Innovation

The Curious Case of Amazon Coins

Amazon Coins debuted among much fan fare in May this year and have mysteriously kept a very low profile since the high profile launch. I am not sure if this is a deliberate strategy on part of Amazon or is it that no one noticed its presence (or maybe absence) in the past few months. The only time that i heard about Amazon coins is when they launched a promotion to give out 20 free coins if one downloaded a certain set of apps. Really? Are these coins being used at all? If yes, how much is their usage? Or […]

Leadership

So, What Drives You?

Last week, I completed 3 years of blogging on wordpress. When I started on this journey three years back, I did not realize where this will take me. However after 3 years and 246 blog posts, I feel that I have only started to warm up. There is still a lot to talk about and a lot to learn and discuss. As each milestone that passes does, this one made me to sit down and think about what keeps me going. I would like to think one of the most important thing that keeps me motivated to keep writing blog […]

Leadership

Whats Your Contribution?

Yesterday, I was running a workshop to introduce the concept of design thinking to a bunch of college students with the following as the challenge that they needed to solve by the end of the workshop How might you make teaching interesting, fun and effective for teachers We all had a great fun day and learnt something very important. All the ideas that the students came up to help teachers were to do with things that assumed that the teachers inherently were not competent people who can teach well. I ran a similar workshop a couple of months ago with […]

Sales, Strategy

This is the Time to Re-design Your Sales Planning Process

Right now is the most important time of the year for a sales leader. Its the time when you not only are trying to support your teams to meet their annual quotas, but also supposedly need to be in the planning mode to make decisions on the sales quotas for the subsequent years. If you are like most sales leaders that I have known, you are finding it difficult to maintain a balance among both these activities. And in most cases, the closure of the year takes more precedence than planning for the next year, which would be best to […]

Leadership

The Most Important Decisions That we Make as Leaders

In 2006, I was being interviewed by Saint Gobain Glass for a role in their customer service, production planning and logistics team. I had to go through 2 levels of screening by the HR agency, followed by an aptitude test, an interview with the hiring manager, the HR manager and then finally by the MD himself. I was told that the final interview for every employee hired in the organization was done by the MD himself (it was a 250 employee organization when I was being interviewed), irrespective of the role the employee is being hired for. That did not […]