Rules to Live By

Premise: We live in a world that changes faster than we can make sense of to respond in any meaningful fashion. In such scenario, how we respond to the changes around us can have a significant impact on our lived experience. The best way that I have found to respond to such a scenario is to build for ourselves a set of guiding principles that determines our response to any given situation. I call them my rules to live by. Having thought about them and intentionally listed them down helps me make quick decisions (and sometimes even subconsciously) so that […]

Let Creative Ideas Surface

I was talking to someone earlier today about creativity and the need for creative ideas to drive innovation to enable us to solve difficult problems like climate change and achieving the SDG goals.. I was surprised when he said, that he was not the creative type and that he finds it really difficult to come up with creative ideas and so avoids participating in brainstorming sessions.. I strongly and fully believe that we are all born creative and “Deep inside us, creative ideas are already there! We just need to let them surface!” Mukesh Gupta This requires us to be […]

The Law of the Loaf

One of the responsibilities of leaders is to organise our people and create contexts within which they operate. This context has a significant impact on the results that the teams can achieve. One way we put in place these contexts is through the culture we operate under (intentionally or unintentionally). And this decides how we interact with each other – as one entity moving toward the goal or as individuals working on each our own goals. It is fairly evident that we are much more effective when we are all working towards a common shared goal. So, the question is […]

Streets, Roads, Stroads and Leadership Effectiveness

I was listening to a podcast episode on 99% Invisible hosted by the inimitable Roman Mars and they were talking about Stroads, which piqued my curiousity. So, today, we will explore this topic but from a leadership lens. Before we go ahead, I think it makes sense for us to define each one of these terms and what it means. Roads: A road is defined as a medium to move vehicles (cars, trucks, etc) from one point to another as quickly as possible. By this definition, all your highways and express ways are all roads. Streets: Street is a medium […]