Top 5 Most Futuristic & Iconic Business Women Making a Difference in 2023
Top 5 Most Futuristic & Iconic Business Women Making a Difference in 2023 Read More »
Dr. Ankoor Dasguupta
Why Even the Best Leaders Seek Out Professional Coaching: 5 Key Reasons Leadership isn’t a destination; it’s an evolving journey that demands self-awareness, adaptability, and strategic foresight. In today’s fast-paced and complex business environment, the best leaders know that continuous improvement is not just an option—it’s a necessity. Even those at the pinnacle of their careers understand the immense value of professional coaching. Which is why I make an attempt to capture few key aspects for the ‘why’ of this. Enhancing Self-Awareness and Emotional Intelligence One of the most compelling reasons leaders hire professional coaches is to gain deeper self-awareness. Understanding one’s strengths, weaknesses, and blind spots is crucial for effective leadership. According to a recent study published by Harvard Business Review, 95% of people believe they are self-aware, but only 10-15% actually are. This gap between perception and reality can lead to ineffective decision-making and strained relationships. A professional coach acts as a mirror, helping leaders see themselves more clearly. Through targeted feedback and reflective exercises, leaders can develop emotional intelligence (EQ), which is directly linked to better team performance, higher employee satisfaction, and improved company culture. Daniel Goleman’s research highlights that EQ accounts for nearly 90% of what sets high performers apart from their peers with similar technical skills and cognitive abilities. Example: Consider the case of a CEO who, despite a successful track record, struggled with retaining top talent. Through coaching, they discovered that their communication style, perceived as abrasive, was the root cause. With increased self-awareness and emotional intelligence, the CEO adapted their approach, resulting in significantly reduced turnover. Navigating Complex Decision-Making Leadership often involves making high-stakes decisions with limited information and tight deadlines. The complexity of these decisions is only increasing as markets globalize and industries evolve. A coach can provide a structured framework for decision-making, ensuring that leaders consider all perspectives and potential outcomes. According to a report by McKinsey & Company, leaders who engage with coaches are 75% more likely to make better decisions. This is because coaches challenge assumptions, help leaders identify cognitive biases, and guide them through a process that balances logic with intuition. Example: A senior executive faced with the decision to enter a new market might struggle with analysis paralysis due to the sheer volume of data and potential risks involved. A coach can help distil the information into actionable insights, enabling the executive to make a confident and informed decision. Driving Sustainable Growth and Innovation In an era where disruption is the norm, leaders must constantly innovate to stay ahead. However, the day-to-day demands of running an organization can stifle creativity and strategic thinking. A professional coach can help leaders carve out time for deep reflection, fostering an environment where innovative ideas can flourish. Observation from the International Coaching Federation (ICF) shows that 86% of companies report a return on investment (ROI) from coaching, with 70% citing improvements in work performance and strategic planning. By working with a coach, leaders can align their vision with actionable strategies, driving sustainable growth and innovation. For instance, the CEO of a tech startup, overwhelmed by operational challenges, found it difficult to focus on long-term strategy. Through coaching, they learned to delegate effectively, freeing up time to explore new technologies and business models. This shift led to the development of a groundbreaking product that positioned the company as an industry leader. Building Resilience in the Face of Adversity Resilience is a critical trait for leaders, especially in today’s volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world. The ability to bounce back from setbacks, learn from failures, and maintain a positive outlook is essential for sustained leadership success. Coaches play a pivotal role in helping leaders build resilience by developing coping strategies, setting realistic goals, and maintaining a balanced perspective. According to a global study by PwC, 76% of leaders who received coaching reported improved resilience, enabling them to