Author: Mukesh Gupta

Inspiration, Leadership

What can we learn from Bertha Benz?

I recently read a blog post by Dave Trott and was blown away by the story of Bertha Benz and the role she played in the wide-spread adoption of motor vehicles. You can read his post here. The story, in short, is as follows: Karl Benz built his internal combustion engine based vehicle (3 wheeled) and was continuing to iterate to try and make it perfect, without being able to sell them. Bertha at one point in time lost her patience with this continuous tinkering and decided to take things in her own hand. One fine day, early in the […]

Leadership, Personal Growth

Why do I Continue to Blog and You Should too

I have been writing on this blog for more than 12 years and this is my 851st post. I wanted to reflect on the experience. For a variety of reasons (some known and some unknown), this blog never became popular nor did I get significant number of visitors. I do not make any money from the blog. So, my friends, family and colleagues have asked me many a times the question: If you are not making money of this, why do this at all? What is your purpose of spending so much time and effort on writing and maintaining your […]

Inspiration, Leadership

Celebrating 25 Women Who Influenced and Shaped My Thinking And Work

I wanted to take this opportunity this International Women’s day to recognise and thank women who have had a significant impact on my thinking in my professional life. I have also been fortunate enough to host many brilliant women as part of my podcast – “Pushing Beyond the Obvious) and want to take the opportunity to thank them for the time and insights they shared with me. Here we go: 1. Bernadette Jiwa I have learnt more about marketing and more importantly story telling from Bernadette than from anyone else, with the exception of Seth Godin. Her ability to tell […]

Leadership

Rules to Live By

Premise: We live in a world that changes faster than we can make sense of to respond in any meaningful fashion. In such scenario, how we respond to the changes around us can have a significant impact on our lived experience. The best way that I have found to respond to such a scenario is to build for ourselves a set of guiding principles that determines our response to any given situation. I call them my rules to live by. Having thought about them and intentionally listed them down helps me make quick decisions (and sometimes even subconsciously) so that […]

Creativity

Let Creative Ideas Surface

I was talking to someone earlier today about creativity and the need for creative ideas to drive innovation to enable us to solve difficult problems like climate change and achieving the SDG goals.. I was surprised when he said, that he was not the creative type and that he finds it really difficult to come up with creative ideas and so avoids participating in brainstorming sessions.. I strongly and fully believe that we are all born creative and “Deep inside us, creative ideas are already there! We just need to let them surface!” Mukesh Gupta This requires us to be […]