5 Healthy Foods to Order at an Italian Restaurant

5 Healthy Foods to Order at an Italian Restaurant
from Healthy Heart Miracle Diet
Along the Mediterranean shores of Italy, you can find some of the healthiest food and eating habits in the world. Unfortunately, many Italian restaurants forgo their cultural heritage and instead serve up large plates of overcooked noodles drowned in butter, cheese, and cream sauces. Huge slices of pizza groan under the weight of a one-inch-thick coating of mozzarella cheese.

The first hurdle is the overflowing basket of bread the server brings to the table. As you’re being seated, ask that the bread not be brought to your table. Don’t be fooled by the “salad” designation on the antipasto, which is primarily cured meats and fatty cheeses.

And although many Italian restaurants treat pasta as a preliminary course to the main dish, you’ll be better off thinking of it as a main course.

Here are some healthy food choices you can make:

1. Consider Italian soups such as pasta fagioli or minestrone. Full of beans and vegetables, a small bowl of these soups will take the edge off your hunger in a hurry.

2. A Caesar salad is a nice way to start your meal. The anchovies used in the dressing (authentic restaurants will also lay whole fillets on the salad) are one of the best sources of healthy omega-3 fats. That said, you’ll still want to ask for the dressing on the side if only to limit the amount of calories: Some restaurants will drown the romaine.

3. Choose red pasta sauces like the red clam, marinara, and vegetable sauces over white cream sauces. White wine–and garlic-based sauces are also fine if they’re not made with too much butter. Ask how the pasta primavera is made before you order; many restaurants load it up with cream.

4. Look for piccata, cacciatore, and marsala fish, chicken, or beef dishes.

5. Choose seafood that’s been cooked in olive oil or wine broths, not the breaded and fried types.

Twenty Lies You'll Hear on a Job Interview

Twenty Lies You'll Hear on a Job Interview

1. "We Want to Make the Hiring Decision Quickly"
As my husband says, people in hell want ice water. Wanting something and doing it are two different things. Every hiring manager intends to hire someone quickly, but the typical process drags on for weeks. Give this tossed-off remark no credence whatsoever to save yourself weeks of sitting-by-the-phone angst. After the interview, go home and put a few more irons in the fire


2. "You're the First Candidate We're Talking To"
This might be true, or it might be a way of saying "Don’t expect things to move quickly." If you hear this on a job interview, jump in with "So, as you begin this interview process, what is the biggest problem you’re hoping to solve?" Your leverage on a job hunt is your ability to zero in on, and talk knowledgeably about, the dragon(s) the employer is hoping to slay.

3. "We're Going to Hire Someone to Help You, Next Quarter"
Hiring managers often blurt this one out when, halfway through the interview, they realize the opportunity they’re describing equates to three or four full-time jobs rather than just one. They’re embarrassed at the way they’ve laden a poor, not-yet-hired person like you with the work of multiple highly trained professionals, so they say they’re planning to hire you some help down the road. Maybe they will. I wouldn’t bet on it. In the interview, get a bead on the most important problems that need solving—the rest can wait (they’ve most likely waited years to address them already).


.................

Why should I join LinkedIn?

Nice article in Economic Times

When I ask professionals why they aren't on LinkedIn, the most common reply I receive is "I'm not job-hunting". While yes it's a great way to pick up a job, there are several other benefits as well:

Improves your visibility: LI is the Google for professionals who aren't ranked high on Google e.g. if you aren't senior enough to be on your company's website or your industry doesn't make frequent news, people will have trouble finding you on the internet.

Create Impact: In real life it takes 10 seconds to create a great impression, online it's much shorter. A businessperson will Google your name, click on the top 2 results and decide if it's worth reading more about you. LI usually appears on this shortlist, offering a standardised format of your credentials.

Updated Address Book: People change cities/ jobs but rarely send emails informing others. By updating a single page, you can inform your entire network about your move.

