Failure is an Option, Fear is not!

Earlier today, I was listening to a panel discussion and something that one of the panelist, Bharathi Vishwanathan, said, stuck a chord with me. She is the chief digital and information officer at Suntory. She said and I quote: Failure is an option, fear is not – Bharathi Vishwanathan She said that this was the motto of her company. When I think about it, it makes a lot of sense, specially if you want to innovate and create a culture of experimentation and exploration. I have written about this many many times that there is no innovation possible if failure […]

Insanely Interesting People who Influenced Me #16 Dave Snowden

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 […]

How could SouthWest Airlines spend A Billion Dollars for IT Modernisation

One of the biggest news story this last Christmas season was the cascading effect of flights being cancelled by Southwest Airlines. According to their SEC filing, they had to cancel more than 16700 flights over the holiday period in December, costing them an estimated $725million-$825 million. The reason for this cascading effect was a perfect storm of outdated technology, a natural storm and their very own business model (point to point service instead of the hub and spoke model that almost all the other airlines follow). In a recent press release, their CEO Bob Jordan shared the following: We are currently […]

A Framework for High Performance Leadership

Premise: I read a post by Michael McCune on Gartner’s blog about thought leadership and it resonated really well with me. In the post, he talks about the importance of original thought provoking content. Content that deepen’s someone’s understanding of their own challenges and how to solve them by sharing an insight that is either original or is non-obvious has significant impact. I agree with his analysis and also the kind of impact that he shares this can have on someone’s behaviour (Buying or otherwise). The challenge with this is that creating content that can have this kind of an […]