Are you Driving Digital Transformation or Leading IT?

I had just shared the impact and influence that Seth Godin has on me and my thinking. Here is his latest observation about leading. On his blog, he writes and I quote, Tug boats don’t usually tug. They push. That’s because pushing is more mechanically efficient than pulling. When we pull, there’s tension and slack in the ropes, and the attachment between the puller and the pushed keeps changing. But the metaphor gets far more interesting when we think about leading instead. One bird at the head of the flock can lead 100 others if they’re enrolled in the journey. […]

How Change Is Changing and What to Do About It

I read this interesting blog post about the changing nature of change, specially in the organisational context, in which the authors (Paul Kurchina, Glen Gonzalez & Stephanie Overby) share their perspectives and distinguish between the “C” change and the “c” change. I would highly encourage you to read it here. Here my take on this topic: Organisations (business or otherwise) will need to learn how to manage change well. This is soon going to become one of the core skills for them in order to even have a chance at succeeding in their endeavour. There is no one way to […]

The Power of Noticing

Premise: One of the key skills that we need to develop if we want to be leaders, in general, is our ability to notice things. This is a meta skill, that once we learn, can be extremely useful in many spheres of our lives (work, home, community, etc). What can we do about this: The key to increasing our ability to notice is, to slow down. I am guilty of not doing this often. A lot of people that I know are guilty of the same as well. We are all so busy doing stuff (emails, meetings, preparing and delivering […]

Leading Large Scale Cultural Transformation

I wanted to share this short video, in which Simon Sinek, in his usual style, shares the way he sees cultural transformation work. Here is the video: Here are some of the important concepts that he shares: What doesn’t work: Launching a formal company-wide transformation effort, with clearly laid out plans, executive presentations explaining the rationale for the change does not work. Typically, these are met with cynical, wait and watch responses from the employees. They have seen many such announcements, leaders starting transformation efforts, come and go, with not much changing on the ground, in their work. What does […]

Less is more: Why our brains struggle to subtract

Premise: It seems that our brains are naturally wired to think in an additive way when we are trying to solve problems. It is one of those brain hacks that we picked up from our ancestors but is no longer as useful to us as it was to them. So, if we can learn to think in the opposite direction, i.e, in a subtractive way, we might surprise ourselves with the solutions that we might arrive at. The Research and its Findings: Here is a research paper published by Nature which looks at this phenomenon and concludes We show that […]