Power of the Visual: When meeting a person for business, a quick check of their photograph helps me identify him/her in the group of strangers seated in the conference room.

Small Talk Tool: Assume you're meeting the Director Marketing of a company for business. By visiting his online profile, you know his school, his college, the companies he's worked with, his current role, etc. In short, it prepares you better for the meeting, providing vital information to help strike up a conversation.

I-the-Brand: As you'll show up as a contact on your associates' LI pages, it improves your online brand.

Free Career Insurance: A business network like LI is your insurance for your future career growth, ensuring you appear on the radars of both head-hunters and future employers.

"Relationships Matter": By helping others connect with your contacts and do business, you deepen the bonds with your existing network.

Reconnect: With old colleagues/ classmates and business associates.

Clearly, being in LI is a valuable online networking opportunity. After all, business is not just what you know but also who you know.

(The Writer is a leading Corporate Etiquette and Protocol Consultant)

Eating

If you are in Consulting and are always staying at hotels, you hardly get time to exercise. In such case, you need to resist temptation and avoid foods that are unhealthy. Remember, what is good to taste is bad for the waste.

Generally, clients don't like a unfit consultant. They have an image of a consultant who is fit, polished etc. So, avoid these unhealthy foods if you are in India and these ones if you are out in the west.

Dear MBA Class of 2011

You'll enjoy this. The author was a Management Consultant who underwent a career change- and now works for Mint!

Advice for the worthies undergoing campus placements, delivered in Morgan Freeman-style to soft hip-hop-ish beats


It is that time of the year when business schools all over the country begin to go through the collective voluntary torture that is campus placements. So if you are in business school right now, I guess things are pretty crazy. Chill.

Around this time annually, I usually get a few emails from students seeking advice. Usually it’s career advice— “Should I be doing marketing or banking?”—and sometimes it’s advice on alternatives—“I am convinced I have an exciting book, about non-vegetarian cupcakes, inside me. What should I do?” (My answer to both questions is: “banking”.)

This year I have decided to encapsulate all the advice I have to give, not all of it useful, into one Cubiclenama piece. That way I save you the hassle of writing to me, and I save myself the agony of cutting and pasting the same email to all of you without screwing up the “Dear Babykutty” bit in the beginning.

However, you know how kids are these days. With their short attention spans and their disregard for old-fashioned things. Hence I have decided to make my advice sexy by delivering it roughly to the tune of Baz Luhrman’s popular 1999 single Wear Sunscreen. That song was also targeted at young people and gave them life advice.

But my version is tailored for a mature MBA audience. Imagine it as being delivered by Morgan Freeman to a soft hip-hop-ish background beat.

***

Ladies and gentleman of the MBA class of 2011,

If I could offer you only one tip for the future, a good USB memory stick would be it. The long-term benefits of a USB stick have been proved by the number of times people lose laptops, or are suddenly asked to submit resumes on a plane or at a conference. The rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my meandering work experience.

Enjoy your last few days in business school. Chances are you’ve already cynically dismissed the whole bloody place. But trust me, in five years you’ll attend an alumni reunion and realize that business school was perhaps the last place you were both truly intellectually challenged and emotionally excited. Both will happen again. But rarely together.

You are not as smart, or stupid, as you think. Don’t worry about the future; or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to make investments based on research reports that will, one day, be written by that same clueless idiot sitting next to you in the canteen right now. The real troubles in your life will never be solved by a presentation or spreadsheet, and will always involve other people. And people are unpredictable sons of bitches.

Spend a little time every day doing nothing.

Listen.

Don’t expect organizations to be as committed to you as you are to them. They don’t work that way. If you do find one that is as committed, never leave.

Jog. (Or walk briskly, or cycle, or do yoga.)

Don’t judge yourself by how much money you make. (And no good comes from knowing who this is.)

Record all the feedback you ever get in your career. Especially the inaccurate, pointless, biased and vague bits that drove you nuts. This will help you when you eventually give feedback to somebody yourself.

