Ancient Wisdom, Leadership

The Art of Kintsugi and Lessons in Leadership

Kintsugi is an old Japanese art of repairing broken ceramic pottery with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold. Instead of hiding the fact that the ceramic was broken, the art accentuates and celebrates this by converting the ordinary piece of ceramic to a piece of art. You can find more information about this art and the philosophy behind the same in the video here. There are many some very important lessons in leadership that we can gleam from this art, if we so desire. Ceramic articles tend to break. That is in their nature. Same way, people make mistakes. We, […]

Creativity, Innovation, Inspiration, Leadership

Lessons in Leading Product Designers or Innovators from James Dyson’s AMA

If you are leading product development or any form of design teams or creative professionals or leading an innovation effort, I think you will find the short video very insightful. In the video, James Dyson answers questions on product design curated from twitter. I think that the selection of questions and the answers given by James Dyson as part of this AMA are really worth listening multiple times. You can watch the entire video here. One fundamental learning for us as leaders from his response and from his journey as an inventor / innovator is that, a truly innovative product […]

Ideas

Having Difficult Conversations

As leaders, it is inevitable that at some point in time we will need to have some form of a difficult conversation with someone. It could be as simple as providing someone with critical feedback that they might not like or as difficult as letting someone go. It is never easy and needs a lot of patience, care and empathy on our part, whenever we are called upon to have such difficult conversation. Recently, the CEO of Better.com had one such difficult conversation with his staff, when he had to let go of 15% of his staff. The way he […]

Leadership

Decision Making Frameworks – The Cynefin Framework

As decisions, we are all expected to make decisions all the time. As I have mentioned in my earlier blogs, it always helps to have a model or a framework to help us make sense of all the information that we come across and then decide the course of action. One such decision making framework is “The Cynefin Framework”. You can listen to Dave Snowden, who created the framework, explain the framework here. This model is a big help in both sense making and decision making. It is a very short video (about 8 mins) and so I recommend that […]

Creativity, Innovation, Leadership

Leading for Creativity and Innovation

One of the primary responsibilities of a leader is our ability to enable our teams to fuel their creativity and drive innovation. Kevin Roberts (who used to be the CEO and later went on to become the Executive Chairman of one of the most creative organisation – Saatchi & Saatchi) delivered a keynote on creativity and innovation and I think there is a lot that we can learn from the keynote. You can watch the entire keynote here. If you are tasked with coming up with innovation in your organisation, which typically, starts with coming up with creative ideas, I […]