So, What Drives You?

Last week, I completed 3 years of blogging on wordpress. When I started on this journey three years back, I did not realize where this will take me. However after 3 years and 246 blog posts, I feel that I have only started to warm up. There is still a lot to talk about and a lot to learn and discuss. As each milestone that passes does, this one made me to sit down and think about what keeps me going. I would like to think one of the most important thing that keeps me motivated to keep writing blog […]

Whats Your Contribution?

Yesterday, I was running a workshop to introduce the concept of design thinking to a bunch of college students with the following as the challenge that they needed to solve by the end of the workshop How might you make teaching interesting, fun and effective for teachers We all had a great fun day and learnt something very important. All the ideas that the students came up to help teachers were to do with things that assumed that the teachers inherently were not competent people who can teach well. I ran a similar workshop a couple of months ago with […]

The Most Important Decisions That we Make as Leaders

In 2006, I was being interviewed by Saint Gobain Glass for a role in their customer service, production planning and logistics team. I had to go through 2 levels of screening by the HR agency, followed by an aptitude test, an interview with the hiring manager, the HR manager and then finally by the MD himself. I was told that the final interview for every employee hired in the organization was done by the MD himself (it was a 250 employee organization when I was being interviewed), irrespective of the role the employee is being hired for. That did not […]

As Leaders, We all Should Follow Rule No. 6

In his book, “The Art of Possibility“, Ben Zanders offers pearls of wisdom. One of the most important piece of wisdom that we can learn from the book is what he refers to as “Rule No: 6”.   If as leaders, we follow this rule, we could potentially make less mistakes and learn much more from the one’s that we do make; If as parents, we followed this rule, we create the possibility of a long, well nurtured and meaningful relationship with our children; If as spouse, we followed this rule. we can create the possibility of a much more deeper and […]

Three Conversations that Help you Remain Customer Centric

In a blog post, Eric  Barker shares the insights from Harvard Business School professor Gautam Mukunda, author of Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter and list down “Denial”, “Hubris” and inflated “Egos” as some of the most common mistakes leaders do. The post also talks about some good advice that leaders can do well to heed to. I think that leaders need to create and keep an open line of communication to three kinds of people to stay grounded to reality. Frontline staff: Regularly engage your front line employees who sell/service your customer for a frank and open conversation. Keep these conversations open […]