Entrepreneurship, Leadership

How Buildings and Businesses Learn – Stewart Brand

I just finished watching part 6 of a 6 part documentary shot for the BBC, written and directed by Stewart Brand (the president of the Long Now Foundation), based on his book – “How Buildings Learn“. You can watch the entire series here. If you only want to watch the part 6, that I will talk about in this post, you can watch that here. When you watch this video, just swap the buildings with organisations or businesses and you will find that the entire video and you will realize that everything that Stewart talks about buildings is also true […]

Leadership

Five-P factors for Root Cause Analysis – Gartner

I read a post by Lydia Leong of Gartner on her blog about the 5P’s for root cause analysis for any given problem (the 6th P). You can read the entire post here. In the post the 5P’s that she talks about allow someone to go deep to find out what really happened and understand why it happened, so that whatever correction action needed to be taken can be done to avoid a similar problem arising again. She picks this framework from Macneil’s Five P factors model used in medicine/psychology and applies it under the IT management. The first ever […]

Leadership

Leaders are Curators of Culture

One of the responsibilities of leaders is as the curators of culture. It is pretty evident that the personality of a leader has an outsized effect on the culture of the team that they lead. I have seen people adopt the phrases used by their leaders in their vocabulary, the mannerisms of the leaders in their physical presence and the mental frames that leaders use in their thinking. If the leader responds to every email within an hour of receiving them, the chances are that their team is doing the same. If the leader clears their email during weekends and […]

Leadership

Flourish or Perish – We will be doing it Together

This TED talk by former CEO of Patagonia shows the scale of what is possible, if we have the vision and the leadership skills in place. Kristine Tompkins shares her journey from being a corporate CEO to being a nature conservationist. She shares the extent of the impact that one can have if only we are committed to the cause. She and her now deceased husband – Doug went about doing what they thought was the best thing to heal the planet. They put the larger good of our planet at the center of their lives for the past few […]

Leadership

Your Greatest strength could also become Your Greatest Weakness

Premise In a recent post, Mike Shipulski, talks about how the core strength of a business usually also becomes the biggest weakness for that business, as it ends up consuming all of the resources to optimise its growth and starves all new ideas for resources. I recommend that you read the entire post here. I reckon that this hypothesis holds true for all of us as individuals and as leaders as well. When put in a corner or when we are challenged, we typically fall back to the strategies that have worked well for us in the past. In some […]