Turning Status Quo into Your Ally

I recently read a blog post by Seth Godin titled, “The four cohorts of the status quo“. It reminded of the fact that as leaders, we need to understand the concept of status quo, how to leverage it and deal with it, as appropriate. This ability to not allow status quo to hinder our pursuits is a high leverage or impact skill for any leader. In the post, Seth talks about the four kinds of people and their relationship with Status quo – those who actively benefit from it, those who care about the stability that it provides, those who […]

The Art of Possibility Thinking

Average leaders react to their situations; Good leaders respond to them BUT Great leaders find the opportunity within them! This doesn’t happen by itself but needs intentional thinking and a specific mindset and go looking for these possibilities. I talk about how to go about doing that here and here.

3 Questions to Ask Before We Start Any Transformation Effort

One of the biggest challenge when it comes to successful transformation efforts, is the stickiness of change in behaviour expected as part of the transformation. Any intervention is considered successful only if it leads to a lasting change in behaviour. And this is where most transformation efforts fail – they do not create a lasting change in behaviour that it set out to create. When we think about the reasons for this, we usually find the following: 1. People do not want to change This is the most common situation. This can happen when the change is being forced on […]

Lessons in Leadership with Ken Wilcox, Emeritus chairman of Silicon Valley Bank

In an interesting conversation with Todd Jick (Reuben Mark Faculty Director of Organizational Character and Leadership at Columbia Business School), Ken shares lessons in leadership from his personal experience having been a leader for more than 3 decades. This is a 45 mins video, which i would recommend that you watch. Have a pen and paper with you to make notes, and you will end up with a lot of notes. You can watch this conversation here. Here are the lessons I made a note of: Becoming a leader is an intentional decision. Reflect and think about why we want […]

Leading in a VUCA World – One conversation at a Time

I recently read a blog post by Marcella Bremer for the Leadership and change magazine. You can read the entire blog post here. In the post she shares her learning from a talk that one of the founders of “Appreciative Inquiry” Ron Fry shared in one his talks during the Leadership Reset conference. Basically, the big idea from the blog is the importance of “Conversation” as the most significant and important tool in a leader’s toolkit in leading his organisation in a VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) environment. We now live in a constantly evolving environment, thanks to the […]