Keep a copy of all your old resumes. When you are struck by bouts of existential crisis, flip through them in chronological order. Do the same with resignation letters.

Shave.

Not a lot of people are “meant” to do something. They just say that to sell bad books. Salman Rushdie might make an excellent, and content, supply chain management consultant. Who knows? You will find various amounts of meaning and satisfaction in various things. Choose your compromises wisely.

You’ll like the job a little better if you like the dress code.

Take chances when you’re young, single and don’t have loans to repay. You’ll take larger chances. Large chances are more fun than small ones.

Be nice to people for the heck of it.

Maybe you’ll retire when you’re 45, maybe you won’t, maybe you’ll get an Awesome Alumnus Award, maybe you won’t, maybe you will marry your school sweetheart, maybe you won’t. Whatever happens, do not forget those probability lessons they taught you in school. Things tend to even out.

Dance. But keep it classy.

Avoid reading business books. However feel free to write them.

Travel light.

You will most certainly face difficult choices. In most cases it helps to think of what choice maximizes gain, instead of agonizing over what minimizes loss.

Invest in a good suit, pair of shoes and get a shave. Thanks to society’s shallowness, the returns will be considerable.

Calm down.

Let people give you advice. Develop the art of looking interested even if you are not. Pay attention to advice from people who have a stake in your happiness, and not a stake in your success.

Please stop listening to Pink Floyd.

But forget everything else. Quickly go buy that USB stick.

Best of luck.

Cubiclenama takes a fortnightly look atthe pleasures and perils of corporatelife. Your comments are welcome atcubiclenama@livemint.com

The State of Strategy Consulting, 2011

Interesting HBR blog that talks about the state of strategy consulting in 2011.
The author sums it quite well - There is not much of a market for stand-alone strategy any more. McK and BCG are moving down the chain - in places like the UAE and others, they are doing operations projects as pure strategy work. The other interesting point is about consulting firms fighting it out for “whale” engagements that are semi-permanent, year-in, year-out relationships with companies rich enough to pay scores of millions annually for help and advice.

The State of Strategy Consulting, 2011
by Walter Kiechel

Like Satan in the book of Job, I've been going to and fro in the earth over the past few months, in my case talking to corporate executives, consultants, and former consultants. Among my questions to them: How are you thinking about strategy these days? Is the highest of managerial arts — or sciences, if you prefer — dead, as some allege? And what's hot on the corporate rialto by way of consulting work?

Some tentative conclusions:

There is not much of a market for stand-alone strategy studies any more. Or, put another way, trying to base a consulting business on same is a mug's game. The days when you could make a living responding to companies' discovery of strategy, as in "Gosh, we gotta get ourselves one of those," are gone with the 1970s (or maybe the 1990s in the "developing world"). Strategy has triumphed, the installed base is huge, no self-respecting company would be without one.

This poses a dilemma for consulting firms. On the one hand, membership in the top bracket — the lofty heights occupied by the likes of McKinsey & Co. and the Boston Consulting Group — still seems to require a strong strategy credential. Which is why you hear outfits such as Oliver Wyman and Booz Allen & Hamilton advertising themselves on the radio (public, of course) as strategy consultants.

But consultancies clinging too long to a specialization in strategy at the expense of other practice areas now find themselves in trouble. They may have done a swell $2 million strategy study for a client, but then have to watch from the sidelines as a more broadly based firm swoops in to do the $15 million project — a total systems redesign, say, or a corporate reorganization — entailed in implementing the strategy. Marakon, which put value-based management at the core of its strategy concentration, is essentially defunct. Monitor & Co., co-founded by Michael Porter back in the early 1980s, has seen better days.

Meanwhile behemoths such as McKinsey and BCG, to maintain their above-industry-average growth rates and keep their global office networks humming, have broadened what they do and moved down the food chain. McKinsey teams are beavering away in places like the United Arab Emirates and the 'Stans — Turkmenistan, say, or Tajikistan — but they're as likely to be doing operations projects as pure strategy work.

