Top ITs focus on leadership training, personality development
By siliconindia   |   Tuesday, 28 December 2010, 16:05 IST
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Bangalore: As Yogesh Wardhkar does a reading to a class of 35 computer graduates at the Mysore campus of Infosys, he continues to have a self satisfied smile as he reads out the story he is familiar with and ants the others to know as well. "Once upon a time, there was a vain emperor who was very fond of clothes. Two swindlers, posing as weavers, decided to teach him a lesson"... As the training session proceeds, Wardhkar notions out that he is well versed with the flow of the exercise and knows how helpful it is to everybody. He continues to think that questions will be thrown at him related to the lessons he learnt from characters in "The Emperor's New Clothes" like the wise minister and the innocent child. But, to his surprise, after five minutes, the trainer says: "Take a sheet of paper and write who, you think the characters in the story represent in the corporate world. Are they the clients, the employers, CEOs, project managers or the market?" Yogesh is visibly stumped; his smile vanishes. Theory was so not something that he had been expecting instead of the practical knowledge he had come to gain all the way from Mumbai from the personality development and leadership skills training. Similar is the story of another new recruit, Sohrab Khandelwal, an engineering graduate from Chandigarh University who joined Infosys earlier this year. He dealt with an entirely different set of surprises. Having an Air Force background had kept him well versed with the Ps and Qs of etiquette. He was blank and shocked when he realized that during face-to-face interactions, looking from left to right, and then to the forehead of the person in front, is considered to be a sign of arrogance. "I never realized these subconscious gestures could be offensive," says Khandelwal.

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