An inspiring story to share...

Read about Ashish Goyal : the world’s first visually impaired trader. He is an employee at JP Morgan's London office, has been selected for India's National Award for the Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities, this year. Ashish is the first blind trader to work for a bank and is also the first-ever blind MBA student at The Wharton School in the United States.

As a trader at JPMorganChase in London, Ashish Goyal helps manage billions of dollars of the bank’s exposure to risks like foreign exchange fluctuations. In his spare time, he takes tango lessons, plays cricket and goes clubbing with friends. Mr. Goyal is also blind.

Watching him in the middle of the trading floor as he switches back and forth from computer screens, his blindness is not apparent at all. But to check his e-mail, read research reports and look at presentations, Mr. Goyal uses a screen-reading software whose speed is so high that it sounds like gibberish to the untrained ear. When he needs to read graphs, which the software cannot do, Mr. Goyal goes through the data and tries to imagine the graph in his head.

On his desk, two computer screens show the usual flashing Bloomberg messages and spreadsheets of constantly changing numbers. Two keyboards are linked to headsets through which the information and figures are read out to him at rapid speeds. The same technology reads out text messages he receives on his cellphone.

“My colleagues already complained that they can’t hear my phone speak, as it is too fast,” Mr. Goyal said jokingly. “I turn around and say, ‘Well, I can’t read your text messages, so it’s only fair.’ ”

Tolga Uzuner, executive director of JPMorgan’s chief investment office and Mr. Goyal’s boss, said he hired the 30-year-old Wharton School graduate because he was one of only a few candidates he interviewed who knew about Asian interest rates, had excellent risk management skills and knowledge of foreign exchange.

Vladimir Aleksic, who now works with Mr. Goyal, said, “We walked out of the interview room and just said wow.” Many people on the team analyze historical data and use comparisons to make decisions about risks, Mr. Aleksic said, but “Ashish looks at where things are now and just follows the news flow. He’s not blinded by the graphs.”

But as someone who can make out only light and shadows, Mr. Goyal also knows his limits. “I told people, ‘You can put me on the spot trading desk, but I’d be too slow,’ ” he said. “The challenges are to realize where I can add value and where I don’t. You need to find your niche.”

Mr. Goyal says he always wanted to work in financial markets. But despite a résumé that includes a top business degree from a university in India, another from the Wharton at the University of Pennsylvania and a three-year stint at an Indian subsidiary of ING bank, finding people who would hire him was not easy.

After earning his first business degree, Mr. Goyal said he had made the short list of candidates for jobs at several firms, but once they realized he was blind he was turned away. When it was ING’s turn, Mr. Goyal recalled, he was so frustrated that he just blurted: “I’m blind. Do you still want to talk to me or not?” “They asked whether I could do the job. I said I think I can, and I was hired,” Mr. Goyal said.

Years later, when he applied to Wharton with the goal of getting a job in New York or London, Mr. Goyal said, the university’s director of admissions signed off on his application with the words: “I have never seen a blind trader on Wall Street. I can’t guarantee you’ll get a job but you’ll definitely be better off with a Wharton degree.” Still, even after Wharton, many Wall Street firms rejected his applications because they could not find anybody else on Wall Street using the same screen-reading software. JPMorgan was the only bank to offer him a summer internship, which led to an offer of a permanent position.

Mr. Goyal was not born blind. Growing up in Mumbai, Mr. Goyal said he had a normal, happy childhood. But when he was about nine years old, he noticed that he could not immediately recognize some people and could not see the lines in his notebooks at school. One night he walked into a ditch, later he crashed his bicycle, and then he started to miss the ball during his tennis lessons.

Mr. Goyal was told he had retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic condition that damages the retina, and would gradually become blind. By the time Mr. Goyal was 22, he had completely lost his eyesight.

“The worst thing was I didn’t know what was happening and what to do about it,” Mr. Goyal said. While other people his age were starting to date, he said, “I was struggling to deal with a disability. What was I to tell people? ‘Sometimes I can see you, sometimes not?’ ”

The loss of his eyesight left Mr. Goyal “scared and confused” and with fewer friends, he said. “I was ready to just give up and not take my final exam and just go and work for my dad,” a real estate developer, Mr. Goyal said. But his mother forced him to sit for the exam, and to his surprise he not only passed but received good grades.

Today, Mr. Goyal said he was proud that he did not need help from others on a daily basis and he had again become active in sports, as he was as a child. Last year, his team won a cricket tournament for the blind, which is played with a slightly bigger ball that has sound.

