Mukesh Gupta's Blog, page 19

Masterclass – How to Thrive as Leaders Alongside Artificial Intelligence

We are living in a liminal moment where the possibilities that AI (all types of them) and the challenges that they pose to individual workers is being explored and being discussed.  What is not being discussed is the implications of wide-spread deployment of AI and the impact it will have on leaders and how and whom they lead?  If you are a leader in an organization which is actively looking to deploy artificial intelligence within your organisations workflow, you would benefit from watching the...

Two ways to Drive Performance Improvements

A recent post on GapingVoid talks about another performance equation (I shared one yesterday on my blog here): Performance improvements = Reducing Errors + Increasing Insights – Gary Klein The author of the post argues that while there is a lot of focus on reducing errors in organisations, there is not enough focus or energy spent on increasing the number of insights that people could share and use to drive productivity improvements. I think there are many reasons for this behaviour. Firstly, we...

Leaders Unite – Unlocking Peak Performance: Insights from a 3 Time Olympian

In a captivating keynote, Janne-Mueller Wieland, an Olympian and captain of the German women's hockey team, shared invaluable principles for high performance. IN this post, I share my key learnings from the keynote to unlocking peak performance.

Leaders Unite – Leading in Uncertain and Chaotic Times

Unlocking Leadership Influence: The Art of Communication

As leaders, one of the thing that we are expected to do is to communicate with the teams that we work with all the time. In many cases, our effectiveness as a leader may even depend on our ability to communicate. We might communicate to inform, inspire or influence. We need different strategies for different objectives. If we are communicating to inform, we need clarity in our communication. If we are communicating to inspire, we need our message to have contrast and colour. We need to be able t...

Bear it with a Smile and Learn from Mistakes

Julia Child was a phenomenal cook and a TV personality. This is a quote from her book – My Life in France: Usually one’s cooking is better than one thinks it is. And if the food is truly vile, then the cook must simply grit her teeth and bear it with a smile, and learn from her mistakes. – Julia Child, My life in france In my experience, what she said about one’s cooking is true about every aspect of our lives. We are usually better leaders that we give ourselves credit for, we are better person...

What can we learn from Bertha Benz?

I recently read a blog post by Dave Trott and was blown away by the story of Bertha Benz and the role she played in the wide-spread adoption of motor vehicles. You can read his post here. The story, in short, is as follows: Karl Benz built his internal combustion engine based vehicle (3 wheeled) and was continuing to iterate to try and make it perfect, without being able to sell them. Bertha at one point in time lost her patience with this continuous tinkering and decided to take things in her o...

Why do I Continue to Blog and You Should too

I have been writing on this blog for more than 12 years and this is my 851st post. I wanted to reflect on the experience. For a variety of reasons (some known and some unknown), this blog never became popular nor did I get significant number of visitors. I do not make any money from the blog. So, my friends, family and colleagues have asked me many a times the question: If you are not making money of this, why do this at all? What is your purpose of spending so much time and effort on writing an...

Celebrating 25 Women Who Influenced and Shaped My Thinking And Work

I wanted to take this opportunity this International Women’s day to recognise and thank women who have had a significant impact on my thinking in my professional life. I have also been fortunate enough to host many brilliant women as part of my podcast – “Pushing Beyond the Obvious) and want to take the opportunity to thank them for the time and insights they shared with me. Here we go: 1. Bernadette Jiwa I have learnt more about marketing and more importantly story telling from Bernadette than ...

Let Creative Ideas Surface

I was talking to someone earlier today about creativity and the need for creative ideas to drive innovation to enable us to solve difficult problems like climate change and achieving the SDG goals.. I was surprised when he said, that he was not the creative type and that he finds it really difficult to come up with creative ideas and so avoids participating in brainstorming sessions.. I strongly and fully believe that we are all born creative and “Deep inside us, creative ideas are already there...