Insanely Interesting People who Influenced me: #3 Swami Vivekananda

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 […]

Life Lessons from The Last Lecture of Randy Pausch

This was the title of the last lecture delivered by Randy Pausch at the Carnegie Mellon University lecture hall. He was terminally ill and only had a few days to live. If you have not watched this video, I would strongly encourage you to spend the hour and 15 mins that it takes to watch the video and while you do so, please do have a notebook close to you and take notes. In his humorous talk, he shares some great wisdom on life and how to live a life worth living. You can watch the video here. When there […]

Four insights on Achieving Resilient Growth Consistently

The best selling authors of the book – Blue Ocean Strategy, recently sent an email in which they speak about the 4 pieces of advice they give to their customers on how to build resilient growth for their organisations. Here are the 4 pieces of advice. 1. Focus on building a healthy, balanced portfolio of market-competing and market-creating strategic moves. Both are important. While market-competing moves generate today’s cash, market-creating moves ensure tomorrow’s growth.   2. Don’t wait for growth to slow to make market-creation a strategic priority.Prepare in advance. You’ll be buffered by your market-creating move in a downturn cycle […]

When your coworker does great work, tell their manager

I read this post on my feed and thought this was a very interesting post about recognising one of your co-workers.   You can read the entire post here.   However, to summarise the post:   1.  Ask before you write a glowing email to someone’s manager, if it is ok. There could be many different and valid reasons why someone might not want the praise. 2.  And when you do write, be specific about how they helped and the kind of impact it created. 3.  Send it to them and their managers. Each of them can use this differently. […]

A Checklist Every Leader Should Be Thinking About

I follow the  “The Great Game of Business” team and the work that they do to help enable businesses become open book and transparent to all their employees. If you are an entrepreneur, it is worthwhile to check their work and explore if it is a good fit for you and what you are trying to achieve. Yesterday, they posted a blog post (I have used the same title) which I found to be very useful to me and am sure will be useful to all leaders. You can read the full blog post here. The Checklist: This is a checklist […]