Category: Creativity

Creativity, Ideas, Innovation, Leadership

How could SouthWest Airlines spend A Billion Dollars for IT Modernisation

One of the biggest news story this last Christmas season was the cascading effect of flights being cancelled by Southwest Airlines. According to their SEC filing, they had to cancel more than 16700 flights over the holiday period in December, costing them an estimated $725million-$825 million. The reason for this cascading effect was a perfect storm of outdated technology, a natural storm and their very own business model (point to point service instead of the hub and spoke model that almost all the other airlines follow). In a recent press release, their CEO Bob Jordan shared the following: We are currently […]

Creativity, Innovation

Wishing you a very happy “World Creativity and Innovation Day” #WCID

Today, April 21st is celebrated as the “World Creativity and Innovation Day“. Do we really need a creativity and innovation day? Shouldn’t every day be about creativity and innovation? I think this is a discussion for another day. For now, lets stick with celebrating the day (recently, any excuse to celebrate is a good excuse, if we need one at all). Here is a short video of how and why the UN announced April 21 as the World Creativity and Innovation Day. Over the past decade, I have written many blog posts that talk about different perspectives on creativity, creative […]

Creativity, Innovation, Inspiration, Leadership

Lessons in Leading Product Designers or Innovators from James Dyson’s AMA

If you are leading product development or any form of design teams or creative professionals or leading an innovation effort, I think you will find the short video very insightful. In the video, James Dyson answers questions on product design curated from twitter. I think that the selection of questions and the answers given by James Dyson as part of this AMA are really worth listening multiple times. You can watch the entire video here. One fundamental learning for us as leaders from his response and from his journey as an inventor / innovator is that, a truly innovative product […]

Creativity, Innovation, Leadership

Leading for Creativity and Innovation

One of the primary responsibilities of a leader is our ability to enable our teams to fuel their creativity and drive innovation. Kevin Roberts (who used to be the CEO and later went on to become the Executive Chairman of one of the most creative organisation – Saatchi & Saatchi) delivered a keynote on creativity and innovation and I think there is a lot that we can learn from the keynote. You can watch the entire keynote here. If you are tasked with coming up with innovation in your organisation, which typically, starts with coming up with creative ideas, I […]

Creativity, Leadership

What can Leaders Learn from the “Introduction of the Icelandverse”

There has been a lot of talk about Facebook’s rebrand as Meta and introduction of Metaverse. So, I will not add to that discussion. However, I do want to talk about what Iceland tourism department has done with the same. In their most recent advertisement, they have spoofed Mark’s vision of the Metaverse and introduced what they called Icelandverse. Before I can go on any further, I highly recommend that you watch this commercial here. Whether you are amused, angry or irreverent to this attempt by the Iceland tourism, as leaders, there are a few things that we can learn […]