Despite his achievements, which this year also included a national award from India for the Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities, Mr. Goyal speaks modestly of himself. “One challenge is that I don’t become a benchmark for other people,” he said. “I’ve done all these things but yes, it’s been a struggle. Not everyone is as fortunate to have the support of friends and family and it wouldn’t be fair. I’m mediocre at many things.”

Andrew Testa for The New York Times

An interesting webinar I signed up for recently... "The 2020 Workplace" with Karie Willyerd

The 2020 Workplace with Karie Willyerd
Three major shifts will affect the workplace of the future: globalization, changing demographics, and social technologies.

Millennials, those people born after 1979, will bring new expectations to the workplace, and they will dominate the US workplace in less than four years.

What are companies doing now to attract, develop, and keep tomorrow's employees today?

Learn some practical tips to prepare for the changes ahead from Karie Willyerd

I happened to chance upon this and think its really powerful and something that each one of us needs to put in to practice. I've learnt a lot from Sharad, in the time that I worked with him at Veritas and in the years since then too.

He has been an inspiring teacher and an empowering leader and I follow his tweets and blog regularly as it always leads me to interesting reading material...

Read on...

7 rules for personal conduct
Sharad Sharma

>> Give more than what you take

>> Set up people for success

>> Say what you mean. Do what you say

>> Build diversity in your team

>> Share the good news and the bad news

>> Cultivate a learning mindset

>> Cultivate an internal drive for excellence


Excerpt from a talk delivered by Sharad Sharma at the Bangalore Open Coffee Club's meeting @ Jaaga, Mar 21st, 2010 [ http://twitter.com/sharads ]

Something I read today... [ and could relate to instantly! ]

An article written by Indu Balachandran, Creative Director of JWT Chennai.


Life of a "servicing" executive!!

If you’ve ever been to a circus, you’d have seen a scary item in the program where a man goes up to a fierce lion, which roars and shows its teeth. The next thing you know, the man has put his head right into the lion’s mouth! And yet he manages to come out alive. What’s more, he does it again the next day, and the next… till he dies, not as lion feed, but of old age, many years later.

Another species of humans that does such a brave act for a living is the client servicing person in an agency.

Sometimes the mouth is that of his client, a wild, fierce animal. Sometimes the mouth is that of the creative director, another wild, snarling beast. But despite these people constantly trying to chew off his head, he lives on, mostly because of a healthy diet of many, many management bestsellers on survival, bought and consumed at airport bookstalls.

Client servicing people are also called “account executives”, and their parents often wish that their child had indeed joined a circus as a lion tamer, as they’d have a more definite idea about what he does for a living.

Admittedly, no parent is really happy about saying, “Our son, who studied words like incendiary, anodyne and preponderant from the MBA word list in preparation for the CAT exam, is now, after equipping himself with an expensive MBA degree from a leading management school, in the servicing department of an ad agency.”

Somehow, “servicing” gives the impression that their beloved, learned son is now overhauling cars in a garage down the road.

So, account executive is the more respectable label. But of course, even after explaining it 2,783 times to one’s parents, they can never understand that “accounts” stand for client’s brands, and not a pile of ledgers that must be balanced before nightfall.

Well, the main reason why agencies employ servicing people is to help grow business, the dress code for which is a suit. What they do grow, at a faster rate than they grow business, is ulcers. But then, they also keep an entire parallel industry thriving – pills, potions, medications, mantras… and other stress busting activities that this ulcer-ridden profession has helped grow.

However, the real purpose for which God created servicing people is that they too can leave their mark in advertising history by writing something called “the brief”.

This is the starting point of every great piece of advertising in the agency. After collecting tonnes of research reports and market figures, and chewing over sales targets, competitive findings, target audience demographics and psychographics (all of which can be swallowed only with three pints of beer), the servicing person has the important task of putting all this enormous information into a pithy, tight, smartly worded, one page brief for the creative team.

This sensational, Reader’s Digest style condensed, one pager makes such inspiring reading, clearly laying out a sparkling, incisive, single minded, dead right strategy (that often in itself deserves an award, for the award-winning ad that matches it), that agencies, in order to get it bang on right, usually write the brief after the campaign has been created.

Which is completely justified, when you think of it, for looking at a servicing person’s day, where is the time to write a brief??

