The Anatomy and Upside of Boredom

Every now and then I come across in my reading list something that lies at the intersection of being interesting, useful and practical. The below post is one such example. This originally appeared on Aeon, written by Neel Burton and edited by  Nigel Warburton. I have written elsewhere (here, here, here and here) about the importance of boredom and how it has an impact on creativity in the least and overall life satisfaction at the most. So, when I came across this post, it was natural for me to share the entire article in its originality rather than my take […]

Starting a Digital Transformation Journey

Premise: It seems like there can’t be a day that goes by when I don’t hear the word transformation being tossed around, usually with the prefix – Digital. At a deep level, I think everyone knows and understands that transformation of any kind is not only difficult but in most cases has an extremely low probability of success. The term digital transformation is a misnomer which has quite a lot of people confused. It is first and foremost transformation, of course enabled by digital technologies but people confuse this with digital becoming the operating word instead of transformation. This is […]

Book Review – The Disruption Mindset by Charlene Li

Overview: I got a digital preview copy of this book via NetGalley. The book is about is basically about what do organizations (typically incumbent organizations) do to be successful at the business of disruption, the assumption being that it is unusual for the incumbents to disrupt themselves or their industries. You can find more information about Charlene here and buy the book here. What is the book about: Charlene gleams some key insights from some case studies of incumbent organizations, which either lost their way or got disrupted found their way to disrupt themselves and in some cases their industries. […]

ABCDEFG of Successful Digital Transformation

I came across this very interesting post by John Hagel, where he brings up a very interesting topic, one that I feel strongly about – Digital Transformation. It appears that you can not go through a corporate presentation or a CxO presentation without hearing the word “Digital Transformation”. Not a day goes by when I don’t read about some initiative run by a business under the banner of “Digital Transformation”. As with any other loosely thrown around words, this term has also lost a lot of meaning and significance. As John clearly points out in his post, doing the same […]

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 […]