Creativity, Innovation

Wishing you a very happy “World Creativity and Innovation Day” #WCID

Today, April 21st is celebrated as the “World Creativity and Innovation Day“. Do we really need a creativity and innovation day? Shouldn’t every day be about creativity and innovation? I think this is a discussion for another day. For now, lets stick with celebrating the day (recently, any excuse to celebrate is a good excuse, if we need one at all). Here is a short video of how and why the UN announced April 21 as the World Creativity and Innovation Day. Over the past decade, I have written many blog posts that talk about different perspectives on creativity, creative […]

Innovation, Leadership, Strategy

How to Win in the Age of Unreasonable Consumer

I recently stumbled onto a video of Adam Morgan (Co-founder of eatbigfish and the co-author of a brilliant book – A Beautiful Constraint) shares his perspectives on how we live in an age of unreasonable consumers and what do we need to think about in order to succeed in this world where we are surrounded by unreasonable consumers. You can watch the entire video here. The first question that comes to mind when I listen to Adam present is to question if we really have become unreasonable consumers? I believe the answer is absolutely. We now expect to have clean, […]

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 […]