Category: Leadership

Leadership

First Principles Based Leadership Requires First Order Learning

Premise I read this post by John Hunter, which was originally published in 2014 but is still very relevant. In this blog, he shares one key insight from the work of Deming – managing (or leading) can’t be taught (prescriptive) and needs to be learnt (experiential). First Order Learning Vs Second Order Learning One needs to learn to lead by leading and to manage by managing. We can learn from our own experience (first order learning) or from the experience of those who have gone before us (second order learning). When we learn from our own experience, we start to […]

Leadership

Lessons we Can Learn From Catching A Rocket in Mid-Air

On 13th October 2024, SpaceX team did something remarkable. They launched their starship rocket and then allowed its booster to drop into the Earth’s atmosphere and caught it with their giant mechanical arms at the launch pad. This is something that has never been done (or even attempted before). There are a few lessons to be learnt for all of us as leaders from this exercise. Lesson 1: Challenging Assumptions and Beliefs When Elon Musk started SpaceX and decided to develop a re-usable rockets, it was never even considered by the teams before him. It was believed to be impossible, […]

Leadership

First Principles Based Leadership – 4 Ways to Know Anything

Premise I was introduced to John Vervaeke and his work by the inimitable Matt Church who leads the Thought Leaders Business School and is based in Australia. John is an award-winning professor of psychology, cognitive science, and Buddhist psychology at the University of Toronto. He says that there are four different ways we can know things, which he calls the 4P’s of Knowing. These are about the manners in which and the mechanisms of knowing something rather than the content of the knowledge itself or how we know about something rather than what we know of. The four ways (4P’s) […]

Leadership

How to find Opportunities to Unlock Significant Performance

Premise One of the things that every leader is expected to do is to find ways to drive significant value from their teams. Good leaders are always trying to look for opportunities that can unlock significant value creation. If you know me at all, you know that I am a big fan of the work done by Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt, the creator of the “Theory of Constraints“. He had this belief that the biggest constraint that any business faces is Management attention. If we rephrase this, the biggest constraint that any organisation faces is the paucity of their leadership team’s […]