Creativity, Innovation, Inspiration, Leadership

How to Be Remarkable and Do Memorable Work?

Premise: I stumbled on to this performance by a school band and thought it was incredible and wanted to share this with all of you. When I think about this a bit more, I realised that there is a lot that we can learn from this band as leaders. Before we move to the learning part, first take the 8 to 10 mins to watch the band perform for the spectators here. One of the most powerful way to stand out is not to conform to the expectations that people have of you. We don’t expect a band to play […]

Innovation, Leadership

Failure is an Option, Fear is not!

Earlier today, I was listening to a panel discussion and something that one of the panelist, Bharathi Vishwanathan, said, stuck a chord with me. She is the chief digital and information officer at Suntory. She said and I quote: Failure is an option, fear is not – Bharathi Vishwanathan She said that this was the motto of her company. When I think about it, it makes a lot of sense, specially if you want to innovate and create a culture of experimentation and exploration. I have written about this many many times that there is no innovation possible if failure […]

Leadership

Blindspots

Premise: Yesterday, I stumbled onto a French advertisement, that shows, in a very impactful way, blindspots of truck drivers. Shot from a first person perspective, the ad has no music, no voice over, no gimmicks, just simple yet powerful visuals. Before we move ahead, please do take the 47 seconds to watch the advertisement here. As I watched this advertisement, the question that was going on in my mind was about my blindspots as a leader. The question is not if we have a blindspots but where are those blindspots. The next question to ask then is – how does […]

Leadership

The Importance of Incorporating Elements of Play at Work

Premise: In the past couple of days, I have stumbled on to videos and articles about the importance of having fun in our lives. I have been thinking about this for a long time, so much so that my last book was called – “Being Happy“. It seems that having fun and being happy are not necessarily the same thing. Or is it? And what does having fun got to do with Leading Transformations? Let’s explore this a bit further. But before we go ahead, I would implore you to watch the videos. The first video features John Cohn, sharing […]

Leadership

Learning How to Learn

We live in a world which is constantly changing and if we really want to stay relevant, we need to find a way to learn new things (technology, process, business models, behaviours, skills, etc) all the time. So, it pays to get better at learning or get better at learning how we learn. Each one of us learns in a different way. Some of us learn better by reading. Some of us by watching videos. Some by getting our hands dirty by trying something. And some others through conversation and by apprenticeship. What we are attempting to learn also has […]