Leadership

Lessons in Leadership from Blind Runners and their Running Guides

Did you know that David Brown runs a 100m in under 11 seconds? So, what’s so special you ask? The special thing is that he is blind. He is the world’s fastest blind runner and has won two world championships and a Paralympic gold medal so far. You can watch a documentary, On | Untethered about him and his journey here. But I digress. When I stumbled onto his story, what struck me was the importance that the running guide plays in his success. The more I tried to read and understand how a running guide can empower visually impaired […]

Leadership

Being a Leader is not a Position, it is a Decision

This short image by Jessica Hagy reminded me of what leadership is all about and what it is not. It is not about authority. It is not about position. It is not about power. It is not about the “LEADER”. It is about making a decision. It is about being in service to a larger goal or a larger group. It is about turning up and being a better human. All of us are leaders the moment we decide to be one. It doesn’t matter if we are the CEO of an organisation or an intern in a large organisation. […]

Leadership

How to Listen as a Leader?

I read this post by Kevin Roberts (founder of Red Rose Consulting; business leader and educator; author and speaker; adviser on marketing, creative thinking and leadership) where he shares his insight on the current state of affairs, which in summary is “Everyone is talking and no one’s listening”. In his post he also shares that there are 4 types of listeners – People oriented, Action or Task oriented, content focused and fast. You can read his entire post (really short one) here. I believe that as leaders, it is paramount that we listen and do it well. However, as a […]

Leadership

Leading and The Future of Learning with Sanjay Sarma

Premise: We are inheriting a world which is seeing an unprecedented pace of change around us. This makes it super critical for us as leaders to enable a culture of continuous and on-going learning for our teams. We need to play a few different roles in this case. We need to practice what we preach, i.e., we need to continue to learn and do so publicly. This sends a message to all that continuous, ongoing learning is crucial for the organisation. This also creates a culture that supports ongoing learning. We also need to play the role of teachers, teaching […]

Leadership

007 Leadership Skills we can Learn from 007 (James Bond)

This is my 750th blog post on this blog and I wanted to write about something that I absolutely love. I absolutely love watching movies and have been a James Bond movie fan almost since the first time I watched him on screen (since Sir Sean Connery brought this to life). I was watching the trailer of the latest movie in the franchise – No Time to Die and got reminiscing about all the different Bond movies that I have watched in the past. I am looking forward to watching this one sometime soon. You can watch the trailer here. […]