Whether you want to be more inspirational or need to learn the latest in recruitment trends, make 2017 your best year with these top five New Year’s resolutions to improve your managerial style and lead your team to success.

1. Delegate more
As a leader, you should never be afraid to delegate jobs and responsibilities to your team members. Unfortunately, many leaders forget this and try to micro-manage instead. This has a dramatic impact on the company and employee satisfaction, with a 2015 study by employee engagement firm, TINYpulse, showing that employees who felt micromanaged were 28% more likely to leave their job. As a leader you need to trust that the team members you have employed will be able to take on the work and do it to the best of their abilities. By delegating more, you will find you have more time to be a better leader and will empower the rest of the team to be accountable for their actions.

2. Be consistent
People like to know what to expect, and a sign of strength in a leader is consistency. Take time to reassess your work methods and make sure that everything you do is done in the same, consistent manner. Try to also moderate your mood - nobody enjoys working in an office where there is a sense of unpredictability concerning the boss. This will put employees at ease and ensure they know where they stand with you at all times.

3. Be more organised
Being in control is one of the most important things a leader can demonstrate, but can often get overlooked when day-to-day life gets in the way. If you are chaotic as a leader, you will not inspire your team members to be organised. Set an amount of time every day when you will focus on reorganising yourself, whether this involves making a to do list for the day or working with your assistant to file away important documents. By being more organised, you will naturally feel calmer and more in control of your work and your team.

4. Be more creative
Some of the most motivational and successful leaders have been those who have inspired others to be creative and think differently from the norm. Your role as a business owner is to inspire innovation and provide a platform for people to get creative when it comes to new and more efficient ways of doing things.

5. Hire the right people
A leader is nothing without a strong team around them, so when it comes to hiring new team members, diligence is everything. Don’t be afraid to hire people that are smarter than you. In management roles, there is no room for insecurities, so set your worries aside and put your mind to finding and hiring the best possible candidates for the role.

Authored By Mike Hoff, Certified Gazelles International Coach and Founder of MHC

The American multinational mobile brand, iPhone is ranked as India’s Most Reputed Mobile Phone brand in a study by BlueBytes in association with TRA Research (both part of the Comniscient Group). In terms of sheer volume, Apple iPhone had the highest positive media appearances. The second most Reputed brand in the list, despite the controversies surrounding the exploding Note 7, is South Korea's Samsung Mobiles, which had a Brand Rep Score 67% lower than the iPhone. The first Indian consumer electronics company to feature in the list and 3rd in All-India featured Micromax with a Brand Rep Score 94% lower than Samsung. The fourth and fifth position is secured by China's Xiaomi and Finland's Nokia, which recently promised a comeback in India with two Android phones. 72 mobile phone brands were listed from 12 different countries featured in the India’s Most Reputed Mobile Phone Brands 2017 Report. Of these, Indian origin phones held the maximum positions – 29 brands. 15 are from China and 8 from USA. BlueBytes is set to launch a Report each month that covers different Sectors. The study evaluates Brand Reputation by analyzing media perceptions and consumer perceptions.

“Reputation can be seen as a currency that the brand can earn through positive action, communication, or sometimes erode due to lack of the same. Reputation has to be consistently maintained, monitored, and enhanced. In a cluttered space like the mobile phone industry, with diverse brands attempting to capture consumer attention, customers buy and recommend on the basis of reputation, making it the most important influencer of buying decisions,” said Pooja Kaura, Chief Spokesperson for India’s Most Reputed Brands. Among the top ten, Chinese multinationals Lenovo, Huawei, and Motorola (now owned by Lenovo) rank sixth, seventh, and eighth respectively. LG (South Korea) and Intex (India) complete the top 10 in this exclusive list.

India’s Most Reputed Mobile Phone Brands 2017 (ISBN: 978-81-932924-5-7), was a study conducted within the Mobile Phone Industry with BlueBytes analyzing news of 72 mobile phone brands in all the major English and Hindi print media (newspapers and magazines) across 9 cities as a representative of the news across all media. A total of more than 60,000 articles related to different Mobile Phone brands were captured in the period between November 1, 2015, and October 31, 2016. In addition to news analysis, the consumer’s perception was also studied and this part of the analysis was contributed by TRA Research, which interviewed 2,500 consumer-influencers on the aspect of Respect. The 56-page, report is available for Rs. 999/-.