navigate crises more effectively. This is particularly important as organizations face unprecedented challenges, from economic downturns to global pandemics. Example: During the COVID-19 pandemic, a CFO had to make tough financial decisions, including layoffs and budget cuts. Coaching provided the support needed to manage the emotional toll of these decisions, while also helping the CFO develop strategies for financial recovery and future growth. Fostering a Culture of Accountability and Excellence Leadership is not just about personal success; it’s about inspiring and empowering others. A coach can help leaders develop the skills needed to build a high-performance culture where accountability, collaboration, and excellence are the norms. This involves setting clear expectations, providing consistent feedback, and creating an environment where employees feel valued and motivated. A 2023 Gallup report found that companies with strong coaching cultures experience 21% higher profitability, 17% higher productivity, and 24% lower turnover. By investing in their own development through coaching, leaders set a powerful example for their teams, driving organizational success. Example: A department head struggling with team performance used coaching to refine their leadership style, focusing on clear communication and constructive feedback. This shift not only improved team morale but also led to a significant increase in project completion rates and overall productivity. At the end of this piece, I’d say even the most accomplished leaders recognize the transformative power of professional coaching. Investing in getting a professional certified coaching is not just about addressing current challenges; it’s about preparing for the future. For leaders aiming to leave a lasting impact, the question isn’t whether to hire a coach—it’s when. –Dr. Ankoor Dasguupta
JADE CELEBRATES 20TH ANNIVERSARY
JADE CELEBRATES 20TH ANNIVERSARY San Jose, California – July 1st, 2023 – Jade has reached an exciting milestone as the company celebrates 20 years of delivering innovative technology-based solutions. Jade’s two decades of services include business application implementations, integrations, software product engineering, cloud services, technology advisory, testing, and managed services. Jade’s presence in San Jose since 2003 and its growth with 400+ customers and over 2,000 plus employees are a testament to its commitment to delivering value to its clients. Jade’s growth continues to provide top-notch IT Services to the global market with domain expertise in various industries, including healthcare, life sciences, high-tech, energy, retail, manufacturing, and the public sector. From a humble upbringing in a family of farmers in Hyderabad, Karan founded Jade Global in 2003 with bootstrap beginnings in Silicon Valley to provide exceptional IT (Information Technology) services to clients. Karan instilled a culture of leveraging the latest technologies to tackle complex business challenges, which has become a cornerstone of Jade Global’s approach. This was the company’s motivation and founding spirit with its original inception. It remains the same today: to deliver innovative technology that enables stellar enterprise experiences from beginning to end. Jade has achieved these goals through its commitment to excellence and customer loyalty. “As we celebrate Jade’s 20th anniversary in 2023, we will continue providing service excellence with our global footprint. Innovation is at the core of our DNA. Under my leadership, the company has grown and achieved significant success, earning a place on the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing private companies in the U.S. for thirteen consecutive years and numerous other awards, including GPTW in US and India, Titan Platinum, and Stevie Gold. I am deeply committed to fostering a learning, development, and innovation culture that places people at the center of everything we do. This approach has been instrumental in building high-performing teams and cultivating strong leaders within my organization. I believe in empowering employees to unlock their full potential and inspiring them to achieve extraordinary things. Congratulations, Jade!” – Karan Yaramada, Jade Global Founder & CEO About Jade Global Jade is a premier Advisory, Integration, Testing, Cloud & Consulting Services, Business Solutions, and IT Outsourcing company that services clients across multiple technology platforms. It is headquartered in San Jose, California, with offices throughout the US, Canada, and India. With more than 2,000 employees, Jade is its clients’ trusted partner.
