The March issue of Fortune has 28 leaders and gurus from the world of business share ?The Best Advice I ever got?. It has the likes of Peter Drucker, Warren Buffet, Richard Branson, Howard Schultz … the list goes on.

Two that stayed with me:

Excerpt from Meg Whitman, CEO and President of eBay

?Always do the best job you can do at whatever you are assigned, even if you think it?s boring.? Jerry Parkinson, an assistant advertising Manager and my boss at P&G, told me this in 1979. Here I was fresh out of Harvard Business School, and I was assigned to determine how big the hole in the ivory shampoo bottle should be: three-eighths of an inch or one-eighth of an inch. I did research, focus groups..and I would come home at night wondering how I had gone from HBS to this. But I later realised that any job you?re given is an opportunity to prove yourself.?

Vivek Paul, Vice Chairman Wipro

?The second-best piece of advice was something I learned from Jack Welch on one of his trips to India. He was commenting that every time he lands in New York, he imagine that he?s just been appointed chairman and that this is his first day in the role, and the guy before him was a real dud. He said, ?every time, I think, what would I do that was different than the guy before? What big changes would I make?? I took that seriously.?

Try to read the entire article.

From Shashi Tharoor’s most recent book “Bookless in Baghdad”

“To me, books are like the toddy tappers?s hatchet, striking through the rough husk that enshrouds our minds to tap into the exhilaration that ferments within.?

?More than a century ago, Walter Pater wrote of art as ?professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass?. That may be all that reading offers, but it is no modest aspiration.

Surely all book lovers would testify to that!

The following sites will keep you abreast with the business books that keep come out every year, what?s good and the nuggets of wisdom within:

800-CEO-READ

You?ll definitely be on top of what?s happening in the world of business books by reading their thoughtful and well reviewed posts.

Keep up the good work Todd, Jack and the team.

Another site where you can good insights into books in Tom Peters website;

What Tom’s Reading and Interviews with Tom’s Cool Friends

Between the two sites, you?ll come away thinking, ?How on earth am I going to catch up!?

“It Couldn’t Be Done” by Edgar Guest.

Somebody said that it couldn’t be done,
But he with a chuckle replied
That “maybe it couldn’t” but he would be one
Who wouldn’t say no till he’d tried.
So he buckled right in with the trace of a grin
On his face. If he worried he hid it.
He started to sing as he tackled the thing
That couldn’t be done, and he did it.

Go head…, try out the latest idea that is brewing in your head, dreams that have been percolating for some time now!

From the rapid changes in the way business is done to the new skill sets that are being required, never before has so much been asked from us as individuals, as employees, as entrepreneurs, as parents and as teachers. Familiar boundaries are vanishing; new ones are being drawn only to be erased before we have understood what they mean!

While we know and understand conceptually the need to embrace change, to come up with radical solutions and think out of the box, how often do we do it? Does our way of thinking constrain and bind us in fixed ways and patterns? Is there any person who has not faced “This is how we do things around here” and more often than not accepted it?

Read more here

I was reading Subroto Bagchi?s Co-Founder and CEO of Mindtree Consulting article on the bosses who influenced him in last month?s issue of Business World.

Some lessons from the article that stayed with me:

Incidentally,Mindtree?s logo was designed by Chetan K S, a student of the Spastics Society of Karnataka, India who has motor and speech disability.

To read it in Subroto Bagchi?s own words, read Making of MindTree - I Page 25

Have you had a boss you has been an inspiring force in your career?

Do write in through the Contact Us and I would be happy to compile it and make it available in a later posting

• Deepa