Tag: Leadership

Leadership

Leaders are Not Great, Leadership Could Be

I stumbled onto an interview with Simon Sinek where he shared his thoughts on what does it take to become a great leader. You can watch the video here. One of his core insight is that leadership requires courage, courage to do the right thing under pressure, courage to stand up to what we think is the right thing to do, courage to make the tough decisions with limited information, courage to set a direction and march forward (believing that it is the right direction), courage to give credit when things go well and take the heat when things don’t […]

Inspiration, Leadership

Insanely Interesting People who Influenced Me #17 Joseph Campbell

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

Changing Beliefs Vs Replacing Beliefs

A couple of days ago, I took a flight from Mumbai to Delhi for work and when I was stepping out of the flight in Delhi, I saw the pilot for the next leg of the journey walk in. He then did something that was totally out of context but showed his culture and character. He bent down and touched the entrance of the aircraft and then with the same motion, touched his forehead. For all the Indians out there, you know exactly what this means.  He was praying to the aircraft. In Hindu tradition, you touch the feet of […]

Leadership, Marketing

Unlocking Leadership Influence: The Art of Communication

As leaders, one of the thing that we are expected to do is to communicate with the teams that we work with all the time. In many cases, our effectiveness as a leader may even depend on our ability to communicate. We might communicate to inform, inspire or influence. We need different strategies for different objectives. If we are communicating to inform, we need clarity in our communication. If we are communicating to inspire, we need our message to have contrast and colour. We need to be able to paint a picture of what is possible. If we are communicating […]

Inspiration, Leadership

What can we learn from Bertha Benz?

I recently read a blog post by Dave Trott and was blown away by the story of Bertha Benz and the role she played in the wide-spread adoption of motor vehicles. You can read his post here. The story, in short, is as follows: Karl Benz built his internal combustion engine based vehicle (3 wheeled) and was continuing to iterate to try and make it perfect, without being able to sell them. Bertha at one point in time lost her patience with this continuous tinkering and decided to take things in her own hand. One fine day, early in the […]