Leadership

Residual Communication

I read this post about Residual Communication written by the British advertiser Dave Trott and it left a deep impression on me. You can read his post here. The idea is pretty simple – what do people remember from what we said, long after we said it. As a leader, I believe that we should obsess about residual communication. What do people remember the most after we had done sharing our vision, strategy or any idea. Our effectiveness as a leader depends on this. We will move on to other meetings and to other tasks expecting our people to act […]

Leadership

Improving Cognitive Diversity in our Teams

Mike makes a great point about 100% agreement within our teams. When we start seeing an increase of 100% agreement on our point of view, it is time for us to do two things: 1. Stop sharing our point of view until every one on the team has shared their opinions, without in any way giving away where we are leaning towards. That way the teams can share their honest opinions rather than toe the line that we lean towards. This is critical to avoid group think and encourage diversity of thought. 2. Identify and give the role of a […]

Leadership

Talent Vs Opportunity

This is a rant. Please ignore if you are not in a mood for somebody’s rant! I strongly believe that talent is equally distributed across any segment that we can think of {men vs women, rich vs poor, straight vs gay, Asian vs European vs African, black vs brown vs white folks, early talent vs experienced talent, developed nation vs developing nation, students of Ivy League universities vs public universities, etc). However, what differentiates the level of success in these segments is the distribution of opportunities. We have a tendency to provide opportunities to people like ourselves. While this is […]

Leadership

First Principles Based Leadership – Building our Systemic Awareness

Premise In this series of posts about First Principles Based Leadership, we have already covered the importance of and how to improve our self awareness, social awareness, cultural awareness and contextual awareness. In this post, we will explore the importance of systemic awareness and how can we continue to improve our ability to understand and be more aware of the systems within which we operate in. We live in a world where everything is inter connected. There is a system at every level of abstraction and these systems create the limits to our efficiency. Systems awareness refers to the ability to understand and identify the […]

Leadership

First Principles Based Leadership – Improving our Contextual Awareness

Premise In this series of posts about First Principles Based Leadership, we have already covered the importance of and how to improve our self awareness, social awareness and cultural awareness. In this post, we will explore the importance of context and contextual awareness and how can we become more aware of the contexts that we operate in. We live in a White Water World (as defined by John Seely Brown and Ann Pendleton-Jullian) where our environments tend to change pretty rapidly. Becoming aware of these changes in context is easy as they stare you in your face. Sometimes, we see small shifts over […]