India’s Most Reputed Brands

‘India’s Most Reputed Brands’ is a product of BlueBytes in association with TRA Research, both nested under the Comniscient Group. The companies bring together a unique synergy in the business of Reputation measurement. The Report leverages their unique specialties – BlueBytes, which is focused on measuring transmission of respect as perceived via the Print Media, and TRA, which specializes in measuring consumer perception. BlueBytes tracks all the brands’ news in all the major English and Hindi print media (newspapers and magazines) across 9 cities as a representative of the news across all publications. While TRA Research contributes with interviews on 2,500 consumer-influencers on the aspect of Commanding Respect. ‘India’s Most Reputed Brands’ is a one-of-a-kind study. BlueBytes and TRA Research are geared towards mapping the Reputation topography of different Sectors. There are four reports covering different sectors in the Reputed series - India's Most Reputed Aviation Brands 2016, India's Most Reputed Pharmaceutical Brands 2016, India's Most Reputed Real Estate Brands 2016 and India's Most Reputed Mobile Phones Brands 2017.

C1X, which has been in the news over the last few months after its Series B raise has appointed its leadership teams across the region and is now committed itself to building a world class infrastructure in Chennai supporting Tamil Nadu IT Development initiatives that could potentially add 100s of jobs to attract the best of talent in its engineering and product development teams in Chennai.

The new facility is a state of the art center with absolute new age facilities that would ensure potential employees and the talent the company is looking for from across the country to feel empowered and build world class adtech solutions.

Mukundu Kumaran, Co-Founder & CEO, said, “We are committed to addressing the global market needs from our facility in Chennai. This facility is in line with our global strategy and our expansion plans across markets and being the leading AMT company in the world, we wanted to take a leap with a strong first mover advantage and continue to march ahead on all our product development activities for the various initiatives we have embarked on.”

“To that effect we have hired some of the best talents globally in leadership positions and few more are slated to join in January, which will announce at the appropriate time. Now that the business growth in 2017 seems ominous it is important to support those teams with adequate product development and engineering folks to address our global expansion programme that Dan, Ram and I are spearheading.”

For the uninitiated, AMT stands for “Advertising and Marketing Technology” and given the exchange is a full stack solution across DSP, SSP, DMP, Ecommerce and Adserver, this company is pioneering the effort in addressing some of the futuristic technology requirements that brands and publishers are looking for.

When quizzed on why AMT, Mukundu responded by saying, “It is difficult to differentiate between various programmatic solutions that are available in the market and when during a brainstorming session one of our new hires prompted this coined word, we were convinced that we will lead the charge around this new stack that does not exist with any other player and so to differentiate and clearly position ourselves, we have decided to lead from the front as industry leaders in that category given we invented this one stack offering across categories through our data sciences and technology capability. Spearheading the market with a truly unified AMT platform that streamlines all the way from guaranteed premium media buys to marketing within large eCommerce platforms is our effort and we are leaving the product to do the talking”

We have heard of DSPs, SSPs and various programmatic offerings and here comes AMT, which is set to drive the change required through its transparent, ease of use and audience discovery platform, which is agnostic in nature and works seamlessly across both desktops and mobile.
Chennai is now in the world map for adtech initiatives and C1X is leading that charge.

C1X has offices globally including San Jose, Omaha, New York, Dubai, New Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Singapore and Tokyo. Its San Jose, Bangalore and Chennai offices are focused on product development and engineering while the rest are offices that drive business.

Each year, New York Festivals ® invites young creative talent from around the globe to take part in the Torch Awards competition. New York Festivals created the Torch Awards as an expression of their commitment to the development and promotion of the next generation of creative talent. The Torch Awards harnesses the power, knowledge, and experience of the World’s Best Advertising® Jury to not only promote the mission of an important international nonprofit organization, but also to help young creatives gain skills that will help them elevate their careers.

2016’s creative competition was the Inclusive Design Challenge. Entrants submitted their ideas for a media showcase presenting the progress of inclusive design and its success stories while supporting the mission of Institute for Human Centered Design (IHCD).

Grand-Winning Team Arigatos came together to create the winning showcase based on the challenge brief for Torch Awards’ 2016 non-profit partner IHCD. The winning entry, “Track-for-All,” was created by team members: Yuki Abe, copywriter; Yuto Fujita, planner, and Marina Kobayashi, creative planner, Dentsu, Japan; and Doh Kim, art director, Cheil Worldwide, South Korea.

“The brief was inspiring to start off with,” said Arigatos team member, Ms. Kobayashi, “… honestly, Inclusive Design was a topic that no one in the team was familiar with before. Learning about the concept was fun and interesting on its own, and through this process, all members of the team naturally began to empathize with the institution’s mission, to ‘build a world where everyone can thrive’ (our Track-for-All strategy, was indeed, inspired by the message of this mission). The brief strongly made me feel that inclusive design was a concept that should be known more by the world, and this feeling motivated me to create a strategy that will not only be educational, but more importantly enjoyable by a wide range of audience.”

“Team Arigatos’ award-winning strategy for “Track-for-All” employed a Rube Goldberg-inspired installation to introduce IHCD and their mission to advocate the use of inclusive design in the 21st century to a global audience. The young creatives strategized to overcome both creative and logistical challenges to earn their award-winning status.

