Tag: culture

Innovation, Leadership, transformation

Lessons in Leading Transformation

Premise:   We are living in a world where a lot of organisations are being forced to transform the way they operate. As we all know, being forced to change is not a good place to be in. The ability of leaders to lead their organisation through this transformation process will be paramount in enabling their organisations to continue to remain relevant.   I came across an old video (from 1993), where Dr. Barbara Lawton shares her perspective and the perspectives from Dr. Deming and his principles on how to lead a transformation process. I could not believe what I […]

Ideas, Innovation, Leadership

Why Some Ideas Never Get Heard!

Premise: I have been reading and writing about ideas and how ideas spread and the role they play in innovation. However, there was a question that almost always bothered me – Why some ideas, despite being great ideas, never got the traction they deserved, both within an organisation and in the marketplace. The answer to this question was provided by Nilofer Merchant in her TEDx talk that she shared on her blog. If this is a topic of interest for you, i would strongly recommend that you start following her blog and the work that she does. Here is the […]

Leadership

Creating a Culture of Accountability

One of the biggest challenges that leaders face in creating a culture of high performance is their ability to create an environment where their teams are accountable for their results that they have committed to achieve. Creating a culture of accountability is exactly that — creating a culture. It is not easy and it starts with them. They are the custodians of the culture within their organisations. The culture is created one action at a time of the leader. So, if you want your teams to be accountable, you as a leader need to be accountable. So, what does being accountable […]

Leadership

The Most Important Decisions That we Make as Leaders

In 2006, I was being interviewed by Saint Gobain Glass for a role in their customer service, production planning and logistics team. I had to go through 2 levels of screening by the HR agency, followed by an aptitude test, an interview with the hiring manager, the HR manager and then finally by the MD himself. I was told that the final interview for every employee hired in the organization was done by the MD himself (it was a 250 employee organization when I was being interviewed), irrespective of the role the employee is being hired for. That did not […]

Innovation

Innovation Isn’t an Idea Problem, Nor is it a Recognition Problem

In a recent HBR article with the same title, David Burrus argued that Innovation is a recognition problem. He also went on to propose a solution to this problem, one that Rhode Island based Rite-Solutions is already using. The general idea is that people are given a certain fixed amount of virtual currencies (say 10000$) which they can invest in any of the idea that is proposed on their internal idea site. This could eliminate the bias of any one or a set of executives, who are usually responsible for deciding on the feasibility of any particular idea. In my […]