A life in the day of a servicing person

A client servicing person’s day often begins with a wake-up call from – you guessed it – the client himself, who, even before the poor servicing chap has inserted toothbrush into mouth, calls to ask about a missed insertion in that morning’s paper.

“WHERE is my ad for LifeSaver Rejuvenator?? You SAID it would appear in this morning’s paper!!” will holler the client.

The groggy servicing person will open his own copy of the newspaper, holding the phone between ear and shoulder, and say, “But it IS here. Page 4. Right below three obituaries…”

Mad Client: “WHAT!! You put my launch ad for LifeSaver on this page?! What happened to front page solus??”

Quick-thinking servicing person: “But don’t you see? We’ve done some innovative positioning for your ad here. Your LifeSaver ad has more impact now in the context of the obituaries…”

Client: “Hmmmm, er, I guess so. Hey thanks! You just saved my life…”

And the relieved servicing person gets past another blunder created entirely by somebody else, and happily begins brushing his teeth.

After charging off to the printer’s to re-check last night’s redone colour corrections for a poster (since the art director never wakes up till 10 am), and stopping by at his aunt’s to pick up six cookery books when she’s not looking (the copywriter has to compile a cheese recipe promotional booklet, but has no idea where one can find recipe books, poor thing), and charging to the bazaar to buy 12 multicoloured kites (the creative director has a shoot today and he needs a kite as a prop, but has no idea where to get the things), and running to a store to buy a dozen red roses (the client mentioned that his wife had finally got her driving licence and hinted that it would be cool to be congratulated by the agency), and zooming into a store to buy a set of bath towels (his Mom arrives tonight to visit his bachelor digs and would faint if she discovered that he uses bed sheets to wipe himself), our dashing servicing man dashes into the conference room for the Monday morning meeting – a ritual for all servicing people – with the manager.

And then you will understand why he slogged to get his MBA degree from that top management school before landing this job, because this is how the meeting will go:

Manager: “There’s a billing shortfall of Rs 2.37 crore on your brand. What do you propose to do about it?”

An ordinary client servicing person might have replied: “Donate my legs to medical science, swallow two packets of Tik-20 cockroach killer, and never regain consciousness…”

But an MBA would reply: “No problem. We’ve proactively generated below the line market activity that will interdict the descendancy, parallelly prorogating competitive denigration with stonewalling tactics that I’ve already apprised our client of and we’ll be presenting creative work for all this, this afternoon…”

And then off he goes to wrestle for time on the Mac in the digital studio to personally complete the leaf motif on the label design for a cough remedy (to ask the art director to do so would take three more days, and what did he learn time management for, if not for this?), and while the file is opening up on the computer, writing an ad for a free tongue-cleaner with every deodorant (to ask the copywiter to do the headline would mean she’d stop that other job for the recipe booklet, and what did he learn work management for, if not for this?).

In between, he will rush up three floors twice to cajole/threaten the media guys for a make-good free release of his client’s ad, which appeared yesterday, but without any telephone number (the ad said Free Ice Creams To All Those Who Call This Number Today!), and after stopping by to fix an appointment with the dentist who has to whiten the teeth of the pretty model for tomorrow’s toothpaste shoot, our young hero will be off to the exhibition grounds in the outskirts of town where his client has a stall, and be right on time to catch the awning that collapses under last night’s rain.

And it’s still 11.30 am of the first day of the week.


(Indu Balachandran is a travel writer and also runs creative workshops in advertising and creative writing. She secretly adores all client servicing people and has a few names she’d like to recommend for the next Param Vir Chakra awards.)

Make a vow to make a difference, not just on Women's Day!

Here's wishing all the wonderful, strong, determined, inspiring, fun, spirited, generous and spunky women I know a memorable Women's Day!

Share your strength and spread the cheer...

There are days when you smile and make everyone around you happy...

There are days when you can't smile and yet you smile through your tears...

Then there are those days when you muster up all your courage and strength and be brave for everyone else around you...

Your strength, your spirit and your vision are an inspiration.

Your ability to achieve success and accept defeat, your ability to change things that don't work, and move on when you can't

Your innovative strength to make the most out of whatever little you have is a lesson for many...

Your will to go on and on, when all you're aching for is a hug, a chance to rest your feet and take it easy...

On some days you are a girl, then on other days you are a mom, a daughter, a wife, a girlfriend, a boss, a team member, a daughter-in-law, a teacher, and yourself, all rolled in to one!

To all the women I know who personify this and more, I salute you!

Go on, make a difference! Make every day count!

~ anuja