Tag: Learning

Leadership

3 Things That I Look for When Hiring

We all end up in a situation when we are required to hire someone. It might be to grow your business or to replace someone who has decided to move on her career.  There is already lot of good advice on hiring best practices. However, I would like to share with you three things that i look for in a candidate before deciding to hire her.  Passion: The first thing that I look for in a person is passion. The passion could be for any topic, not necessarily their jobs or roles in the past but for any topic. I […]

Leadership

When Does True Learning Happen?

Imagine that you are a piano virtuoso and are  invited to play  in a series of live concerts all through summer in a different country. So, what do you do? You practice your part diligently and are excited and ready to perform your piece. Due to some reason, you have not been able to practice with the entire orchestra, but that doesn’t matter much as the orchestra and yourself are professionals and know your entry’s exits and more importantly, the conductor of the orchestra can take care of that. So, you go on stage all prepared and the orchestra starts… And […]

Ideas

Ideas for Budget Free Training and Development for Your Employees

Today, all organizations are under constant stress to reduce costs and maintain profitability. One of the casualties is the training budgets to train your employees. What might we do to continually improve the learning and development activities of the employees without much budgetary support? Free Training: As a team, decide what skills need to be developed. Then scout for an online course on platforms like coursera or VentureLab and participate in the learning activity as a team (most of these are free and hence no budget limitations). Alternately, create teams and assign each team to attend specific courses and then get […]

Sales

The Art of the Quick Phone Call

I have found the article on the art of the quick phone call by Mark Suster very interesting and helpful. I have had to sell to a lot of people on the phone and I have learnt from experience that the tips that Mark has listed work really well. Few more things that I would like to add to the list are: Summarize the discussion or decision in an email and share it with the caller. This will help clear mis-understandings upfront.  Pls share any pre-read that can help save time and provide back-ground information for the call at least a day ahead if possible or […]

Business Model

Business Model Innovation: Learning from the peers

CISCO has been talking about Smart + Connected Communities which have a single intelligent common network backbone on which multiple services can be built and provided thereby increasing efficiencies and effectiveness of the services.  They have been promoting this service for a reasonably long time now with some moderate success. When you think of the different challenges that CISCO has with regards to S+CC is very similar to the challenges that Sun Edison faced a few years ago.  A little about Sun Edison: They were an organization in the business of installing and maintenance of solar power systems for large organizations. They had considerable expertise in installing […]