What a CEO really wants from you

What inspires you to write?
I think for some reason, I enjoy writing. Maybe I was a half-baked editor of the college magazine. But most importantly I think writing has helped me to be more precise on two counts - first to be thorough about a particular matter because it goes and sits in your memory and, second, it helps you to be precise and not ramble.

So in the interest of memorability, precision and enjoyment, I was inspired to get into writing.

Did you see your third book, What a CEO really wants, as a continuing pattern of your previous two books?
There is a pattern. It is not a very well thought of pattern. I have to say I didn't sort of think of it in advance and plan it. But when I look back, like with life in many things, it fits into a nice pattern.

The first book, The case of the Bonsai manager, came out of a question that was bothering me: 'why do successful people come to the top and then wobble and get fired?'. And that caused me to enquire into that subject. I came to the view that it's because they become so analytical in the course of their rise. But when you reach a very senior level, analysis gives you that much and no more.

And you have to take decisions intuitively. But if a person says he takes decisions based on intuition alone, then the stock of the company would collapse. He gets caught in that trap and that causes him to make mistakes. That's because he becomes a prisoner of analysis and not a friend. I don't want him to be a slave of intuition, but a friend of intuition.

That's how the first book came to be written. And, because the subject was on the psycho-social field, which is not my natural subject, I was inspired from nature.

Nature has simplicity, which we have messed around with as civilisation progressed. So I took a number of examples from the plant and animal species, from which I drew lessons and that became an interesting book. That caused me to go to my second book. It says why people fail to use their intuition. I came to the view that the leader or manager has not realised who he is, is because self-awareness is low.