The most intense competition between consulting firms is for "whale" engagements. Undertakings with $20 million price tags such as the post-merger integration of a giant pharmaceutical client and its equally humongous acquisition. Or redesigning a company's entire store system and approach to customers. While BCG or McKinsey will still proudly help a client devise a corporate strategy, in the eyes of many in the industry such projects have become what retailers call "loss leaders" — products you have to offer to get the customer in the door, but not where you make the real money.

Ultimately what the consultancies are competing for are semi-permanent, year-in, year-out relationships with companies rich enough to pay scores of millions annually for help and advice. In this context, as the Olympian firms broaden their offerings, their challenge becomes maintaining their pricing power, their ability to charge strategy-level rates for types of work that consultants from Deloitte or Ernst & Young will offer to do for a lot less.

At real live companies, strategy isn't dead; it's embedded in other initiatives. To be sure, you can still occasionally find a company buying a whole-hog, build-me-a-strategy-from-the-ground-up project. Typically such purchasers are emerging from some sort of major corporate unpleasantness — a near bankruptcy, say, or having missed out, Nokia-like, on a ground-shaking technological shift. Or, sometimes related, they have a new CEO with a mandate to shake things up and make her mark.

At most companies, though, the strategy has been established, even institutionalized. One CEO I talked with rattled off a list of undertakings for which he had enlisted consulting help. None sounded to me like company-defining strategic. But when I asked if, for him, strategy was dead, he was close to being offended. "Of course not," he replied. "For us, our strategy informs every big decision we make — what markets to enter or exit, what acquisitions to make, what products to introduce." (The very issues he had consultants gathering facts on.)

Foolish me, I came away thinking, underestimating the ubiquity, and triumph, of corporate strategy.

Walter Kiechel III is the former Editorial Director of Harvard Business Publishing, former Managing Editor at Fortune magazine, and author of The Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World. He is based in New York City and Boston.

Golden Rules for Career Success by Richard Moran

Golden Rules for Career Success by Richard Moran

WORKING as a business consultant all over the world, I have discovered some basic career-related rules that everyone should know—but many don’t.

1. Business is made up of ambiguous victories and nebulous defeats. Claim them all as victories.
2. Keep track of what you do; someone is sure to ask.
3. Be comfortable around senior managers, or learn to fake it.
4. Never bring your boss a problem without some solution. You are getting paid to think, not to whine.
5. Long hours don’t mean anything; results count, not effort.
6. Write down ideas; they get lost, like good pens.
7. Always arrive at work 30 minutes before your boss.
8. Help other people network for jobs. You never know when your turn will come.
9. Don’t take days off sick—unless you are.
10. Assume no one can/will keep a secret.
11. Know when you do your best—morning, night, under pressure, relaxed; schedule and prioritize your work accordingly.
12. Treat everyone who works in the organization with respect and dignity, whether it be the cleaner or the managing director. Don’t ever be patronizing.
13 Never appear stressed in front of a client, a customer or your boss. Take a deep breath and ask yourself: In the course of human events, how important is this?
14. If you get the entrepreneurial urge, visit someone who has his own business. It may cure you.
15. Acknowledging someone else’s contribution will repay you doubly.
16.Career planning is an oxymoron. The most exciting opportunities tend to be unplanned.
17. Always choose to do what you’ll remember ten years from now.
18. The size of your office is not as important as the size of your pay cheque.
19. Understand what finished work looks like and deliver your work only when it is finished.
20. The person who spends all of his or her time is not hard-working; he or she is boring.
21. Know how to write business letters—including thank-you notes as well as proposals.
22. Never confuse a memo with reality. Most memos from the top are political fantasy.
23. Eliminate guilt. Don’t fiddle expenses, taxes or benefits, and don’t cheat colleagues.
24. Reorganizations mean that someone will lose his or her job. Get on the committee that will make the recommendations.
25. Job security does not exist.
26. Always have an answer to the question, “What would I do if I lost my job tomorrow?”
27. Go to the company Christmas party.
28. Don’t get drunk at the company Christmas party.
29. Avoid working at weekends. Work longer during the week if you have to.
30. The most successful people in business are interesting.
31. Sometimes you’ll be on a winning streak and everything will click; take maximum advantage. When the opposite is true, hold steady and wait it out.
32. Never in your life say, “It’s not my job.”
33. Be loyal to your career, your interests and yourself.
34. Understand the skills and abilities that set you apart. Use them whenever you have an opportunity.
35. People remember the end of the project. As they say in boxing, “Always finish stronger than you start.”

