Mukesh Gupta's Blog, page 17

PBTO: The Art of Leading with Pankaj Rusia

Premise: In this first episode of a new series, which will be focused on leadership, we host a practicing leader – Pankaj Rusia. He currently works for SAP as the Head of Customer Success for the SAP HR Cloud business are and is based out of Singapore. As the Head of Customer Success for SAP South East Asia, he is on a mission to make customers look great in front of their leadership, employees, and managers, and to help them get the best out of their SuccessFactors solutions. Insights from the ...

Learn Any Hard Skill by Cal Newport

Premise: We live in a world that is changing much faster than we can keep pace with. The rapid evolution of Artificial Intelligence is a testament to this. As I talk in my book Thrive, we will be called upon to learn something new all the time, just to stay relevant. If we are to thrive, we need to be able to turbo charge our ability to learn. It is in this context that I really liked a video posted by Cal Newport, that he released at the start of the year on his YouTube channel and would like t...

Infectious Generosity

Premise: I watched this TED talk delivered by Chris Anderson and was inspired by this. He tells a lot of stories that have sparked the imagination of people, who went on to spread a lot of joy by being generous and creative. I also like the concept that Ben Zanders talks about in his book, The Art of Possibility, about “Giving an A”. At the beginning of every class that he teaches, he tells his students that he will give them an “A” as their grade, provided they write him a letter, dated the day...

How to Create a Culture of Learning in Your Organization

The Secrets to Living Longer, Happier and Healthier

Premise: In the past couple of days, I have come across two women, two doctors who have in their own ways shared the importance and impact that our thoughts have on our body. First, Meet Dr. Gladys McGarey. She is 103 years old and considered the mother of Holistic Medicine. In this captivating and powerful interview, she shares the secrets to a longer, healthier, happier life. – LOVE & LIFE, together. At 103, she confesses to have a 10 year plan and also that she found her true voice when she w...

How to create a culture that supports creativity and fosters innovation

How To Make this Year Your Best Year Ever

Premise: I was invite to deliver a workshop on how to set up your year to be “Your Best Year Ever” recently and here is what I had shared with them in terms of how to think about or approach this task. I believe in order for any year to be our best year ever, it needs to be balanced and see success and growth in all areas of our lives. And I think the key areas that we need to consider are as below: If we have a year where we are able to balance our health and wealth […]

How to Mentor More People Without Getting Burned Out

Premise: One of the things that all leaders, sorry, all good leaders, get asked, is to mentor someone. The better the leader, the more such request that we tend to get. However, the time that we have for mentoring is fairly limited. While the mentee’s benefit a lot from the mentoring, there are reasons to believe that mentoring also benefited me as much as a mentors. So, it is in our best interest to mentor as many people as we can, given our limited time, and do so in such a way that we don’t b...

Story of the Creation of the Humble Mouse as Narrated by Steve Jobs and Its Lesson in Leading Innovation

Earlier today, I stumbled upon a video of Steve Jobs talking about the creation of the humble mouse and why he had to go to David Kelly Designs (which later on became IDEO) to get it done. You can watch the video here. In the video, he shares that content is more important than process, when it comes to innovation and creativity. The question is what does he mean by content? He is not talking about the content that we refer to. He is talking about the sum of character, knowledge and the curiosit...

PBTO: Mindsets to Become a High Performing Leader

In this live presentation that I delivered at an event, I introduce a model or a framework of leadership that I have created – The Butterfly Model of leadership and then go in detail about one of the key pillars of this model, which is “Leaders Mindsets” which allow them to perform at a very high level. “Mindset change is not about picking up a few pointers here and there. It’s about seeing things in a new way” – Carol Dweck, Author: Mindset – The New Psychology of Success. As Carol said above, ...