Leadership

How to Lead Teams to Drive Innovation, Efficiency, Growth or Transformation

Premise I watched this short video in which HBS professor Linda Hill shares her experience from engaging a Life Sciences company and how they went about building teams and leading for innovation. You can watch the full video here. I have written many times about this topic (here, here, here, here, here, here and on innovation here). As leaders, we need to adapt and change depending on what we are trying to achieve and what our objectives are. Leading for Innovation If we want to drive innovation, we need to foster a culture that enables, engages and encourages the team […]

Leadership

Three Skills We Need to Continue to Improve for Life

Premise There are three things that we need to continue to work and improve as leaders, in order to continue to be an effective leader. These are fundamental in our evolution as a leader and true irrespective of where in the leadership ladder you are at. Believe What we believe have a significant impact on how and what we think is possible. The belief systems are usually sub-conscious in nature and most leaders are not aware of their own beliefs and how they affect our thinking and actions. As leaders we need to learn how to make that which is invisible […]

Leadership

First Principles Based Leadership Requires First Order Learning

Premise I read this post by John Hunter, which was originally published in 2014 but is still very relevant. In this blog, he shares one key insight from the work of Deming – managing (or leading) can’t be taught (prescriptive) and needs to be learnt (experiential). First Order Learning Vs Second Order Learning One needs to learn to lead by leading and to manage by managing. We can learn from our own experience (first order learning) or from the experience of those who have gone before us (second order learning). When we learn from our own experience, we start to […]

Leadership

Lessons we Can Learn From Catching A Rocket in Mid-Air

On 13th October 2024, SpaceX team did something remarkable. They launched their starship rocket and then allowed its booster to drop into the Earth’s atmosphere and caught it with their giant mechanical arms at the launch pad. This is something that has never been done (or even attempted before). There are a few lessons to be learnt for all of us as leaders from this exercise. Lesson 1: Challenging Assumptions and Beliefs When Elon Musk started SpaceX and decided to develop a re-usable rockets, it was never even considered by the teams before him. It was believed to be impossible, […]

Leadership

First Principles Based Leadership – 4 Ways to Know Anything

Premise I was introduced to John Vervaeke and his work by the inimitable Matt Church who leads the Thought Leaders Business School and is based in Australia. John is an award-winning professor of psychology, cognitive science, and Buddhist psychology at the University of Toronto. He says that there are four different ways we can know things, which he calls the 4P’s of Knowing. These are about the manners in which and the mechanisms of knowing something rather than the content of the knowledge itself or how we know about something rather than what we know of. The four ways (4P’s) […]