Category: Creativity

Creativity, Ideas, Innovation, Leadership

The Impact of Cheap, Abundant and Always Available Intelligence (AI)

In the past couple of weeks, I have come across two distinct stories that both point us towards something interesting. First lets go through the stories. Story 1: Collecting Tax The Taiwanese government was struggling to collect taxes from small businesses, whose primary transactions were done with cash and were for small amounts. The customers had no incentive to ask for a tax invoice. The small business had no incentive to declare the sale, so they can avoid paying taxes. This made it difficult for the government to bring these transactions into the ambit of the formal economy allowing them […]

Creativity, Leadership, Podcast, Strategy

The Last Legal Competitive Advantage You Are Allowed!

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/pushingbeyondtheobvious/The_Bomber_with_No_Guns__3_Lessons_in_Strategy_from_a_World_War_II_Secret_Weapon.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: Email | RSSIn most scenarios, the default instinct for solving problems is additive. We add more features to a product, more resources to a team, more complexity to a process. We operate under the assumption that “more” is inherently better. This approach feels safe and logical, layering on solutions to cover every contingency. This is also in line with the natural process of increasing entropy all around us. However, imagine, what if the most powerful strategy isn’t about adding, but enabling radical subtraction? What if the path to an unbeatable advantage lies in […]

Creativity, Ideas, Innovation, Inspiration, Leadership

How to Move from Bad Ideas to Breakthrough Ideas

Premise: I came across this reel on Instagram and loved the story and wanted to share it with you all. You can watch the reel here. While the story itself is better told by Dr. Caroline Brookfield in the reel, I wanted to share other things that I learnt watching and listening to the story and wanted to share that with you. So, here we go: Lesson 1: The importance of Psychological Safety The person who shared the idea about poking people’s eye was able to share the idea (which eventually led to the breakthrough idea) because that person felt […]

Creativity, Innovation, Inspiration, Leadership

How to Be Remarkable and Do Memorable Work?

Premise: I stumbled on to this performance by a school band and thought it was incredible and wanted to share this with all of you. When I think about this a bit more, I realised that there is a lot that we can learn from this band as leaders. Before we move to the learning part, first take the 8 to 10 mins to watch the band perform for the spectators here. One of the most powerful way to stand out is not to conform to the expectations that people have of you. We don’t expect a band to play […]

Creativity, Innovation

Story of the Creation of the Humble Mouse as Narrated by Steve Jobs and Its Lesson in Leading Innovation

Earlier today, I stumbled upon a video of Steve Jobs talking about the creation of the humble mouse and why he had to go to David Kelly Designs (which later on became IDEO) to get it done. You can watch the video here. In the video, he shares that content is more important than process, when it comes to innovation and creativity. The question is what does he mean by content? He is not talking about the content that we refer to. He is talking about the sum of character, knowledge and the curiosity of the people as their content. […]