Turning Status Quo into Your Ally

I recently read a blog post by Seth Godin titled, “The four cohorts of the status quo“. It reminded of the fact that as leaders, we need to understand the concept of status quo, how to leverage it and deal with it, as appropriate. This ability to not allow status quo to hinder our pursuits is a high leverage or impact skill for any leader. In the post, Seth talks about the four kinds of people and their relationship with Status quo – those who actively benefit from it, those who care about the stability that it provides, those who […]

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 […]

Insanely Interesting People who Influence me: #4 Seth Godin

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 […]

Lessons from Orchestra Conductors

In a recent blog post, Sethi Godin talks about how the famous conductors (orchestra) seem to be the only person on the orchestra that don’t make any sound at all and yet are the most important person on the team. He says, and I quote, Famous conductors are often judged for an hour or two on stage. They wear expensive clothes, make dramatic gestures and receive ovations. They also get paid a lot to carry a very little stick and they’re the only one on stage who doesn’t make noise. But it turns out that none of these things are […]

How to Stay In a Positive Mental State

I am a big fan of Anthony Iannarino and his work. He is one of the few sales thought leaders who understands that to be successful in sales, one doesn’t just need to master the selling techniques but also master oneself in many ways. One such piece of insight from Anthony has inspired this post. In his post “How to Change Your Mental State Now”, he shared the following insight. In order to change our mental state, we have three variables that we can work with: –    Changing our focus –    Changing the meaning –    Changing the physiology I highly […]