Mukesh Gupta's Blog, page 22

A Framework for High Performance Leadership

Premise: I read a post by Michael McCune on Gartner’s blog about thought leadership and it resonated really well with me. In the post, he talks about the importance of original thought provoking content. Content that deepen’s someone’s understanding of their own challenges and how to solve them by sharing an insight that is either original or is non-obvious has significant impact. I agree with his analysis and also the kind of impact that he shares this can have on someone’s behaviour (Buying or...

Of Clouds and Clocks

Sir. Karl Popper, in one of his lectures, elaborates about the presence of two types of systems – the clocks and the clouds. Clocks: At one end of the spectrum are Clocks. Clocks are those systems that can be taken apart to understand how they function and assembled back together and when done right, will continue to function the way they were designed. They are predictable. They can be simple or complex but with enough time and skill, we can understand each and every part of the system, their r...

3 Skills for all Leaders to Cultivate – Naming, Framing and Priming

Premise: One of the key responsibilities that we have as leaders is to make sense of what is happening in and around the teams that we lead and share this with our teams as and when required. The way we do this could be either through writing (emails, blogs, etc) or by speaking (in all-hands, at events, 1-1 calls, etc). In either case, we need to be careful about the language we use, as the way we use the language has a big impact on what others perceive or understand from our communication. So,...

Using KPI’s to drive Peak Performance with Stacey Barr – The Performance Measure Specialist

In this episode of Pushing Beyond the Obvious, we host Stacey Barr – The Performance Measure Specialist. Stacey is a specialist in strategic performance measurement and evidence-based leadership. She specialises in using practical performance measurement as the catalyst for creating a high-performance culture that achieves measurable success. She is also the creator of the PuMP® methodology. PuMP® is a performance measurement methodology that routinely transforms measurement cynics into its grea...

Unintended Consequences

When we are leading a team in an environment that is complex and full of uncertainty, it is important to understand that every decision we make will always have unintended and unpredictable consequences. As leaders, we need to not only expect that but go looking for it to ensure that the unintended consequence is not something that can have a significant negative impact on what we set out to achieve. In the early years of the last century, Hanoi had a rat problem. The French colonial government ...

Wishing you a very happy “World Creativity and Innovation Day” #WCID

Today, April 21st is celebrated as the “World Creativity and Innovation Day“. Do we really need a creativity and innovation day? Shouldn’t every day be about creativity and innovation? I think this is a discussion for another day. For now, lets stick with celebrating the day (recently, any excuse to celebrate is a good excuse, if we need one at all). Here is a short video of how and why the UN announced April 21 as the World Creativity and Innovation Day. Over the past decade, I have written man...

How to Win in the Age of Unreasonable Consumer

I recently stumbled onto a video of Adam Morgan (Co-founder of eatbigfish and the co-author of a brilliant book – A Beautiful Constraint) shares his perspectives on how we live in an age of unreasonable consumers and what do we need to think about in order to succeed in this world where we are surrounded by unreasonable consumers. You can watch the entire video here. The first question that comes to mind when I listen to Adam present is to question if we really have become unreasonable consumers...

3 Questions to Ask Before We Start Any Transformation Effort

One of the biggest challenge when it comes to successful transformation efforts, is the stickiness of change in behaviour expected as part of the transformation. Any intervention is considered successful only if it leads to a lasting change in behaviour. And this is where most transformation efforts fail – they do not create a lasting change in behaviour that it set out to create. When we think about the reasons for this, we usually find the following: 1. People do not want to change This is the...

Seeing the Unseen!

Earlier today, I read a post by Martha Bird (@anthro_tweeter). She is a business anthropologist at ADP focused on understanding the cultural contexts of work and workplaces. In the post, she talks about the importance of “Leading with Intention and Attention”. You can read the entire post here on the MIT Sloan Management Review site. Personally, I believe that one of the key skills that differentiate good leaders from great is their abilities to spot things that are not spoken or shown. Over tim...

Building an Invincible Company

I recently watched Alexander Osterwalder deliver a keynote on “Building an Invincible Company“, based on his book with the same name. He shares a lot of great insights on leadership, innovation and building sustainable business advantage for businesses. You can watch the entire keynote here. Here are some lessons I took away from the talk: The moment a company thinks it is invincible, their decline becomes inevitable. Invincible companies constantly reinvent themselves while they are successful....