Author: Mukesh Gupta

Leadership

Lessons for Leaders from the Movie – “The Fundamentals of Caring”

Premise: This past weekend, I ended up doing what I really love doing – watch movies. One of the movies that I watched was the 2016 movie “The Fundamentals of Caring” featuring the unassuming Paul Rudd. The movie was based on a book. As the movie title says, the movie is about someone who takes on the job of a care giver to a young man (played by Craig Roberts). The young man suffers from Duchenne muscular dystrophy. He has also followed the same schedule, eat the exact same food for his entire life. The care giver is also a […]

Leadership, transformation

The Power of Noticing

Premise: One of the key skills that we need to develop if we want to be leaders, in general, is our ability to notice things. This is a meta skill, that once we learn, can be extremely useful in many spheres of our lives (work, home, community, etc). What can we do about this: The key to increasing our ability to notice is, to slow down. I am guilty of not doing this often. A lot of people that I know are guilty of the same as well. We are all so busy doing stuff (emails, meetings, preparing and delivering […]

Leadership, transformation

Leading Large Scale Cultural Transformation

I wanted to share this short video, in which Simon Sinek, in his usual style, shares the way he sees cultural transformation work. Here is the video: Here are some of the important concepts that he shares: What doesn’t work: Launching a formal company-wide transformation effort, with clearly laid out plans, executive presentations explaining the rationale for the change does not work. Typically, these are met with cynical, wait and watch responses from the employees. They have seen many such announcements, leaders starting transformation efforts, come and go, with not much changing on the ground, in their work. What does […]

transformation

Less is more: Why our brains struggle to subtract

Premise: It seems that our brains are naturally wired to think in an additive way when we are trying to solve problems. It is one of those brain hacks that we picked up from our ancestors but is no longer as useful to us as it was to them. So, if we can learn to think in the opposite direction, i.e, in a subtractive way, we might surprise ourselves with the solutions that we might arrive at. The Research and its Findings: Here is a research paper published by Nature which looks at this phenomenon and concludes We show that […]

Strategy, transformation

6 Levels of Commitment to Change

Premise: Every change or a transformation effort needs the support and commitment of people who will either be affected by the change or who lead the change or who could influence the success of the change effort. Hence, it is important for those who want to drive or lead the change effort learn how committed they are to the change. The commitment can vary from people wanting to outright sabotage the change on one extreme to co-creating or co-owning the change on the other end of the spectrum. Along the spectrum, there are 6 levels or stages of commitment that […]