Tag: culture

Ancient Wisdom, Leadership

The Art of Kintsugi and Lessons in Leadership

KintsugiĀ is an old Japanese art of repairing broken ceramic pottery with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold. Instead of hiding the fact that the ceramic was broken, the art accentuates and celebrates this by converting the ordinary piece of ceramic to a piece of art. You can find more information about this art and the philosophy behind the same in the video here. There are many some very important lessons in leadership that we can gleam from this art, if we so desire. Ceramic articles tend to break. That is in their nature. Same way, people make mistakes. We, […]

Leadership, transformation

Lessons in Leadership with Ken Wilcox, Emeritus chairman of Silicon Valley Bank

In an interesting conversation with Todd Jick (Reuben Mark Faculty Director of Organizational Character and Leadership at Columbia Business School), Ken shares lessons in leadership from his personal experience having been a leader for more than 3 decades. This is a 45 mins video, which i would recommend that you watch. Have a pen and paper with you to make notes, and you will end up with a lot of notes. You can watch this conversation here. Here are the lessons I made a note of: Becoming a leader is an intentional decision. Reflect and think about why we want […]

Inspiration, Leadership

Insanely Interesting People who Influence me: #4 Seth Godin

For the rest of the year, I would like to take a moment and thank the people who have had a significant impact on me as an individual. The way they have lived their lives and their body of work has had an outsized impact on how I think about life in general and and work, in particular. Some of these are contemporary thinkers and some of them are just a memory. Some of them are famous in their own rights and some of them are yet to be found by others. Some of them are young and some of […]

Leadership

How to be an Agile Leader?

In a rather long blog post, Henna Inam shares her perspective on why board members of organisations need to be agile and also shares a framework from her book Wired for Disruption, which can be used to develop our agility muscles. While she shares this framework and how it is relevant for board members, I believe that this is as relevant for all leaders, irrespective of which level and how formal our leadership really is. So, assuming that we all agree that in a world which is moving fast, it is in the best interest of every leader to learn […]

Leadership

Leaders are Curators of Culture

One of the responsibilities of leaders is as the curators of culture. It is pretty evident that the personality of a leader has an outsized effect on the culture of the team that they lead. I have seen people adopt the phrases used by their leaders in their vocabulary, the mannerisms of the leaders in their physical presence and the mental frames that leaders use in their thinking. If the leader responds to every email within an hour of receiving them, the chances are that their team is doing the same. If the leader clears their email during weekends and […]