Insanely Interesting People who Influenced Me #17 Joseph Campbell

For the rest of the year, I would like to take a moment and thank the people who have had a significant impact on me as an individual. The way they have lived their lives and their body of work has had an outsized impact on how I think about life in general and and work, in particular. Some of these are contemporary thinkers and some of them are just a memory. Some of them are famous in their own rights and some of them are yet to be found by others. Some of them are young and some of […]

The Power of Stories

Premise: Earlier today, I watched a keynote presentation delivered by Jonathan Gottschall on the Power of Stories. He made me sit up and think about stories in a new light. You can watch his keynote here. As leaders, one of the most important tools that we have in our arsenal is the use of stories. We use stories to communicate our ideas, to rally our troops, while leading change and influencing how people show up to and actually do their work. And I think it is important to understand all aspects of the stories that we tell so that we […]

Insanely Interesting and Influential People – #2 Paulo Coelho

For the rest of the year, I would like to take a moment and thank the people who have had a significant impact on me as an individual. The way they have lived their lives and their body of work has had an outsized impact on how I think about life in general and and work, in particular. Some of these are contemporary thinkers and some of them are just a memory. Some of them are famous in their own rights and some of them are yet to be found by others. Some of them are young and some of […]

4 Ways to Enable Connections

Premise: One of the most important steps in driving any kind of transformation is the ability to rally around teams that are impacted by the transformation. One of the reasons many transformation efforts fail is existence of resistance for the transformation effort. It is critical to address this resistance if we want to have a good chance of success. Here are 4 ways that we can bring people together as team so that we can understand the existence and the reason for the resistance. Once we know this, we can then address the same openly. Shared Purpose The easiest and […]

Crafting an Effective Elevator Pitch

I am sure that at some point in time, you would have had the need to come up with an elevator pitch for an idea that you wanted to share with others to either inspire them to action or elicit a commitment. There are a lot of ways one can go about designing an elevator pitch but I came across Randy Olson‘s TEDMED speech where he shares this simple framework for crafting an elevator pitch.  “{Premise} and {premise} but {problem} therefore {Solution}”  This is a simple yet powerful framework for crafting an effective elevator pitch.  You can watch his entire […]