Leaders, Futures and Foresight

As leaders, we are expected to have a vision of the future that we are leading our teams towards. To build this vision, we need to be able to think of the potential and probable futures, to decide and pick the one that we want to move towards. So, we need to learn to think about futures and learn the skill of foresight. Here is a conversation in which futurist Sohail Inayatullah (from MetaFutures) shares his perspectives with examples about thinking of transformational futures. Here are some lessons I learnt from listening in to this conversation. As leaders, we live […]

Overcoming Resistance to Change

We live in a world with accelerating pace of change. For all us leaders, this accelerating change comes with the necessity to respond to these changes in a coherent, strategic and urgent ways. This translates into starting and leading change initiatives within our teams. So much so that there is change fatigue that has started to set in. This fatigue often leads to resistance to change. There are many other reasons for the resistance to change. Tired leaders who forget to involve the teams in their thinking about the “Why”, “What” and the “How” of the change initiatives. Tired communications […]

Insanely Interesting People who Influenced me – #8 His Holiness – The 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet

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 […]

Building a Better Version of Ourselves

Premise: I strongly believe that irrespective of where we are in our lives, there is always a better place to be. We can always be a better person than we are today, we can have a better impact on our world than we are having right now. There is always a better future to look forward to. There is always a better goal to aspire for. If we agree about this, what is the force that can propel us to become the better person that we can become, create the bigger and more meaningful impact that we can create or […]

Being A CEO of an Organization is A Lot Like Driving Your Car

My first boss had once said this – “Running an Organisation as a CEO is like driving a car”. – You need to know your destination. That’s the vision that you have for your organization. Every CEO should have a vision for where they want to steer their organization. They should also articulate this vision to their teams on an ongoing basis. – You need to know the route to your destination or have a map that could guide you to the destination. You should be able to at least see the next 100 feet. CEO’s need not have a […]