Mukesh Gupta's Blog, page 37

The fast track to a life well lived is feeling grateful

For the Ancient Greeks, virtue wasn’t a goal in and of itself, but rather a route to a life well lived. By being honest and generous, embodying diligence and fortitude, showing restraint and kindness, a person would flourish – coming to live a life filled with meaning and finding an enduring, as opposed to ephemeral, happiness. Today, that view hasn’t much changed. While we hear plenty of stories of celebrities, politicians and even our neighbours finding fleeting pleasure through self-gratif...

Book Review – Indistractable by Nir Eyal

Overview:

I got a digital preview copy of this book via NetGalley. This book is all about how to handle distractions that are hurled at us from all directions.

What is the book about:

In his previous book – Hooked, Nir shared the framework that could be used to build habit forming products and in this book he shares strategies for consumers to avoid getting sucked into the habit forming products that were built using the framework he shared in his previous work

Book Review – The Disruption Mindset by Charlene Li

Overview:

I got a digital preview copy of this book via NetGalley. The book is about is basically about what do organizations (typically incumbent organizations) do to be successful at the business of disruption, the assumption being that it is unusual for the incumbents to disrupt themselves or their industries.

You can find more information about Charlene here and buy the book here.

What is the book about:

Charlene gleams some key insights from some case studies of incumbent organizations,...

Book Review – Master of One by Jordan Raynor

 

Overview: I got a preview copy of the book via NetGalley and had downloaded this a while back but got around to reading this now. Some caveats upfront – I am not a Christian. This book was seemingly written predominantly for a Christian audience. That said, I am not averse to reading books about Christianity and to be honest like it when an author quotes an interesting scripture. It tends to make complex subject simple in a quick and easy way. So, I didn’t mind reading a book full of scri...

Book Review – Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Perez

Overview:

I bought this book on Audible after listening to the author talk to Roman Mars on his podcast – 99% Invisible) and listened to the audio book, which the author has read herself.

The book is primarily about three things:

Design Data and Women

The entire book is about how designers have ignored the role that gender plays in designing their products or services and how by not collecting data about how the design interacts with half the world’s population, we are blind-sighted of the...

Book Review: 15 Minute Pause: A Radical Reboot for Busy People by Michelle Burke, Lilamani de Silva

Overview:

— I got this book as an advance review copy. Michelle and Lilamani have done a great job in writing this as a workbook..

Ease of reading:

— The book is written in a very simple to read language. As this is written in the format of a workbook, this is best read over a long period of time, doing the exercises that they suggest, reflect on the questions that they pose and trying out some of the ideas that they suggest. So, this book will not be effective or useful, if you just read th...

Convenience Trumps Everything Else

Premise:

I have realised this truth:

Convenience trumps everything else.

If you think about it, almost everything that we do, we do because it is convenient, not because it is the right thing to do, not what we say we want to do, but what is convenient to do.

We want to eat healthy. But we end up eating fast food or canned food because it is convenient to order something on the supermarket aisle or order a fast food, than going to the market, buying vegetables, cook fresh food and eat it.

We...

Book Review – Seeing Around Corners by Rita McGrath

Overview:

— I got this book as an advance review copy. Rita McGrath has produced another stunning book, in a way even better than her earlier book “The End of Competitive advantage”. You can pre-order the book here.

Ease of reading:

— The book is not only easy to read. The stories and the insights from the stories follow one after the other. The stories keep the reader interested and the insights from the stories allows us to learn from these stories.

What I loved about the book: We are livi...

Strategy to Execution to enable Intelligent Enterprise

Premise All organisation have a stated strategy – one that they would like to execute on. However, most organisations are not able to execute the stated strategy, which leads to the organisation not being able to live up to its potential and deliver what they promise to their stakeholders. So, where do things go wrong?   For any strategy to get executed, there are a series of things need to happen: Strategy definition process (ongoing): The process used to define the strategy needs to take in...

Why Some Ideas Never Get Heard!

Premise:

I have been reading and writing about ideas and how ideas spread and the role they play in innovation. However, there was a question that almost always bothered me – Why some ideas, despite being great ideas, never got the traction they deserved, both within an organisation and in the marketplace.

The answer to this question was provided by Nilofer Merchant in her TEDx talk that she shared on her blog. If this is a topic of interest for you, i would strongly recommend that you start...