Leaders must adopt emergent leadership in a rapidly changing world with new workforce expectations, technological advancements, and increasing competition. Becoming intentional, aware, and capable of sense-making is key, alongside viewing actions as experiments and monitoring for unintended consequences, thus necessitating continuous dynamic adaptation and a cultural shift away from rigid planning towards empowerment and engagement.
We live and work in some sort of a system. Our very body is a system. So, developing the ability to understand and work better with systems can be a super power – both as an individual and (even more so) as a leader. One of the most foundational aspects about systems that we need to understand is that all systems are living, breathing and constantly evolving. However, each one of them has a tendency to be in a specific state or can transition from one state to another. For example water can transition between solid, liquid and gas but […]
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 […]
Leo Szilard, in his book – The voice of the dolphins, and other stories has a short story titled The Mark Gable Foundation. In this short story, there is a conversation between two characters, one of who thinks that the pace of scientific change is too fast and is seeking ideas on how to slow it down. Here is their exchange: “I’m thinking of setting up a trust fund. I want to do something that will really contribute to the happiness of mankind; but it’s very difficult to know what to do with money. When Mr. Rosenblatt told me that […]
In a recent blog, advertising legend Dave Trott shares the story of the insight that led the Wright brothers succeed in recording the first human flight in history, while everyone else struggled and failed. The key insight was that they understood that it was not the air under the wings that powered the flight but it was the lack of air above the wings that sucked the aircraft upwards. This was going against all known wisdom of the day. So, there is a time and place for following conventions and there is a time and place when defying conventional thinking […]
