Category: Strategy

Ideas, Innovation, Strategy

Feeling Stuck When Solving a Complex Problem?

When we are working on a complex problem and are stuck, one the best ways to find inspiration to unstuck ourselves is to move away from our regular environment where we got stuck to a different novel environment. Here is a great post from IDEO university that talks about an activity that could help us find inspiration outside our context – https://www.ideou.com/blogs/inspiration/an-activity-to-help-you-find-inspiration-outside-your-context. The post talks about a three-step process: Step 1: Start with Emotions Step 2: Identify Analogous Experiences Step 3: Reflect and Connect This is one way to find inspiration. We could also find inspiration to solve a complex problem […]

Leadership, Strategy

What is better – Being People Centric or Being Process Driven?

One of the decisions that every business needs to make, in order to continue to grow is to put in place processes that can provide enough stability,  predictability and consistency of experience. Without the right processes, the growth is chaotic and can strangle the business itself. On the other side, there is this whole conversation about how it is important to be people centric in order to do well. People do business with other people and not with processes or bots. So, it is important to treat people (employees, customers and partners) well and thereby create the foundation for them […]

Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Strategy

What Do You Do when you are stressed

Premise: We all live in a world where we have stressors all around us and our ability to manage stress becomes an element that determines how successful we are in whatever we do. Managing Stress: As with everything else in life, stress also has two faces. One kind of stress allows us to be alert and in the moment and leads us to be at our best. The other kind of stress takes a toll on our abilities and leads us to perform at far lower levels than we are capable of. The truth of the matter is that it […]

Entrepreneurship, Strategy, transformation

To succeed, Optimise the one variable that matters

Premise: One of the things that almost everyone of us does is to optimize. We optimise our time, our money and at times even our relationships. We want maximum efficiency in almost everything that we do. In organisations, we compensate sales guys on sales made, product managers on product development, marketing folks on leads generated, manufacturing folks on operational efficiency. Everywhere we look, we can find efforts to maximise efficiency in that part. This, in general, is our attempt to gain local optima. We try to reach optimal performance in that specific domain with no regards to the effect it […]

1000Entrepreneurs, Strategy, transformation

When Your Biggest Strength becomes Your Biggest Weakness

Premise:  Once advice that almost everyone agrees to, when it comes to defining our strategy (personal, professional or organisational) is that we need to “Play to your strengths”. If you are a business that has already seen some amount of success, the chance is that you know what your core strength is. So, you build on it. You continue to invest in your strength to get even better at it. You continue to invest until you are the best-in-class on this topic in the whole wide world. This strategy works really well, until it doesn’t. The  irony is that most […]