TRUST is a five letter word.

TRUST is a five letter word. But, I personally feel , it has a much bigger impact than that.We sleep peacefully trusting our soldiers at the borders of the country to protect our nation.

We eat a packaged food by a company trusting that the food made is through a quality process and is apt for eating.
We invest our lives in the hands of air pilot as we know that he is qualified and will fly the ariplane appropriately.

Trust at the work place is very important. I personally feel that it forms the basis of all relationships at the work place.
There are a few obvious words that pop into my mind as I heard the word Trust - Integrity, Credible, Honest, No games, ethics.
During my 6 years of work experience, I have worked with several people. Some of them were my peers, a few my superiors and the rest my subordinates. As I reflect on my past, I recollect two individuals who were two different extremes.

AB( Only initials kep) was the relationship manager at our organization. His primary task was to interact with the clients and then work with the project team to ensure that requirements are met. On reflection, I realize that he was quite good at self monitoring. When he was with client, he cared about them and acted in a manner that was expected of him. With us, he sounded more like the technical guy. But in this role play, he often commited oto things that were not doable in the specified time frame.
I remember once the technical team discussing a major problem with him , and expected him to inform this to the client. But, he went to the client and informed them that everything was fine. The project got delayed and the client accused the technical team of not communicating the cause earlier. The Relationship manager not wanting to break the bad news had stayed away from delivering the message. A result of this was that the project suffered and we lost face in front of our client. I remember that since then, the relationship manager lost credibility in front of our team. Although,everyone of us talked to him and responded to him, deep inside our heart, we felt that we could not trust him. The biggest impact of loosing trust is that
once it is lost, it is extemerly difficult to regain it. An element of doubt once sets in is difficult to repair. This also results in communiction isseswhich could results in conflicts.

On the other hand, NM was the kind of manager everyone trusted. This was simply because she delivered what she promised and supported the team in front of the mangement if as a team we had come to a common conclusion. Besides that , thee were chararacteristics in our personality such as down to earth, quick follow up by email or phone. communicating releabvant data and immediately clarifying any rumour that we had. The best advanage I noticeced in her by trust was that the team was easily able to rely on her. The team responded to her better and was even willing to take some calculated risks when time case. In short, a feeling of loyalty was instiiled in the team mates because of the trust we had in her.

On rreflection, I realized that if there were two things that I had to do , it would be a) Saying what you do, doing what you say
b) Apologize immedately if I am wrong. I think the first one " saying what you do, doing what you says" is important because trust and credibility are strongly related. If we commit to or act on what was expected of us, it is likely that we will be percieved as someone who is trustworthy. I have often witnessed folks in meetings saying that "I will get back to you with the details" and never seem to answer the questions. Only after constant reminders is the information sent. This is an example of how trust can either be built or broken.

The second case is about apologizing if there was a mistake. I personally feel that it is human for persons to commit an error or mistakes. Some of these are because of a difference in expectations, some due to cultural mismatch and some due to perceived understanding of the situation. I feel that in cases where things have gone wrong, it is apporpriate that a one on one conversation happens and things are settled out. This will eliminate any negative thoughts arising in the minds of indiviudas and result in better trust than before.

As I intend to follow the two instances of trust in me, am reminded of the German Scholar Friedrich Nietzsche quotes about trust which states that "I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you”