Leadership

The Power of Initiative

I just read about David Aguilar, aka, “HAND Solo” and how he holds a Guinness Record for building the first fully functional LEGO prosthetic arm. He has gone on to iterate and now is at the fifth version of the prosthetic arm, MK-V, even carries a Spike Prime Hub – a programmable control unit capable of receiving and sending orders from sensors to motors. You can read his story at the original post by Sanj Atwal, on the website of Guinness world records here. You can also follow his journey on his YouTube channel. What this story shows me is […]

Leadership

Trusting Adults to Behave like Adults

I read a post on Nature.com which talks about lessons to be learned by governments about communications and trusting the public with hard truth. You can read the entire post titled “Covid Lessons: Trust the Public with hard Truths” here. I believe that the lessons are as much valid for business leaders as much for the governments and the public. Bureaucracy is usually a result of not trusting our employees to do the right thing in any given situation. Every time we see an employee make a mistake, the tendency is to create a policy around it so that, that […]

Ideas, Innovation, Personal Growth

Intellectual Curiosity, Critical Thinking and Perspective Taking

Just finished reading by Hank Barnes on Gartner’s blog where he talks about his pet peeves with the B2B world and I quote My biggest pet peeve is that the B2B world has DEVOLVED to  a world where three things don’t seem to be valued anymore – Hank Barnes (On the Gartner blog) The three things that he mentions are “Intellectual Curiosity, Critical Thinking and Perspective taking”. While he talks from the perspective of Businesses dealing with other Businesses, I reckon, these are true for each and everyone of us and in every sphere of life – both personal and professional. While […]

Creativity, Ideas

Where do Ideas Come from?

I was recently speaking to a group of students about how can we learn to be creative on-demand and was asked this question. The student asked is there a way we can categorise all the different ways we can come up with a creative idea. This is another way of asking – Where do Ideas come from? I have written about this in the past here, here, here and here. There are multiple different ways to look at this question from. One way is to look at this from the lens that Steven Johnson wrote about in his best selling […]