Author: Mukesh Gupta

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 […]

Leadership

Residual Communication

I read this post about Residual Communication written by the British advertiser Dave Trott and it left a deep impression on me. You can read his post here. The idea is pretty simple – what do people remember from what we said, long after we said it. As a leader, I believe that we should obsess about residual communication. What do people remember the most after we had done sharing our vision, strategy or any idea. Our effectiveness as a leader depends on this. We will move on to other meetings and to other tasks expecting our people to act […]

Leadership

Improving Cognitive Diversity in our Teams

Mike makes a great point about 100% agreement within our teams. When we start seeing an increase of 100% agreement on our point of view, it is time for us to do two things: 1. Stop sharing our point of view until every one on the team has shared their opinions, without in any way giving away where we are leaning towards. That way the teams can share their honest opinions rather than toe the line that we lean towards. This is critical to avoid group think and encourage diversity of thought. 2. Identify and give the role of a […]

Leadership

Talent Vs Opportunity

This is a rant. Please ignore if you are not in a mood for somebody’s rant! I strongly believe that talent is equally distributed across any segment that we can think of {men vs women, rich vs poor, straight vs gay, Asian vs European vs African, black vs brown vs white folks, early talent vs experienced talent, developed nation vs developing nation, students of Ivy League universities vs public universities, etc). However, what differentiates the level of success in these segments is the distribution of opportunities. We have a tendency to provide opportunities to people like ourselves. While this is […]