Mukesh Gupta's Blog, page 23

The Rule Of Six

I came across the “Rule of Six” from a blog post by Adam Voigt (you can read his post here). In the post, he says, and I quote Apparently radio stations use this rule when a new song is released.  They have a quest to have you hear that song six times as quickly as possible, which is why it seems to us as though that song is being played every second track. After six exposures to the song, we move from analysing the song and into familiarity with the song.  Even if the song is horrendous, we tol...

Crisis in Leadership and a Call for Action

In July of 2012, I had published a blog post about leadership in crisis. While reading the newspaper today, I realised that we are living in a world with a leadership crisis. Whether it is lack of strong political leadership or strong leadership in the corporate world. Is this because the current set of leaders never wanted to step down or nurture the next set of leaders? Or is this because we are living in a time of rapid change and the current crop of leaders don’t understand the dynamics of t...

Effectiveness Before Efficiency

Earlier today I read a blog post by Mike Shipulski titled “If you can be one thing, be effective“. It was a really short and to the point. The crux of the matter is the following: Being effective trumps being efficient or productive!! The insight behind all of these assertions is that being productive or efficient at the wrong things only leads to waste. So, Efficiency or productivity or speed comes after we become effective at what we aspire to do. This creates a significant question that needs...

Three Primary Roles of a Leader

There is a lot of expectations from leaders, specially when we are in an environment that is ambiguous. Matt Church in his “Speakership” programs talks about the role of leaders and he says that there has ever been only three things that leaders have ever done. Replace fear with confidence: This assumes that we, as leaders know what our teams are afraid of. Some of the fears are easy to guess (fear of getting sick) and some not so. So, it is important that we learn how to understand what are the...

Under the Surface

Yesterday, I watched the movie – Encanto streaming on Disney+ and really loved the movie and the underlying concept that it is based on. This song encapsulates the feeling that the movie handles. I would recommend you watch this 3 min song (and the entire movie if you have the time). I think as leaders, it is our responsibility to learn the way we and the people we lead feel under the surface (in addition to knowing how we feel under the surface ourselves). This is as simple as asking and as dif...

What does Riding a Bicycle teach us about Leading in Uncertain Times

At first glance, there doesn’t seem to be much in common between knowing how to ride a bicycle and leading an organisation during uncertain times. However, watching a short video about how much we don’t really understand about how we ride a bicycle made me realise how much there is in common between this and leading an organisation in uncertain times. First things first, I would highly recommend that you watch this video and then we can continue this conversation. If you are anything like me, yo...

Dealing with Complex Adaptive Systems with Dave Snowden

We are living in a world where things are changing at a pace that is difficult to keep up with. In such a scenario, as leaders, it is important for us to learn how to deal with complex adaptive systems (which is how organisations and markets function – including us and the people who we lead). Dave Snowden created the Cynefin framework that helps us understand the kind of system we are operating under and shares the way we could function within the system. I wrote about it last week here. In thi...

The Art of Kintsugi and Lessons in Leadership

Kintsugi is an old Japanese art of repairing broken ceramic pottery with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold. Instead of hiding the fact that the ceramic was broken, the art accentuates and celebrates this by converting the ordinary piece of ceramic to a piece of art. You can find more information about this art and the philosophy behind the same in the video here. There are many some very important lessons in leadership that we can gleam from this art, if we so desire. Ceramic articles t...

Lessons in Leading Product Designers or Innovators from James Dyson’s AMA

If you are leading product development or any form of design teams or creative professionals or leading an innovation effort, I think you will find the short video very insightful. In the video, James Dyson answers questions on product design curated from twitter. I think that the selection of questions and the answers given by James Dyson as part of this AMA are really worth listening multiple times. You can watch the entire video here. One fundamental learning for us as leaders from his respon...

Having Difficult Conversations

As leaders, it is inevitable that at some point in time we will need to have some form of a difficult conversation with someone. It could be as simple as providing someone with critical feedback that they might not like or as difficult as letting someone go. It is never easy and needs a lot of patience, care and empathy on our part, whenever we are called upon to have such difficult conversation. Recently, the CEO of Better.com had one such difficult conversation with his staff, when he had to l...