“We made the Track-for-All device on our own, which was also a challenge. Most team members had no experience in arts and crafts, but we all worked together in constructing a Rube Goldberg-like machine that works,” said Ms. Kobayashi. “One member of our team works in Korea, communication was difficult at times, because we couldn’t get together too often as a team. Meetings were often held on Skype, and we had to ensure that all communication was kept transparent, to maintain a sense of teamwork.”

The jury was inspired by Team Arigatos’ dynamic pitch and powerful accompanying video illustrating the team’s prototype design for the “Track-for All” showcase. Following the jury’s selection of the winning team, Valerie Fletcher, Executive Director of IHCD commented, “We enthusiastically move forward with the winning team Arigatos to realize their Track-for-All strategy through an exhibit in Boston.”

The winning team worked directly with the nonprofit to make their idea into a reality. Mission accomplished! Team Arigatos had the opportunity to see their work go live and their award-winning showcase is now a permanent fixture in IHCD’s showroom at their Boston, Massachusetts headquarters.

“Being awarded the honor of a permanent installation has taught my team and I, that passion and commitment will bring along good results,” said Ms. Kobayashi. “We all felt very passionate about this project, so it was very overwhelming for us when we got to know that the installation was going to be permanent.”

Team Arigatos hopes that that the installation will open new doors to more opportunities in the future and that it will continue to inspire people as long as it’s on display. “We hope that the permanent installation will become a certificate for ourselves and the client, which will always be there, to celebrate the hard-work and passion poured into making the Track-for-All idea into shape,” commented Ms. Kobayashi.

The benefits of the Torch Awards are robust. No other competition offers emerging creative talent the opportunity to be celebrated for innovative work created on behalf of a worthy nonprofit, the experience of seeing their campaign utilized in the real world, a mentorship that provides access to advertising’s top-tier of creative leaders, and a life-changing experience that instills career confidence.

“For me and the team, I feel that earning the Torch Award has given us confidence, to have belief in keeping hold of the ideas that we think are great. Earning the Torch Award has also taught us, that hard work, deep thinking, and strong teamwork truly does pay off at the end,” said Ms. Kobayashi.

As a member of the 2016 Torch Awards Grand-Winning Team, Ms. Kobayashi offered her advice to this year’s entrants: “Work hard, feel passionate and have fun!”

The 2017 Torch Awards competition is the Integrated-Mixed Media Challenge. Interested young creatives may enter and submit their idea for tackling the needs and goals of 2017 partner Today, I’m Brave, a registered non-profit that celebrates people performing Brave acts every day and everywhere. For more information or to enter please visit the Torch Awards website.

All press inquiries are welcome and should be directed to Gayle Mandel: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Ph: 1 212 643 4800

The New York Festivals International Family of Award Competitions…
Celebrating the World’s Best Work® since 1957!

At 94, Dilip Kumar is undeniably one of the finest actors of the country and a name that Hindi cinema remains indebted to. Zee Classic, with its brand promise of Woh Zamana Kare Deewana, celebrates this thespian actor’s 94th birthday with a day-long festival titled ‘Dilip Kumar Birthday Special’, on 11th December, Sunday, 9 AM onwards. 

Kick-starting the Sunday film festival is ‘Gunga Jumna’ starring Dilip Kumar with his real life brother Nasir Khan. It is a story of two siblings on the opposite sides of law. ‘Vidhaata’ starring Sanjay Dutt, Shammi Kapoor and Sanjeev Kumar, is about a man hit by misfortune, goes onto become a smuggler to secure a better future for his grandson. The channel will showcase ‘Karma’ also starring Anil Kapoor, Jackie Shroff and Naseeruddin Shah. This one stars Dilip Kumar as a police officer who frees three prisoners under special permission to put together a unit to avenge his family’s death.

Then comes ‘Kranti’, a pre-Independence drama also featuring Manoj Kumar. When Sanga (Dilip Kumar), a loyalist of King Laxman Singh is falsely charged with killing his master, he escapes and forms an army of rebels to drive the British out of India. Concluding the fest is ‘Aan’. A love story between a princess and a villager, this film also highlights India’s transition to a democracy from monarchial rule.

Born to a Pathan family as Muhammad Yusuf Khan, Dilip Kumar came to Mumbai to earn a living oblivious of showbiz. Devika Rani, the then owner of Bombay Talkies offered him his first ever role in 1944. Hindi writer Bhagwati Charan Varma gave him the screen name Dilip Kumar and a legend was born. With 63 films in a career spanning over 6 decades, Dilip Kumar epitomized quality and dedication. For his command on depicting emotions on screen, he is fondly remembered as the King of Tragedy in Bollywood.

~Tune-in to ‘Dilip Kumar Birthday Special’ on Sunday, 11thDecember, 9 AM onwards only on Zee Classic~