Category: Leadership

Leadership

First Principles Based Leadership: Improving our Social Awareness

In my first post (which you can read here), in a series of posts about “First Principles Based Leadership”, I shared the importance of developing five types of awareness (self, social, cultural, contextual and systems) in order to build that foundation for becoming a First Principles based leader. Today, in this third post, we will talk about how we can improve our social awareness. When I talk about social awareness, I mean the ability to know what is going on with the people we lead and work with, as individuals and the interactions between them. It is our ability to […]

Leadership

First Principles Based Leadership – Cultivating Self Awareness

In my last post, I shared the importance for leaders to work on five different kinds of awareness (self, social, cultural, contextual and systemic). Today and in the next four posts, I will delve into how can we go about cultivating and improving each one of these awareness. Today, let’s explore how we can go about cultivating and improving our self awareness. Any and all deep dive into self awareness can only start by delving deeper into our consciousness. We can do this in a few different ways. Meditation We could use meditation to access our sub-conscious. As many seers […]

Leadership

Foundation For First Principles Based Leadership

Premise: One of the foundations for First Principles Based Leadership is for leaders to be aware. Leaders need to work on their awareness on five different levels. 1. Self Awareness: First and foremost is for us, as leaders, we need to work on improving our self awareness. When I talk about self awareness, I am referring to knowing what we want to achieve and why we want to achieve it. Is it for our own sake (ego driven) or is it for the sake of the team that we are leading (service driven). When I talk about self awareness, I […]

Leadership

Best Practices Vs First Principles Based Leadership

Earlier today, I read a blog post by Greg Satell titled “This Is One Big Reason Why So Much Business Thinking Is Crap“. In the post he shares his insight on how business fads are created, propagated and result in much waste before fading away. I agree with him whole-heartedly. Building best practices through case studies and interviews, in my opinion is somewhat similar to how blind men would define an elephant, just by feeling a part of the elephant. There is a lot that can go wrong in the process and Greg does a brilliant job at laying them […]