Category: Ideas

Ideas

Crisis in Leadership and a Call for Action

In July of 2012, I had published a blog post about leadership in crisis. While reading the newspaper today, I realised that we are living in a world with a leadership crisis. Whether it is lack of strong political leadership or strong leadership in the corporate world. Is this because the current set of leaders never wanted to step down or nurture the next set of leaders? Or is this because we are living in a time of rapid change and the current crop of leaders don’t understand the dynamics of the change and are at a loss on how […]

Ideas

Having Difficult Conversations

As leaders, it is inevitable that at some point in time we will need to have some form of a difficult conversation with someone. It could be as simple as providing someone with critical feedback that they might not like or as difficult as letting someone go. It is never easy and needs a lot of patience, care and empathy on our part, whenever we are called upon to have such difficult conversation. Recently, the CEO of Better.com had one such difficult conversation with his staff, when he had to let go of 15% of his staff. The way he […]

Ideas, Leadership

The Role of a Leader – Comfort the Disturbed and Disturb the Comfortable

This is a picture that I had clicked some time back. This was a street art and at that time, it rang true for what it said, from the perspective of an artist (and yes, I do consider myself as an artist who works with words). When I was going through my instagram feed and stumbled on to this picture again, I realised that this is exactly what a leader is to do – to comfort the disturbed and to disturb the comfortable. Leaders comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable – Mukesh gupta Comforting the disturbed: One of the […]

Creativity, Ideas, Innovation, Leadership

6 Ways to Solve Difficult Problems

Lately, I have been talking a lot about how to be creative on demand. I have shared my learning and insights with my colleagues, students, startups, leaders and creative professionals. This is one of the most fundamental abilities that we need to master if we want to do really well in our professional and sometimes personal lives. You can watch the recording of one of these sessions here. I have also shared my perspectives on “Where creative ideas come from” in earlier blog posts as well. So, the question then is why another blog post about the same topic? That’s […]