How to Win in the Age of Unreasonable Consumer

I recently stumbled onto a video of Adam Morgan (Co-founder of eatbigfish and the co-author of a brilliant book – A Beautiful Constraint) shares his perspectives on how we live in an age of unreasonable consumers and what do we need to think about in order to succeed in this world where we are surrounded by unreasonable consumers. You can watch the entire video here. The first question that comes to mind when I listen to Adam present is to question if we really have become unreasonable consumers? I believe the answer is absolutely. We now expect to have clean, […]

Building an Invincible Company

I recently watched Alexander Osterwalder deliver a keynote on “Building an Invincible Company“, based on his book with the same name. He shares a lot of great insights on leadership, innovation and building sustainable business advantage for businesses. You can watch the entire keynote here. Here are some lessons I took away from the talk: The moment a company thinks it is invincible, their decline becomes inevitable. Invincible companies constantly reinvent themselves while they are successful. They fully realise that they will be disrupted and so work hard to find invest in technologies and business ideas that could potentially disrupt […]

Dealing with Complex Adaptive Systems with Dave Snowden

We are living in a world where things are changing at a pace that is difficult to keep up with. In such a scenario, as leaders, it is important for us to learn how to deal with complex adaptive systems (which is how organisations and markets function – including us and the people who we lead). Dave Snowden created the Cynefin framework that helps us understand the kind of system we are operating under and shares the way we could function within the system. I wrote about it last week here. In this video, Dave shares his perspective on how to […]

How do we know when to quit?

A young student recently asked me the following question: How do I know it is time to quit something and when to persist with it? Here is how I answered the question: There is no one answer that fits everyone. There are many ways to figure this out. For me, the best way is to go back to the reason why I started something. If the reason I started something is still relevant and important, I know that I would like to continue to engage on this topic. Then the next question to ask is if the activity is taking you towards […]

Reading or Watching with your own Filter on

I read this interesting post by Robert Twigger in which he talks about how he is trying to watch the NEWS with his own filter – a filter for creativity. He also shares a bit about the results. You can read his post here. This is interesting in many different ways. What he has done is make that which is hidden, obvious. Each one of us looks at the information that comes to us with a filter on. I say this on many occasions and also in my book Thrive, that the human brain is a large pattern recognition engine. […]