Prithvi Shergill
Prithvi Shergill- Founder, Advisor, Investor, Researcher, Ideapreneur Kindly brief us about the outset story of your career since the beginning. My professional journey began when I realised that value gets created by combining purpose, people, and proficiency. Experiencing this in local and national leadership positions and international training with student associations such as AIESEC led me to join AT&T in 1990, where I worked in several HR roles across the USA, Philippines, India, and then Singapore which helped me to understand how important it is for HR to be aligned with business objectives and ensure people practices create happiness. My mandate from 2002 was to transform HR service delivery, using technology and shared service models to impact organisational effectiveness and enable effective integration with joint venture companies. In 2004, I joined Accenture, progressing to be a Partner, working closely with internal stakeholders to shape strategy and ensure execution, enhancing the maturity of policies, processes, practices, and platforms impacting leadership, talent, and culture. These served as the foundation of the growth engines for its businesses across technology, consulting, and operations. My assignments in Accenture led me to work on the human capital strategy to ensure the efficiency and effectiveness of business operations, value creation, and people development in various contexts, cultures, and countries. Then I was appointed as Chief Human Resources Officer at HCL Technologies in 2012, where I played a pivotal role in the reset of the talent strategy to re-energise the culture founded on the strategic intent of putting “Employees First, Customers Second”, seeding, nurturing and harvesting Ideapreneurship to multiply profitability and innovation. My experience at HCL Technologies helped shape my experience and expertise on the need for systemic operating models and solutions, combining technology and talent. These experiences at different companies across countries have helped me to develop a distinctive perspective on the opportunities HR and leaders have in engaging, enabling, and empowering people to build their proficiency and performance. After transitioning to be an entrepreneur, I established Tomorrow with colleagues who had shared beliefs in the opportunity to refresh people management by stewarding digital transformation initiatives with an outcome orientation. Tomorrow merged with entomo, where their expertise and experience were codified into a people experience platform that enterprises of tomorrow use to transform performance, talent, and learning. What inspired you to become a business consultant? I have always remained committed to investing in creating capacity, enhancing ability, capturing creativity, and driving change leading to growth. My career as a business consultant allows me to engage with multiple communities across cultures and countries to help companies and people become the best versions of themselves. My intentions, promises, and actions are rooted in the belief that professional consultants should act as trusted advisors to their clients, demonstrating ownership to understand context and shape customized solutions that translate strategy to action. I believe that success requires a deep understanding of the drivers of the client’s business and culture and relationships that truly go beyond the contract. As a successful leader, which three personal qualities do you believe contributed most to your success? I emphasize that the commitment to demonstrate Empathy, apply Adaptability, and build Relationships are three of the most crucial personal qualities that have contributed to my success. By developing Empathy, a leader can connect with stakeholders on a deeper level, understand their pain points, and create a work model that delivers desired results in a culture that is fostered by inclusivity, respect, and collaboration. In today’s fast-paced business environment, change is constant, and leaders must be able to role model Adaptability in changing circumstances, by remaining resilient, agile, and forward-thinking, thereby responding proactively to be future-ready. Finally, I see building transparent Relationships with employees, customers, and stakeholders as essential in inspiring trust, which is the fuel to have people commit to applying their abilities authentically. How do you keep yourself up to date with the latest technology, trends, research, etc. to give up-to-date service to clients? I believe in staying updated with the latest technology, trends, and research, and I achieve this by being curious about things that I do not know, have exposure to, or have experience with. To reach the right decisions, I demand it be evidence-based – and seek data that can be translated into information and insight which inspires the right action. I can often be seen seeking out time with people one-on-one to learn from them, attending industry conferences to learn from audiences I engage with, seeking response and reaction to ideas on online forums, – and seeing “networking” as building a mutually beneficial association. What were some of your biggest technology challenges? I tell that one of the biggest challenges for professionals, including myself, remains co-creating enterprise-wide people enablement technology solutions whose value can be seen in their awareness, adoption, and assimilation to truly augment practices, processes, and policies. The need to appreciate context on what needs to be continued, started, or stopped, given organisational dynamics, often fuelled by cultural differences, language barriers, and different regulatory requirements, is essential. While many technology products profess to be the best in class, the ability to navigate away from the “one-size-fit-all” solution as often is not fit for purpose, to what will make design and deployment distinctive is a collective and individual skill. What have been the toughest obstacles you faced in your career and how did you overcome them? I believe that measuring and managing change is one of the toughest obstacles professionals continue to be faced with. I say that while change is uncomfortable, leaders need to be able to do more than communicate, train people and address employees’ concerns about the change. Investing time and effort to explain the context and build the capability to reset, reimagine and reinvent policies, processes, practices, and platforms is what leads to accelerating from today and changing to be ready for tomorrow. Mention some of the notable recognitions and accreditations received by your organization and person. I have been humbled to have represented
