Lessons for Leaders from the Movie – “The Fundamentals of Caring”

Premise: This past weekend, I ended up doing what I really love doing – watch movies. One of the movies that I watched was the 2016 movie “The Fundamentals of Caring” featuring the unassuming Paul Rudd. The movie was based on a book. As the movie title says, the movie is about someone who takes on the job of a care giver to a young man (played by Craig Roberts). The young man suffers from Duchenne muscular dystrophy. He has also followed the same schedule, eat the exact same food for his entire life. The care giver is also a […]

The Power of Noticing

Premise: One of the key skills that we need to develop if we want to be leaders, in general, is our ability to notice things. This is a meta skill, that once we learn, can be extremely useful in many spheres of our lives (work, home, community, etc). What can we do about this: The key to increasing our ability to notice is, to slow down. I am guilty of not doing this often. A lot of people that I know are guilty of the same as well. We are all so busy doing stuff (emails, meetings, preparing and delivering […]

Leading Large Scale Cultural Transformation

I wanted to share this short video, in which Simon Sinek, in his usual style, shares the way he sees cultural transformation work. Here is the video: Here are some of the important concepts that he shares: What doesn’t work: Launching a formal company-wide transformation effort, with clearly laid out plans, executive presentations explaining the rationale for the change does not work. Typically, these are met with cynical, wait and watch responses from the employees. They have seen many such announcements, leaders starting transformation efforts, come and go, with not much changing on the ground, in their work. What does […]

4 Ways to Enable Connections

Premise: One of the most important steps in driving any kind of transformation is the ability to rally around teams that are impacted by the transformation. One of the reasons many transformation efforts fail is existence of resistance for the transformation effort. It is critical to address this resistance if we want to have a good chance of success. Here are 4 ways that we can bring people together as team so that we can understand the existence and the reason for the resistance. Once we know this, we can then address the same openly. Shared Purpose The easiest and […]

How To Be Different and Stand Out

Premise: One of the side effect of the explosion of social media is that every one is trying to be seen (views), heard (downloads) and appreciated (likes/shares). In this constant struggle to be seen/heard/appreciated, everyone is trying to be different and unique and authentic. And that is the true challenge. According to National Human Genome Research institute, “All human beings are 99.9 percent identical in their genetic makeup.” Which means that we are all that different from each other genetically. The 0.1 percent that does differentiate us genetically is influenced by our environment, exposure and experience we have had in […]