Ancient Wisdom, Ideas, Leadership

Leadership and Happiness

One significant impact that Covid-19 had is that it has caused a sudden explosion of the importance of wellness all around us. The contrast between working from home and working from our offices has been stark. This has also initiated a lot of great conversations about mental health and the importance of the role of emotions within the business context. While this focus in the cultural zeitgeist is new, the research and our knowledge about the role that emotions play in our work place is not new at all. There is a lot of good research that have found that […]

Leadership

Achieving and Sustaining High Performance

I had the opportunity to watch Gilbert Enoka present at one of the events that I was participating in. He has a long history of success as a mental skills coach with New Zealand’s corporate and sporting elite. He is internationally renowned for his 19 year history with the All Blacks (New Zealand Rugby team), first as their mental skills coach and now as manager. He has been with the All Blacks for over 250 tests and during that time the team has won back-to-back Rugby World Cups, one Laureus Award (for the best team in the world), 17 Bledisloe […]

Leadership

The Power of Stories

Premise: Earlier today, I watched a keynote presentation delivered by Jonathan Gottschall on the Power of Stories. He made me sit up and think about stories in a new light. You can watch his keynote here. As leaders, one of the most important tools that we have in our arsenal is the use of stories. We use stories to communicate our ideas, to rally our troops, while leading change and influencing how people show up to and actually do their work. And I think it is important to understand all aspects of the stories that we tell so that we […]

Ideas, Leadership

A Framework for High Performance Leadership

Premise: I read a post by Michael McCune on Gartner’s blog about thought leadership and it resonated really well with me. In the post, he talks about the importance of original thought provoking content. Content that deepen’s someone’s understanding of their own challenges and how to solve them by sharing an insight that is either original or is non-obvious has significant impact. I agree with his analysis and also the kind of impact that he shares this can have on someone’s behaviour (Buying or otherwise). The challenge with this is that creating content that can have this kind of an […]

Leadership

Of Clouds and Clocks

Sir. Karl Popper, in one of his lectures, elaborates about the presence of two types of systems – the clocks and the clouds. Clocks: At one end of the spectrum are Clocks. Clocks are those systems that can be taken apart to understand how they function and assembled back together and when done right, will continue to function the way they were designed. They are predictable. They can be simple or complex but with enough time and skill, we can understand each and every part of the system, their role in the system and how they interact with the other […]