Category: Leadership

Leadership

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 […]

Leadership

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 […]

Leadership

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 […]

Customer Engagement, Leadership, Strategy, transformation

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 […]

Innovation, Leadership

Great Teams Are a Mix of Old and New

To add to this nice post, I think that the composition of consistently high performing teams is that they have a set of core team members who enjoy working with each other and have worked together for long periods of time thereby developing the ability to understand how each other thinks and depending upon the project, you add new people to the mix to get a breath of fresh thinking into the project. To take the analogy of the broadway or the movie business, you can see that most directors like to work with the same set of people when […]