Tag: awareness

Leadership

First Principles Based Leadership – Raising Cultural 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 and social awareness. In this post, we will explore the importance of cultural awareness and how can we become more culturally aware. Any and all deep dive into cultural awareness can only start by having worked and improved our self and social awareness. Without high levels of both self and social awareness, it is very difficult to improve our cultural awareness. Before we start delving into this, let’s first understand what is culture and what […]

Leadership

Blindspots

Premise: Yesterday, I stumbled onto a French advertisement, that shows, in a very impactful way, blindspots of truck drivers. Shot from a first person perspective, the ad has no music, no voice over, no gimmicks, just simple yet powerful visuals. Before we move ahead, please do take the 47 seconds to watch the advertisement here. As I watched this advertisement, the question that was going on in my mind was about my blindspots as a leader. The question is not if we have a blindspots but where are those blindspots. The next question to ask then is – how does […]

Ancient Wisdom, Leadership

Wisdom and Leadership

One of the key responsibility of a leader is to be able to perceive the difference between reality and what appears to be the reality, i.e., we need leaders who are wise. The question then is what is wisdom and is there a simple way to becoming wise. An old Indian metaphor can come to our help. It is that time of the day when it is neither dark nor light. You are walking through a park and you see something lying on the ground and you instinctively jump. That is our body reacting to keep us alive – better […]

Leadership

Unhurried Productivity with Digby Scott

One of the things that absolutely fascinates me is our obsession with productivity. And this obsession almost always leads us to feel guilty about not being busy all the time. I have written about being happily busy (another way to say unhurried productivity, but unhurried productivity sounds much better) here. Digby Scott has created a model that simplifies an important and complex idea is a very simple way. I highly recommend that you read the post by Digby on his blog here. You can read more about his experiment here and what he hopes to learn from it. He has […]

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 […]