Mangaluru: Leadership an Infectious Disease Society Badly Needs Today – Rajat Shetty

Mangaluru: The Mangalore Chapter of NIPM organized a special session titled “Ready, Aim, Fire – A story of Resilience, Cricket and Humor” by Rajat Shetty, Technology Analyst at Infosys Ltd., Mangaluru at 5:30 pm on Saturday, 22 August at Maria Paiva Cuceiro hall, School of Social Work, Roshni Nilaya, Valencia.

The interaction began with a narration of a plausible explanation (by Devdutt Pattnaik) as to why we have a “Chalta Hai” attitude towards life in this part of the world. It is time we break the shackles of mediocrity and laziness to focus on finding the reason why we are here in this world. Rajat then illustrated that the globe is spherical but the world is flat and that almost every second there is a clash of cultures when we interact with people from different parts of the world and we should be ready to adapt to it.

The first part of the interaction – READY – emphasized the importance of preparing oneself, gathering knowledge and improving one’s skill set. This can only be done if we find the right medium and the right people to interact with, especially when we are living in the ever-expanding Information age. This helps build confidence to communicate and engage which in turn builds a diverse network of highly skilled professionals. All these above points were illustrated with stories from the Mahabharata and Rajat’s own experiences when he participated in the Toastmasters International Prepared Speech and Humorous Speech Contests. He also shared his experience when he met N R Narayana Murthy and Vishal Sikka on two separate occasions.

The second part of the interaction – AIM – dealt with the importance of finding a mentor and the need to grab opportunities as and when they come. He illustrated this with a narration of his life changing experience when he secured the third place in Tycoon 2009 – An All India Leadership Hunt.

The last section of the interaction – FIRE – consisted of two parts, leadership and how success and failure is to be handled. In the leadership section, he explained how the industry was moving away from the “one size fits all” attitude to a collaborative environment where employees are not treated as assets but as partners, individuals and team players. It is the need of the hour for companies to look beyond profitability, spreadsheets and productivity models and move towards giving importance to employee welfare and help build an environment that fosters the culture of training, learning and growth of each individual. A number of times, individuals break down under the pressure of failure. It is in these times that family and teammates come into play. An individual needs to be resilient and must learn to persevere. He needs to go back to the point where he started and repeat the entire cycle of READY, AIM and FIRE. As Randy Pausch so famously said “The brick walls of failure are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something.”

He then shared the traits of a successful leader – one who values a diverse network of individuals, one who thinks beyond the curve, one who knows the reality of today and the unknown possibility of tomorrow, one who knows what needs to be done and how it needs to be done. A leader is one who enables his teammates to pursue their ambitions and goals and in turn transforms them into future leaders. Leadership is an infectious disease that the society badly needs today, a disease that will not only transform the individual but the society and nation on the whole, he added.

The session was attended by hundreds of HR students and professionals. NIPM chapter chairman Sebastin K V, past chairpersons P A Jose, Shekhar Pujari, Secretary Krishna Shetty and Treasurer B M Acharya were also present during the occasion.