Mukesh Gupta's Blog, page 32

Lessons for Leaders from the Movie – “The Fundamentals of Caring”

Premise:

This past weekend, I ended up doing what I really love doing – watch movies. One of the movies that I watched was the 2016 movie “The Fundamentals of Caring” featuring the unassuming . The movie was based on a book.

As the movie title says, the movie is about someone who takes on ...

The Power of Noticing

Premise:

One of the key skills that we need to develop if we want to be leaders, in general, is our ability to notice things. This is a meta skill, that once we learn, can be extremely useful in many spheres of our lives (work, home, community, etc).

What can we do about this:

The key to increasing our ability to notice is, to slow down. I am guilty of not doing this often. A lot of people that I know are guilty of the same as well. We are all so busy doing stuff (emails, meeting...

Leading Large Scale Cultural Transformation

I wanted to share this short video, in which Simon Sinek, in his usual style, shares the way he sees cultural transformation work.

Here is the video:

Here are some of the important concepts that he shares:

What doesn’t work:

Launching a formal company-wide transformation effort, with clearly laid out plans, executive presentations explaining the rationale for the change does not work. Typically, these are met with cynical, wait and watch responses from the employees. Th...

Less is more: Why our brains struggle to subtract

Premise:

It seems that our brains are naturally wired to think in an additive way when we are trying to solve problems. It is one of those brain hacks that we picked up from our ancestors but is no longer as useful to us as it was to them. So, if we can learn to think in the opposite direction, i.e, in a subtractive way, we might surprise ourselves with the solutions that we might arrive at.

The Research and its Findings:

Here is a research paper published by Nature which looks a...

6 Levels of Commitment to Change

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Every change or a transformation effort needs the support and commitment of people who will either be affected by the change or who lead the change or who could influence the success of the change effort. Hence, it is important for those who want to drive or lead the change effort learn how committed they are to the change.

The commitment can vary from people wanting to outright sabotage the change on one extreme to co-creating or co-owning the change on the other end of the...

Becoming Change Agents..

Whether we like or not, we are all involved in some form of transformation at any given time. Some of these transformations are self initiated, at times they are forced upon us, on our companies, industries or even economies. It is in our own interest to learn how to navigate these changes. The best way to do that is to learn to become a change agent and lead the change instead of allowing the change to lead us.

Being or becoming a change agent is not simple. We need to learn specific sk...

The Finest Example of Storytelling using Data

I have seen a lot of presenters who use data to influence or persuade their audience. In most cases, they end up overwhelming their audience. If you were to ask the audience a couple of days later about what they remember from the presentation, usually, people do not remember much.

So, it was with utmost excitement and reverence, I would like to share the best presentation that i have ever seen that uses data to persuade the audience.

This is a TED talk delivered by Hans Rosling (almost ...

4 Ways to Enable Connections

Premise:

One of the most important steps in driving any kind of transformation is the ability to rally around teams that are impacted by the transformation. One of the reasons many transformation efforts fail is existence of resistance for the transformation effort.

It is critical to address this resistance if we want to have a good chance of success. Here are 4 ways that we can bring people together as team so that we can understand the existence and the reason for the resistance. O...

How To Be Different and Stand Out

Premise:

One of the side effect of the explosion of social media is that every one is trying to be seen (views), heard (downloads) and appreciated (likes/shares). In this constant struggle to be seen/heard/appreciated, everyone is trying to be different and unique and authentic. And that is the true challenge.

According to National Human Genome Research institute,

“All human beings are 99.9 percent identical in their genetic makeup.”

Which means that we are all that different fro...

Tips on Leading a Successful Transformation Effort

Leading a successful transformation

Premise:

We are living in a world where every organisation is undergoing some form of transition or transformation – forced or otherwise. Another thing we know is that most change efforts fail.

Given this background, what can we as leaders do to tilt the probability of success on our side? Here are some suggestions that are offered in the book “Terms of Engagement“.

Flow of Information:

In any transformation effort, the flow of relevant info...