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 […]

Leadership

Failure and Success

Failure is often considered to be the opposite of success. However, truly successful people know that failure is an integral part of any success! It’s very rare indeed that someone finds success without meeting failure along the way. If they do, the success doesn’t last as long as they would like it to! So, we would do well to learn how to look at failure and how we deal with it when we come face to face with it. When we do come face to face with failure, it would be great to look to what we can learn from […]

Leadership, Quotes

Winds of Change

We now live in a world where the winds of change rage faster and faster. The attitude and the ability to build windmills will make or break our careers in the mid-to-long term. Are you ready? Do we have the necessary mindset, the required toolsets and the skillsets to make this a reality? I have been talking about the need for leaders to understand that almost all leadership is about leading through change. So, if we want to be better leaders, we need to be able to lead our teams through the raging winds of change while building windmills that […]