Hayk Shirinyan
Software Development Process – It’s Not Just a One-Man Show Many startup founders have misconceptions about building software.For example, did you know it takes more than a single developer to build software?Just like how it takes an entire construction crew to build a house, creating software, especially from scratch, requires a dedicated team of developers, each with a purpose.It’s not just a single person doing everything, several other professionals work hand-in-hand to deliver a product. The Truth Behind Software Development Many believe that a single software developer is enough to build an app for their business, which isn’t necessarily a lie. It’s not entirely true either. Creating an app, just like every other piece of software, is a complicated process. Is it possible for one person to build an app? Absolutely. Is it time-efficient and economical? Probably not. Using the same analogy: if you wanted to hire someone to build your house, who would you trust more? A single person who says they can do everything? Or, would you go with a generated contractor backed by a crew with different specializations? No offense to the individual who could probably do an excellent job building a house without help but numbers always win. Software development agencies are the general contractors of the software world. If you’re a founder, you should know it takes a team of professionals to create software – not just a single person. The Different Roles in a Software Development Team Software developers Software developers are the backbones of software development. These programmers use their skills to turn code into tangible and interactable products. They can either specialize in front- or back-end operations. In some cases, exceptionally skilled software developers can do both and are called full-stack developers. While software developers are wizards, they’re not business analysts nor do they work on the architecture of the software and its security aspects. Instead, they collaborate with other team members as part of a larger workforce that builds the software. Business analysts Where software developers focus on the code and building the foundations of the software, the business analysts take care of the bigger picture. They translate business requirements into technical features and specifications that explain the pain points and functionalities stakeholders need and want to see in the resulting software. What problem/s does the product want to solve? What else can it solve? Does the leadership know what the product can do and what it can’t do? Are there other software that do the same thing? These are just some of the questions business analysts answer in creating the technical requirements they send to software architects as part of the software development process. Software architects Software architects choose the frameworks and libraries the software developers will use for the project or what features it should have to achieve the results end users want. For example, an architect decides whether the software should have microservices or implement multi-tenancy. In a nutshell, software architects in software development are what building architects are to civil engineers in construction. Delving further, software architects are more than just experienced developers who oversee what software developers are working on. They envision and design a “blueprint” that software developers use and follow, containing detailed steps and instructions for building software. They may occasionally help resolve conflicts when developers have different opinions about certain designs and implementations. In terms of hierarchy, software architects are some of the top decision-makers in software projects. Software architects often work closely together with the lead developers. Lead developers Lead or senior-level developers are the ones who receive the “blueprints” from the software architects and help with the implementation based on the instructions given. When it comes to coding, lead developers spend less time writing code. Instead, they create specialized technical tasks and specific steps to execute the architecture defined by the software architects. Typically, this will involve assigning tasks best suited for a particular software developer. Being able to manage a team, guide struggling developers, help set goals, prioritize tasks, and provide guidance are key qualities for a successful lead developer. The lead developers also review the code written by the junior-level developers and request changes if necessary. If it’s the architect’s job to keep every software developer on the same page, lead developers fill that page with the right stuff. DevOps Engineers DevOps, short for “development operations”, is responsible for bridging communication between the operations team and the software developers. They help set up the hosting environments like Quality Assurance, Staging, and Production while building and deploying the software to the same environments. In addition, the DevOps Engineers are tasked with automating this process by creating CI/CD pipelines. CI/CD stands for Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment. Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment are separate processes, but both go hand-in-hand in software development. In construction, imagine CI as having a dedicated support team for bricklayers. Each team member (developer) works on their section (code branch) and brings it to the central staging area (code repository). This constant cycle guarantees everyone has equal access to the latest materials (codebase). This reduces instances of conflicts later on. On the other hand, Continuous Delivery (CD) is like having a dedicated conveyor belt or elevator at the construction site. This deployment pipeline takes over every time there’s a new batch of bricks, checking for quality (testing) for quality assurance purposes. The same elevator or conveyor belt then approves the bricks (changes) for transport through other testing floors (staging environments) where they’ll go for further evaluation. After clearing everything, the elevator delivers the final version (release candidate) to the working area (production) where it will be used. Using this analogy, we can see that the CI/CD pipeline, and in turn, DevOps engineers, are important. With DevOps engineers overseeing the software development process, developers can automatically push code to certain source control branches, creating a bundle that goes through final approval before it goes live. Project Managers Project managers watch over all the parts of an in-development
