Prashant Chopra's Blog, page 57

Do eyes light up when you’re around?

Do eyes light up when you’re around?

Those who make the biggest difference, energize others.

The law of energy is put more in than you take out.

Any person or system that takes out more than it puts in is dying. Reserves last for awhile, but death is imminent.

Successful leaders replenish energy in others. Energy looks like hope, optimism, and confidence.

Recharging people:

Leaders who over-emphasize deliverables and projects suck life out of people.

Leaders who energize, focus on projects and people. Foolish  leaders forget people come first. People complete projects.

Leaders who prioritize people are energizers.

Successful leaders monitor energy. What’s the mood of your team?

Surprising sources of energy:

Doing things you love. Rest is helpful, but doing what you love energizes. Help your team do things they love. Just ask, what do you love doing?

Challenges energize when they’re just out of reach. Too far and they drain.

Finishing energizes. Successful leaders create and celebrate finishing points. Great finishing points energize for the journey.

Developing new skills infuses energy. What are you doing to develop those around you?

Read more at the original article here at leadershipfreak.com by Dan.

Destiny.

“Every great accomplishment begins with a dream, never forget that within us all is the fortitude, patience and passion to change destiny.”

― Mark W. Boyer

The decline of empathy.

College students today are 40% less empathetic than they were 30 years ago, most of this decline attributed to prevalence of social media, reality TV, video games, and “hyper competitiveness”.

- A 2010 University of Michigan study.

Where are we taking our children with Facebook, twitter, Big Boss, Snapchat, and candy crush?

Boredom, anxiety, and enjoyment.

Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person’s capacity to act:-)

- Mihaly C.

Privacy, team work, and creating magic.

What does ‘teamwork’ mean in a contemporary workplace? Does it mean high energy no-walls-in-between discussions, everyone valuing/criticizing others opinion, until consensus is reached? Or does it mean solo stars outshining the results by working alone, focusing energy saved from discussions into relentless doing and improving?

What do you think works better?

Mandating shy/creative people to talk and socialize and collaborate in hallways, or letting them work a solution out in a focused solitary corner, and letting them shine and re-shine it?

Food for thought:-)

Tomorrow …

No one can go back, but everyone can go forward.

And tomorrow, when the sun rises, all you have to say to yourselves is:

I am going to think of this day as the first day of my life.

I will look on the members of my family with surprise and amazement, glad to discover that they are by my side, silently sharing that much-talked-about, but little understood thing called love.

I will pass a beggar, who will ask me for money. I might give it to him or I might walk past thinking that he will only spend it on drink, and as I do, I will hear his insults and know that it is simply his way of communicating with me.

I will pass someone trying to destroy a bridge. I might try to stop him or I might realise that he is doing it because he has no one waiting for him on the other side and this is his way of trying to fend off his own loneliness.

I will look at everything and everyone as if for the first time, especially the small things that I have grown used to, quite forgetting the magic surrounding them. The desert sands, for example, which are moved by an energy I cannot understand – because I cannot see the wind.

Instead of noting down things I’m unlikely to forget on the notebook I always carry with me, I will write a poem. Even if I have never written one before and even if I never do so again, I will at least know that I once had the courage to put my feelings into words.

When I reach a small village that I know well, I will enter it by a different route. I will be smiling, and the inhabitants will say to each other: ‘He must be mad, because war and destruction have left the soil barren.’

But I will keep smiling, because it pleases me to know that they think I am mad. My smile is my way of saying: ‘You can destroy my body, but not my soul.’

Tonight, before leaving, I’m going to spend time sorting through the pile of things I never had the patience to put in order. And I will find that a little of my history is there.

All the letters, the notes, cuttings and receipts will take on their own life and have strange stories to tell me – about the past and about the future. All the different things in the world, all the roads travelled, all the entrances and exits of my life.

I am going to put on a shirt I often wear and, for the first time, I am going to notice how it was made. I am going to imagine the hands that wove the cotton and the river where the fibres of the plant were born. I will understand that all those now invisible things are a part of the history of my shirt.

And even the things I am accustomed to – like the sandals which, after long use, have become an extension of my feet – will be clothed in the mystery of discovery.

Since I am heading off into the future, I will be helped by the scuff marks left on my sandals from when I stumbled in the past.

May everything my hand touches and my eyes see and my mouth tastes be different, but the same. That way, all those things will cease to be a still life and instead will explain to me why they have been with me for such a long time; and they will reveal to me the miracle of re-encountering emotions worn smooth by routine.

taken from THE MANUSCRIPT FOUND IN ACCRA, Paulo Coelho’ blog.

Celebrating a year, embracing the next:-)

The warrior [of light] has lived each and every day of the year that has gone by, and even though he has lost some great battles, he has survived and here he is. This is a victory. This victory has cost many difficult moments, nights of doubt, endless days of waiting. Since ancient times, celebrating a triumph has been part of the ritual of life itself.

Commemorating is a rite of passage.

His companions look at the happiness of the Warrior of Light and think to themselves: “why does he do this? He could be beaten in his next combat. He may provoke the enemy’s fury.”

But the warrior knows the reason for his gesture. He gains strength from the best present that victory can offer: confidence.

The warrior celebrates the year that has come to an end so he can be stronger for tomorrow’s battles.

Source: PauloCoelhoBlog.com

On creativity, solitude, and team work.

Remember Stephen Wozniak? In his memoir, he offers his advice to kids who aspire to great creativity:

Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me – they’re shy and they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone where they can control an invention’s design without a lot of other people designing it for marketing or some other committee. I don’t think anything revolutionary has been invented by committee. If you’re the rare engineer who’s an inventor and also an artist, I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone. You’re going to be best able to design revolutionary products and features if you are working on your own. Not on a committee. Not on a team.

What do you think? Is agility of development and team work important at the cost of creativity? What kind of projects do you think can be run in teams, keeping the teams engaged too?

As a side note, here is an interesting bit of new research on correlation, if any, between the degree of extroversion of a leader, and her team’s performance:

Extroverted leaders enhance the group performance when team members are passive (i.e. conforming, ready to follow the explicit lead by authority). On the other hand, introverted leaders are more effective with teams whose members are proactive, and take initiative (self managed, thinkers?). (Reference: Adam Grant’s work, Wharton).

Interesting, hmm? Think the efficient and extroverted organizational chains will be challenged enough before creative teams start to get ambiverted or introverted leaders? How about Agile teams – where there are no explicit leaders?

 

When the wars are over …

“… and when all the wars are over, a butterfly will still be beautiful.” 

― Ruskin Bond, Scenes from a Writer’s Life

[Quotiquette] When nobody notices …

“When you do something noble and beautiful and nobody noticed, do not be sad. For the Sun every morning is a beautiful spectacle and yet most of the audience still sleeps.”

― John Lennon.