Free I Bought The Monk's Ferrari by Ravi Subramanian Page A

referred by them. He was happily married to an ex-colleague of his. All was well between them until the HR manager began his perverse ways. He started having an affair with a girl from the training unit in the same organisation. Soon, his wife learnt of it and walked out on him and she sang like a canary about all his underhand dealings. The HR manager lost his job. Once she got to know, even his girlfriend left him. This is how a wayward personal life, low on integrity impacted a career.
    Therefore, it is very important to maintain the highest degree of integrity. People form opinions about others and these opinions are often difficult to change. It takes only one move to create a negative impression, which stays for life.
    Many a time, when you had to allocate a task at hand to a particular person, you must have felt, 'I won't give it to him, I'm not sure how honest he is.' Probably, you have not even worked with the person in question, but his behaviour drives you to form this opinion. Quite often, ideas are formed about individuals' professional behaviour and capabilities based on their personal etiquettes.
    If you want to acquire the Ferrari, you cannot get to it alone. You need your team to work with you. And, how do you build a team? Do you know why dealing with your teammates with integrity and honesty is important? I was once told by Ajay Bimbhet, a stalwart in the banking industry, who I worked with for a very short period of time, that people work for organisations and people leave because of their supervisors. If you want to be successful, you need to get a great team of colleagues working for you. They will stay with you and work for you, only if they trust you.
    If they get even an iota of doubt on your trustworthiness, you will cease being the boss. And if that happens even once, you will never be able to get that allegiance from your team, and without a cohesive and united team, you will never be able to come up with good performances. Post that, if you still have hopes of a Ferrari, you would have taken the positive thoughts concept as detailed in the previous chapter, to new heights.
     
    COMMANDMENT FOUR
     
    Set and follow the highest standard of integrity in your personal and professional lives. If you are high on integrity, people will respect and value you. The Ferrari when it comes, will stay with you.
     

Ten
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Value Time
     
     
     
    T he erstwhile American President, John F Kennedy once narrated an interesting story about the French Marshal Lyautey:
    The great French Marshall Lyautey once asked his gardener to plant a tree. The gardener objected that the tree was slow growing and would not reach maturity for hundred years. The Marshall replied, "In that case, there is no time to lose; plant it this afternoon!"
    This brings us to the scarcest and the most wasted commodity in this world—TIME. Time is invaluable, be it yours or others. Most people care little about this precious resource, procrastinate and leave everything for the last minute. I read a very interesting statement somewhere, a few days back. It said, 'Had it not been for the eleventh hour, most of the things in the world would be left incomplete'. How true!
     

     
    To get all there is out of living, we must employ
our time wisely, never being in too much of a
hurry to stop and sip life, but never losing our
sense of the enormous value of a minute.
    A NONYMOUS
     

     
    Think as to what would happen if the last minute disappeared from your schedule. Look back to all the activities you did last week and see for yourself. Knock off the final minute from the activities you did the last week. The result is, almost everything is left unfinished, because you left everything for the eleventh hour. The obvious consequence is that your effectiveness suffers.
    I remember a meeting I attended once. It was chaired by the new retail bank head of HSBC, Rajnish Bahl. The meeting was attended by all his direct reports. Rajnish had taken over,