Mukesh Gupta's Blog, page 30

The Power of Initiative

I just read about David Aguilar, aka, “HAND Solo” and how he holds a Guinness Record for building the first fully functional LEGO prosthetic arm. He has gone on to iterate and now is at the fifth version of the prosthetic arm, MK-V, even carries a Spike Prime Hub – a programmable control unit capable of receiving and sending orders from sensors to motors. You can read his story at the original post by Sanj Atwal, on the website of Guinness world records here. You can also follow his journey on h...

Trusting Adults to Behave like Adults

I read a post on Nature.com which talks about lessons to be learned by governments about communications and trusting the public with hard truth. You can read the entire post titled “Covid Lessons: Trust the Public with hard Truths” here. I believe that the lessons are as much valid for business leaders as much for the governments and the public. Bureaucracy is usually a result of not trusting our employees to do the right thing in any given situation. Every time we see an employee make a mistake...

Intellectual Curiosity, Critical Thinking and Perspective Taking

Just finished reading by Hank Barnes on Gartner’s blog where he talks about his pet peeves with the B2B world and I quote My biggest pet peeve is that the B2B world has DEVOLVED to  a world where three things don’t seem to be valued anymore – Hank Barnes (On the Gartner blog) The three things that he mentions are “Intellectual Curiosity, Critical Thinking and Perspective taking”. While he talks from the perspective of Businesses dealing with other Businesses, I reckon, these are true for each an...

Where do Ideas Come from?

I was recently speaking to a group of students about how can we learn to be creative on-demand and was asked this question. The student asked is there a way we can categorise all the different ways we can come up with a creative idea. This is another way of asking – Where do Ideas come from? I have written about this in the past here, here, here and here. There are multiple different ways to look at this question from. One way is to look at this from the lens that Steven Johnson wrote about in h...

How do we know when to quit?

A young student recently asked me the following question: How do I know it is time to quit something and when to persist with it? Here is how I answered the question: There is no one answer that fits everyone. There are many ways to figure this out. For me, the best way is to go back to the reason why I started something. If the reason I started something is still relevant and important, I know that I would like to continue to engage on this topic. Then the next question to ask is if the activit...

China’s ‘Negative List’ Adds Entry Limits to News Service Sector And Why I think This Could be a move in the Right Direction!

Last week saw Chinese government announce that they will no longer allow for private investments in the News industry. You can read more about this on the Bloomberg site here. In a strange way, I kind of think this is a good idea but not for the reasons that the Chinese government took this decision. Let me explain with respect to TV NEWS channels. My explanation below for the TV NEWS Channels holds true for newspapers to magazines to radio channels. It’s just easier to explain this from one per...

Reading or Watching with your own Filter on

I read this interesting post by Robert Twigger in which he talks about how he is trying to watch the NEWS with his own filter – a filter for creativity. He also shares a bit about the results. You can read his post here. This is interesting in many different ways. What he has done is make that which is hidden, obvious. Each one of us looks at the information that comes to us with a filter on. I say this on many occasions and also in my book Thrive, that the human brain is a large pattern recogni...

How Change Is Changing and What to Do About It

I read this interesting blog post about the changing nature of change, specially in the organisational context, in which the authors (Paul Kurchina, Glen Gonzalez & Stephanie Overby) share their perspectives and distinguish between the “C” change and the “c” change. I would highly encourage you to read it here. Here my take on this topic: Organisations (business or otherwise) will need to learn how to manage change well. This is soon going to become one of the core skills for them in order to ev...

How to Teach Young Adults to Identify Fake News? Make a Game they can Play!

I recently read this article about a new video game that is on Kickstart that allows young adults to learn about how to distinguish between real and fake news. You can read the article here.  I believe this is a great idea for the following reasons:  People learn a lot when they are having fun and don’t think about learning. I wrote about the concept of head fakes in my post about what I learnt from Randy Pausch’s last lecture. You can read that blog here. If the team designs the game well, whic...

Scaling a Creative Solution to a Tough Problem

One of the key environmental challenges is the accumulation of plastic waste in our oceans. There are a lot of people who are trying to solve this specific problem in their own ways. Some have built trash collecting robot boats, and other devices. I came across this interesting solution that AB Inbev is implementing in Mexico. You can read about this solution and more information about the project here. The company that owns the Corona brand of Beer found an interesting way to solve this problem...