Venkatachalam Viswanathan · 20 September 2026
When Competence Is No Longer Enough
What makes one person continue to grow in their career, while another, equally competent, finds that his career has stopped moving?
We all get up in the morning and go to the office, where we spend more than half our lives trying to win what has often been termed “The Rat Race”. And towards that effort, we give up a part of our lives and spend more time at the office than we do with our families. Corporate life occupies too much of our lives for what happens within it to be treated lightly. It is where ambition is tested, where standing is earned or withheld, and where many people come, often without quite realising it, to measure their worth. What happens to a person inside an organisation therefore reaches far beyond salary and title.
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