What makes a leader!

Here's interesting Harvard business review article that I came across today:

This article provides indepth analysis about the characteristics of a leader such as emotional intelligence and how they differentiate him from the rest of the crowd.
The article primarily assumes that while leadership certainly requires a "certain threshold" of analytical and technical skills, its the soft skills associated with leadership, defined as emo. intell. that typically distinguish oustanding performers from those who are merely adequate. The article furthers its talk about emotional intelligence which can be classified as a combination of different components such as such as self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skill ( which is interestingly defines as friendliness with purpose ). Overall, the article seems like a potential read for all the business school aspirants and future leaders!

North Carolina Visit!

The past two weekends have been busy as I was out of town travelling.

May 1st - I  flew down to beautiful North Carolina. As one of my friends is getting married soon, a few of us thought its time for some 'Bachelor fun'. Well, it was a fun weekend indeed. We crashed at my buddy's new place in Raleigh, NC on Thursday night, partied somewhere near Raleigh Downtown, drove to the beach ( yeah! a beach for real...not lake Michigan : )  ) in Wilmington, NC, spend a pleasant evening there and drove back on Sunday evening.  
My return flight was on monday morning and as usual, the lazy a*#$ that yours truly is, I missed 6:40 AM flight by like 5 minutes by waking up late. I ended up paying $75 to confirm a seat in the next flight so that I could get back to work directly from the airport. Since my pickup-buddy would be in office by the time I arrived in Chicago, I was contemplating on whether to hire a taxi ( which can get expensive and add to my already turning-out-to-be-expensive trip! ) or wait for my buddy to pick me up during his lunch time.

Incidentally, my co-passenger who happened to be a Indian guy ( lets call him Desai for ease ) doing his monthly visit to his chicago office, offered me a ride to my office as 'it is on the way to my office so come-na, I will drop you beta! :) '. As it has become a sort of a habit these days, I started blabbering about my mba plans and what are some of my career plans post business school. Desai gave me some totally unexpected career counselling which was a bit interesting. He talked about one of his old acquaintances  who was completely broke and how he started working in a Subway to pay his bills initially and later started his own 'calling cards' company and became highly successful. He talked about one of this other friends who was an engineer by profession but who quit his job and got into running a Subway and ended up running 8 of them simultaneously.
Mr. Desai suggested that I should start thinking in the lines of owning my own business someday and only then, the prospects of making it big would really start to unfold. Though I was a bit skeptical about his story in the beginning I did realized that this guy has a point. The conversation ended just as it started as he dropped me at my office and bid adios. ( I did manage to get his email/phone though! ). Apart from giving me a free ride,  I have to say he did wakeup the budding entrepeneur in me!!