Mukesh Gupta's Blog, page 15

Breaking Norms to Breakthrough

I stumbled onto a TikTok video about a skating race and how one athlete out-thought her competitors to register a historic win. You can watch the video here. The athlete won the competition right at the start by breaking the norms of how you are supposed to race to win. The norm was that everyone start slow to preserve their energy and then as they come close to the final laps, put all your effort and energy and get away from the pack. The winner of this race did the exact opposite. She broke aw...

How to Move from Bad Ideas to Breakthrough Ideas

Premise: I came across this reel on Instagram and loved the story and wanted to share it with you all. You can watch the reel here. While the story itself is better told by Dr. Caroline Brookfield in the reel, I wanted to share other things that I learnt watching and listening to the story and wanted to share that with you. So, here we go: Lesson 1: The importance of Psychological Safety The person who shared the idea about poking people’s eye was able to share the idea (which eventually led to ...

Work Remotely or Return to Office

Premise: Currently there is a big debate going on around the world with respect to where do we work from. There is a camp of people who think they are more productive and save time, money and attention by working remotely. There is another camp which believes that working remotely has a lot of limitations, specially around preserving the company culture, innovation or helping new hires integrate with the organisation. Both have their merits but not in the ways that we would think at first glance...

Failure vs Regret

Failing at something that we tried to accomplish is better than not having attempted it at all and regretting about it!

Leaders are Not Great, Leadership Could Be

I stumbled onto an interview with Simon Sinek where he shared his thoughts on what does it take to become a great leader. You can watch the video here. One of his core insight is that leadership requires courage, courage to do the right thing under pressure, courage to stand up to what we think is the right thing to do, courage to make the tough decisions with limited information, courage to set a direction and march forward (believing that it is the right direction), courage to give credit when...

PBTO: The Art of Leading in the Age of AI with Damien Cummings

In this interesting conversation, an accomplished CEO and digital transformation leader, Damien Cummings shares his perspective on the art of leading in uncertain times. He shares how leaders need to do to stay relevant in an ever changing context, specially the technology landscape. Here are some things that we cover in this conversation:  You can find more information about Damien here. You can connect with him on LinkedIn here.  Books discussed in the video:  If you would like to watch us hav...

Leaders Worth Following have High Levels of Self Awareness

Premise: I saw this short video about how to master your emotions and was reminded about one of the foundational qualities that leaders worth following need to master – their level of self awareness. I believe that self awareness can be thought as consisting of at least three layers. Intellectual Self Awareness: The outer most layer is the intellectual self awareness. What this means is that they are aware about what they want, why they want it, what are they prepared to do for it and what is a ...

Effective Leadership is about Connecting People with Purpose, Ideas and Resources

Leaders are most effective when they are able to connect people they lead to a larger purpose (larger than all of us), connect people with different ideas so there can be better ideas and finally provide them with the requisite resources to bring those ideas alive. A ll this, while creating an environment or a culture of trust, inclusion and accountability. Even when one of these ingredients is missing, the effectiveness of the leaders takes a nose dive. This also means that it is the responsibi...

How to Be Remarkable and Do Memorable Work?

Premise: I stumbled on to this performance by a school band and thought it was incredible and wanted to share this with all of you. When I think about this a bit more, I realised that there is a lot that we can learn from this band as leaders. Before we move to the learning part, first take the 8 to 10 mins to watch the band perform for the spectators here. One of the most powerful way to stand out is not to conform to the expectations that people have of you. We don’t expect a band to play […]

Failure is an Option, Fear is not!

Earlier today, I was listening to a panel discussion and something that one of the panelist, Bharathi Vishwanathan, said, stuck a chord with me. She is the chief digital and information officer at Suntory. She said and I quote: Failure is an option, fear is not – Bharathi Vishwanathan She said that this was the motto of her company. When I think about it, it makes a lot of sense, specially if you want to innovate and create a culture of experimentation and exploration. I have written about this ...