“The New Leader’s 100-day Action Plan”

This book describes itself as a way to take charge, build your team and to get results. I used this book to ease into a new job I’ve just started, I have been here for a month now. I am using this book everyday like a guide, and I am a seasoned Leader, so a leadership role is not necessarily new to me. But this book, along with it’s helpful templates is helping me in getting to the logic behind the “gut”.

I have always worked instinctively towards my goals, acquiring skills required to perform at the next level through insight and through watching how other people perform their jobs. This book is helping me explore the logic behind the instinct, and helping refine the way I react to situations in a new environment.

I recommend it highly – I am seeing positive preliminary indications and I will share the results with you once the 100 days are done.

For those of you who are interested in buying it, the book’s name is “The New Leader’s 100-Day Action Plan: How to Take Charge, Build Your Team, and Get Immediate Results” by George B. Bradt, Jayme A. Check and Jorge E. Pedraza. Check it out. 

“Trust Me” – A novel by Rajashree

This novel is a story about Paro, a girl who moves to big, bad, Bombay to become a set designer of some sort. Oh forget it, there is no story. This is a really ridiculous book, and I cannot believe Chetan Bhagath, Kundan Shah, Javed Akhtar, Soha Ali Khan and other such eminent people have endorsed it.

The characters are too superficial. Rajashree would like us to believe that her heroine, Paro, is a straight-laced girl with middle-class sensibilities but she smokes, drinks, parties, spews out the “F” word in every sentence; and has two boyfriends and an abortion in about a years’ span. Sorry, but as a legitimate, straight-laced girl with middle-class sensibilities, I object. I object to this characterization.

There is not one single thing I like about this book, and this is such a low. I had picked up this book, hoping that since it was written by an Indian woman, and about an Indian woman, I’d be able to relate to it. Instead, it is a smutty book about a slutty girl, masquerading as a humorous book. What repartee? What humour? I read the whole book waiting for the witticism to start, but did not find it.

Why can’t there be a book about the trials and tribulation of a normal Indian girl? Heartache is no less acute if the one affected does not engage in drinking, smoking, swearing and sleeping around.