How to Win in the Age of Unreasonable Consumer

I recently stumbled onto a video of Adam Morgan (Co-founder of eatbigfish and the co-author of a brilliant book – A Beautiful Constraint) shares his perspectives on how we live in an age of unreasonable consumers and what do we need to think about in order to succeed in this world where we are surrounded by unreasonable consumers. You can watch the entire video here. The first question that comes to mind when I listen to Adam present is to question if we really have become unreasonable consumers? I believe the answer is absolutely. We now expect to have clean, […]

Dealing with Complex Adaptive Systems with Dave Snowden

We are living in a world where things are changing at a pace that is difficult to keep up with. In such a scenario, as leaders, it is important for us to learn how to deal with complex adaptive systems (which is how organisations and markets function – including us and the people who we lead). Dave Snowden created the Cynefin framework that helps us understand the kind of system we are operating under and shares the way we could function within the system. I wrote about it last week here. In this video, Dave shares his perspective on how to […]

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 […]

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 […]

Insanely Interesting People who Influenced Me: #10 Clayton Christensen

For the rest of the year, I would like to take a moment and thank the people who have had a significant impact on me as an individual. The way they have lived their lives and their body of work has had an outsized impact on how I think about life in general and and work, in particular. Some of these are contemporary thinkers and some of them are just a memory. Some of them are famous in their own rights and some of them are yet to be found by others. Some of them are young and some of […]