Leadership

First Principles Based Leadership – 4 Ways to Know Anything

Premise I was introduced to John Vervaeke and his work by the inimitable Matt Church who leads the Thought Leaders Business School and is based in Australia. John is an award-winning professor of psychology, cognitive science, and Buddhist psychology at the University of Toronto. He says that there are four different ways we can know things, which he calls the 4P’s of Knowing. These are about the manners in which and the mechanisms of knowing something rather than the content of the knowledge itself or how we know about something rather than what we know of. The four ways (4P’s) […]

Leadership

How to find Opportunities to Unlock Significant Performance

Premise One of the things that every leader is expected to do is to find ways to drive significant value from their teams. Good leaders are always trying to look for opportunities that can unlock significant value creation. If you know me at all, you know that I am a big fan of the work done by Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt, the creator of the “Theory of Constraints“. He had this belief that the biggest constraint that any business faces is Management attention. If we rephrase this, the biggest constraint that any organisation faces is the paucity of their leadership team’s […]

Ideas, Leadership, Quotes

Price of Discipline or the Cost of Regret

In this memorable quote, best selling author Robin Sharma compares regret with the effort of taking action. It costs us either ways. If we take action, it costs us in time and energy and if we don’t act, it costs us in regret over time. It is upto each one of us which bill we choose to pay. So, let’s choose wisely!

Leadership

First Principles Based Leadership: Six Perspectives That can Help us Transform from Good leaders to Great Leaders

Premise The most important act we do as a leader is our interactions with those we lead. The quality of these interactions lead to the results we achieve through them. To transform from average or good leaders to great leaders, we need to develop the ability to assess any given interaction and respond based on the need of the situation and the person we are interacting with. I believe that we can do this well, if we can learn to think and behave from six different perspectives for every interaction we have with our team and then choose which perspective […]

Leadership

First Principles Based Leadership – Introducing Systems Thinking for Leaders

Premise This post is relevant for you irrespective of where you are currently situated in leadership ladder (Individual contributor, team lead, leading teams, leading managers, leading lines of business or leading organisations). While systemic awareness this is a foundational skill, it gets more and more crucial as you climb the leadership ladder. So, we would be better off learning about this while we are early in our careers and build on it as we grow by adding nuances and being intentional and learning from our experiences interacting with systems. What is a system? Before we can start to understand or […]