Mukesh Gupta's Blog, page 40

Within Chaos Lies Opportunity – Bruce Lee

In this interesting talk Shannon Lee (Daughter of one of the great martial artist and philosopher – Bruce Lee). 

Hope you enjoy the talk! 

Rocking Your Next Brainstorming Session!

I am sure that at some point in your career, you have been either invited to or hosted a brainstorming session to come up ideas. Ideas to either solve a specific problem or to create a new product or service or for something else altogether. 

Most brainstorming sessions don’t work. They either don’t get the creative ideas that you expect to come up with or nothing happens after the brainstorming, which leads to a feeling of fun but wasted time.

But it need not be like that. I’ve hosted more t...

Imagination – Our Greatest Strength and our Greatest Weakness

One of the greatest strengths of the human race is also one if its weakest link. Our ability to imagine is the source of all the innovations around us that has made our lives and our species so dominant in the also what causes us to trip in a lot of our pursuit.

Imagination can be both productive and destructive. 

We could end up living in our imaginary worlds and never see the reality. This is the reason why so many of us (individuals and organisations) are never able to realize our potenti...

Coming to a Concert Hall Near You, The next music superstar – AIVA, Artificial Intelligence

I watched this TED video where Pierre Barreau presents music that was created by an artificial intelligence called AIVA and was blown away.

He and his team were able to feed into an algorithm a whole array of music which then was analysed by a neural network and the application is now able to compose original music based on input criteria. It decides what note should come after a specific note when we are looking for a certain kind of effect the music should create in a listener. 

Watch his...

4 Pathways to Innovation

I was facilitating a group of senior leaders who were tasked with leading the innovation effort in their respective organization and started the facilitation with the simple yet profound question –

“How do you define innovation?”.

The best answer I’ve so far received to this question is the following:

“Innovation is applied problem solving leading to generation of value.”

The next question to ask then is the following:

“Which problems are worth solving and where do we find them?”

This is th...

Personal Data Replaces Cash at this Cafe

Shiru café looks like any other coffee shop. But the similarities end there. If you were to go to the café for some hard earned caffeine, the chances are that you will be refused your caffeine unless you are either a student or a teaching staff at a university. Simply put, no college ID >> No coffee.

What’s more, if you are a part of the teaching staff, you can pay for your coffee with cash.

However, if you are a student then to get your cup of coffee (or tea), the currency that you need to p...

You cant innovate when,

I read this blog post by Mike Shipulski which resonated really well with me. His post is as below: 

You cant innovate when, 

Your company believes everything should always go as planned.
You still have to do your regular job.
The project’s completion date is disrespectful of the work content.
Your company doesn’t recognise the difference between complex and complicated.
The team is not given the tools, training, time and a teacher.
You’re asked to generate 500 ideas but you’re afraid no one will d...

Big Data, Automation and Cows Who Decide When they want to be Milked

I came across this interesting read on Quartz.com. The post is about a farm in Iceland where the entire barn is automated.

Here are some quotes from the article.

When one of their cows wants to be milked, she walks to the center of the barn to one of the three self-milking Lely machines. She enters the machine—a gated, cow-size booth—and first has her teats inspected and cleaned. Next, the robot attaches its equipment to extract her milk while the cow chows down on some cow candy: tasty corn...

The State of the Gig Economy

We have all at some point in time talked about or heard about the growth of the gig economy and how this could potentially be the future of work. While the number of people participating in the gig economy has been on a growth path, their ability to earn from their gigs alone to support them and their families has not been growing in proportion.

JP Morgan Chase Institute recently did a study on the state of the online platform economy. It tried to answer a fundamental question – “Has all the...

How to Help a Colleague Who Seems Off Their Game

When we think about productivity at work, we need to think beyond ourselves. As they say, as a team we are as strong or as productive as the weakest link on our team. This translates to the fact that if someone on our team is not doing their best work, we have a role to play in helping them back to being their productive best. This might not be an official part of our job but working with peers who are productive and doing good work has an impact on our work as well.

Most of the times, it cou...