Leadership, transformation

3 Questions to Ask Before We Start Any Transformation Effort

One of the biggest challenge when it comes to successful transformation efforts, is the stickiness of change in behaviour expected as part of the transformation. Any intervention is considered successful only if it leads to a lasting change in behaviour. And this is where most transformation efforts fail – they do not create a lasting change in behaviour that it set out to create. When we think about the reasons for this, we usually find the following: 1. People do not want to change This is the most common situation. This can happen when the change is being forced on […]

Leadership

Seeing the Unseen!

Earlier today, I read a post by Martha Bird (@anthro_tweeter). She is a business anthropologist at ADP focused on understanding the cultural contexts of work and workplaces. In the post, she talks about the importance of “Leading with Intention and Attention”. You can read the entire post here on the MIT Sloan Management Review site. Personally, I believe that one of the key skills that differentiate good leaders from great is their abilities to spot things that are not spoken or shown. Over time, they have developed the uncanny ability to know when there is more to a presentation or […]

Business Model, Entrepreneurship, Strategy

Building an Invincible Company

I recently watched Alexander Osterwalder deliver a keynote on “Building an Invincible Company“, based on his book with the same name. He shares a lot of great insights on leadership, innovation and building sustainable business advantage for businesses. You can watch the entire keynote here. Here are some lessons I took away from the talk: The moment a company thinks it is invincible, their decline becomes inevitable. Invincible companies constantly reinvent themselves while they are successful. They fully realise that they will be disrupted and so work hard to find invest in technologies and business ideas that could potentially disrupt […]

Leadership

The Rule Of Six

I came across the “Rule of Six” from a blog post by Adam Voigt (you can read his post here). In the post, he says, and I quote Apparently radio stations use this rule when a new song is released.  They have a quest to have you hear that song six times as quickly as possible, which is why it seems to us as though that song is being played every second track. After six exposures to the song, we move from analysing the song and into familiarity with the song.  Even if the song is horrendous, we tolerate the […]

Ideas

Crisis in Leadership and a Call for Action

In July of 2012, I had published a blog post about leadership in crisis. While reading the newspaper today, I realised that we are living in a world with a leadership crisis. Whether it is lack of strong political leadership or strong leadership in the corporate world. Is this because the current set of leaders never wanted to step down or nurture the next set of leaders? Or is this because we are living in a time of rapid change and the current crop of leaders don’t understand the dynamics of the change and are at a loss on how […]