Mukesh Gupta's Blog, page 37

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...

The Power of Framing

If you were offered $5 today versus $10 in a month, what would you prefer?

This is the exact question that was asked in a psychological experiment, which has been repeated multiple times by different experimenters and it looks like most of the people who participate in the experiment tend to choose option 1, i.e., $5 today over the $10 in a month. This proved to the experimenters the existence of a bias that we tend to value short term rewards more than long term rewards, also called “tempora...

The Laws of Success with Albert-László Barabási

Premise:

I had always suspected that success and performance are not always related, but the research by Albert Barabasi now shows that this looks to be definitely the case. Albert is a network scientist and has been involved in some very interesting research trying to find the formula for success.

In this series of short video playlist, he shares the 5 laws of success that he has discovered through his research:

The Secret of Success:

Success is unbounded!

Success breeds Success

Run away...

Shifting Focus of Innovation – From Efficiency to Effectiveness

The past couple of decades all innovation efforts and application of technology has been in an effort to increase the efficiency of people working in organisations. This could be done by automation and helping people work more productively, still working on what they were already working on.

I believe that the future application of technology and human ingenuity would be to increase the effectiveness of people and machines. This will mean that we are looking at complete rethinking and redesig...