Author: Mukesh Gupta

Leadership

Three Lessons in Effective Communication from a Funny Ad

I stumbled on to an ad on my Instagram feed, that I had found very funny when it originally aired. You can watch the ad here before we go any further. When I rewatched this ad from the lens of what can I learn from it, I found it had a lot of lessons for us as leaders and as communicators: Lesson 1: Setting the context Whenever we are trying to tell a story, it is important to set the context within which the story is going to play out. The idea here is to make the context as familiar […]

Leadership

Lessons in Leadership from the movie “Raayan”

I recently watched the Tamil language movie – Raayan and really liked the movie. It is a typical commercial movie, following the life of three siblings with the eldest one trying to protect the younger one’s. Here is the plot according to Wikipedia: The film follows Kathavaraayan “Raayan”, a fast-food hotel owner in North Chennai, who begins to protect his family when they inadvertently get muddled in a war between two rival gangs. Here are a few lessons in leadership that I took away from the different characters in the movie: Patience Vs Definitive Action Patience is a great virtue until […]

Leadership

Bullet Point Meetings and Campfire Conversation

I was watching a recording of the highly energetic and insightful anthropologist Jitske Kramer, delivering her keynote at the Nordic Business Forum 2022 and was stuck by one of her insights: Bullet Point Meetings: These meetings are all about taking actions and tactical thinking. These meetings are about listing down what needs to be done and checking them once done. This is all about day-to-day activities that needs to be done to keep the lights on for our businesses. These meetings are all about behaviours, norms and rituals that we follow when we come together. In these meetings, you optimise […]

Leadership

Insights on Leading for Innovation

I watched this conversation between Mo Gawdat, former Chief Business Officer for Google X, tech entrepreneur, and author of the best-selling books “Solve for Happy“, “Scary Smart” and “Unstressable” on the High Performance podcast and found myself rigorously nodding my head in agreement or going wow, why did I not think about it like that. If are a leader who wants to lead a team of innovators, spending this hour listening (and hopefully adopting some of his ideas at work) to this conversation. Usually, when I like a video, I try to list down the things that I learnt from […]

Leadership

Lessons in Leadership from the movie Indian 2

Recently, I got to watch the Tamil movie Indian 2, which stars one of my favourite actors ever – Kamal Hassan. The movie is supposed to be a sequel to a hit Tamil movie released in 1996 with the same name. While the premise of the movie remains the same (it’s the story of an anti corruption crusade of one man by becoming a vigilante), the treatment in the sequel is, let’s just say different. Whether we like the movie or not is our subjective opinion. So, to each our own. However, I think there are a few lessons that […]