Bailey with his wry sense of humour, who&rsquo;d been backpacking &mdash; so to speak &mdash; through the Naga Hills, and was in Delhi for the processing of some of those films, spent considerable time cackling his way through conversations, but was less inclined to pick up his camera and go wandering the streets of the city &mdash; which he&rsquo;d done previously, having completed, last year, a twin set of books on the city for Steidl, called Delhi Dilemma.

Bailey's Indian cream

I am planning to buy a car &mdash; either the Maruti Suzuki Swift or the Hyundai i10. I have a budget of Rs 5 lakh, half of which is in the form of a bank loan. I want to know whether to buy a petrol or a diesel car. I would be using the car thrice a week and not for more than 30 kms at a time.

Ten on ten

Want to buy an old Portuguese-style home in Goa, one of those charmingly quaint mansions painted white, sunny yellow or blue, with tiled roofs held up by wooden rafters and verandahs running all around? They may look sleepy and old-world, but make no mistake &mdash; they&rsquo;re in huge demand among wealthy Indians and foreigners who&rsquo;re ready to pay crores to acquire one.

Heritage homes in Goa

- Find Specials News, Features, Analysis and more at Business Standard. Full coverage of Goafest 2014

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