The people you surround yourself with, the books you read, the courses you participate in, the shows you watch – all of these are a sure predictor of where you’re going to be 5 years from now. So where are you headed?

It might be time to re-evaluate just who or what you let influence you. If you can’t identify people in your life who you aspire to be like financially, or in business, or indeed in any aspect of life, then it’s time to look around for some new friends. Paying a good mentor or coach is one way of doing this, but regularly reading and learning from uplifting blogs is definitely another very useful method, and one that I’ve used to great benefit.

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In a new study, Moore School of Business marketing professor Stacy Wood suggests that it’s in times of upheaval that we’re particularly inclined to leave our comfort zone and try new things.

On first thought, this sounds counter-intuitive. You would think that upon losing our job or girlfriend, we’d be more intent on crawling under the sheets with a favorite book or movie and lying low for a while – not deciding that now’s the time to quit smoking or take up sky-diving.

And yet, these are the very kinds of challenges that we’re likely to take on following a big life change, according to Wood.

It seems that when we are confronted with one disruption to our daily routine, we become more open to other change. Or, to put it differently, when things break, we enter the right mind-frame for breaking our old habits as well. According to Wood’s rationale, this is because once something pivotal in our routine gets switched around, we’re no longer so attached to all the other habits that formed our daily script.

"It's not about pop culture, and it's not about fooling people, and it's not about convincing people that they want something they don't. We figure out what we want. And I think we're pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That's what we get paid to do.

"So you can't go out and ask people, you know, what the next big [thing.] There's a great quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, 'If I'd have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me "A faster horse."

"We do no market research. We don't hire consultants. The only consultants I've ever hired in my 10 years is one firm to analyze Gateway's retail strategy so I would not make some of the same mistakes they made [when launching Apple's retail stores]. But we never hire consultants, per se. We just want to make great products.

"There's no other company that could make a MacBook Air and the reason is that not only do we control the hardware, but we control the operating system. And it is the intimate interaction between the operating system and the hardware that allows us to do that. There is no intimate interaction between Windows and a Dell notebook.

On the benefits of owning an operating system: "That allows us to innovate at a much faster rate than if we had to wait for Microsoft, like Dell and HP and everybody else does. Because Microsoft has their own timetable, for probably good reasons. I mean Vista took what -- seven or eight years? It's hard to get your new feature that you need for your new hardware if it has to wait eight years. So we can set our own priorities and look at things in a more holistic way from the point of view of the customer. It also means that we can take it and we can make a version of it to fit in the iPhone and the iPod. And, you know, we certainly couldn't do that if we didn't own it."

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"If everything is coming your way, you’re in the wrong lane!"
"A hundred thousand sperm and you were the fastest?"
"Vegetables aren't food. Vegetables are what food eats."
"I've got nothing against God. It's his fan club I can't stand.
"My Karma ran over my Dogma."

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The way our politics is going these days regional issues are more important, regional parties are taking centre stage...

That's because the quality of our political leaders is going down. Remember when Jawaharlal Nehru was the PM between 1950 and 1962 this country achieved extraordinary growth. Five steel plants were completed, Bhaba Atomic Energy Research Centre was established Tata Institute of Fundamental research became strong, Bhakra Nangal dam came up, IITs, AIIMS, you name it all of that happened in 12 years post independence. You tell me of any other 12 year period where we made such growth in government.

If you have a great leader of the caliber of Nehru even India with all its problems even after independence, with all its lack of resources can make extraordinary progress. Establishing five steel plants is not easy but the man did it. Establishing a centre for atomic energy research is not easy, he did. Getting 400 plus Phds from around the world to IIT Kanpur was not easy, he did it. All of this happened because of the vision of one man.

In fact in 1967 many of my professors at IIT Kanpur said they all came back to India because of the vision and the enthusiasm of Nehru. Today these institutes are not able to attract five such faculties per year but that man attracted 400 such people at just one institute. What does it tell you? It tells you if you have great leaders you can achieve what seems impossible. I am absolutely convinced, as I have written in the book, three fundamental pieces of development — values practiced by people, leaders who serve as a role models and the elite and the powerful who will eschew any asymmetry of benefits. These three pieces of development puzzle are absolutely necessary if India has to make decent, equitable, just fair, growth.

Post the Satyam episode the issue of corporate governance has come to the fore. What do you think should be done to avoid such instances?

Any community that encourages, directly or indirectly, a feudal structure or dictatorship is bound to result in disaster. On the other hand any community (company, city, town, nation etc) that espouses the cause of democracy committed with fair, balanced, transparency and accountability will never see a disaster.

What happened in Satyam is that it was a huge scandal. Nobody could stand up and say, what is happening is wrong. Even those who thought what was happening is wrong did not have the courage and were not in an environment to say that it was wrong.

But lot of companies has a feudal approach...

That's where I think the investors, particularly the institutional investors, have to put pressure on such companies to eschew feudalism and install an enlightened democracy. I believe feudalism was responsible for what happened at Satyam.

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Be it the undisputed powerful Nehru-Gandhi family in the national capital or the Abdullahs in India-controlled Kashmir to the Reddys and the Karunanidhis in the southern states of Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu respectively, dynasty politics is an irony considering that India considers itself the world's largest democracy -- all one got to possess is a big and famous name and then even with no prior experience in governance, one can aspire to be the one calling the shots in a political party -- a clear sign of nepotism, say political analysts.

"It all started with the Nehru-Gandhi family, India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru bringing his daughter Indira Gandhi to the Congress. After Nehru from 1947-1964, Indira Gandhi ruled India from 1966-1977 and again from 1980-1984, and her son Rajiv ruled during 1984-1989," said political scientist Professor Ajay Singh.

"No other dynasty in modern history has ruled so many people for so long a time. Even in India it is necessary to go back to the 17th-century Moghul Empire to find a parallel even before British rule. No doubt, it's sheer nepotism in a country of billion people," he added.

Agreed political scientist R.K. Basu: "In India, family succession is at the core of society, business, and, to a surprising degree, politics. Even the lowliest jobs on the railroads are often passed from father to son. It's in the mindset of people. This is the reason why dynasty politics is surviving even after 62 years of independence from British rule. It shows nepotism has a place in Indian politics, and it would stay, thanks to the people and power."

The Nehru-Gandhi family is not alone. In India-controlled Kashmir, the current Chief Minister Omar Abdullah had succeeded his father Farooq Abdullah as the executive head of the state, who in turn had succeeded his father Sheikh Abdullah.

Likewise, in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi is mulling to hand over the baton to his son Stalin, the namesake of the former Soviet leader.

Political analyst Prof S.K. Gupta contended: "It shows that experience of good governance doesn't count in secular, democratic India. Experienced politicians are always ignored for making way for sons and daughters of politicians to keep alive the tradition of dynasty politics. Party members are always charting the careers of their leaders by succumbing to nepotism, thereby setting aside the true values of a democracy."

However, according to the political analysts, India is not alone as the dynasty politics is prevalent even in developed nations like the United States and Japan.

"The election of George W. Bush as President eight years after his father left the White House, and Makiko Tanaka's induction as Japan's Foreign Minister almost 25 years after her father was Premier, shows that dynasty politics is not a preserve of Third World democracies. Even it is prevalent in developed nations. Why to blame India only?" said Professor Singh.

Rightly summarized in India's leading English daily in an editorial in the recent past, "India is a democracy of dynasties, for dynasties and by dynasties."