Mukesh Gupta's Blog, page 5

Lessons we Can Learn From Catching A Rocket in Mid-Air

On 13th October 2024, SpaceX team did something remarkable. They launched their starship rocket and then allowed its booster to drop into the Earth’s atmosphere and caught it with their giant mechanical arms at the launch pad. This is something that has never been done (or even attempted before). There are a few lessons to be learnt for all of us as leaders from this exercise. Lesson 1: Challenging Assumptions and Beliefs When Elon Musk started SpaceX and decided to develop a re-usable rockets, ...

First Principles Based Leadership – 4 Ways to Know Anything

Premise I was introduced to John Vervaeke and his work by the inimitable Matt Church who leads the Thought Leaders Business School and is based in Australia. John is an award-winning professor of psychology, cognitive science, and Buddhist psychology at the University of Toronto. He says that there are four different ways we can know things, which he calls the 4P’s of Knowing. These are about the manners in which and the mechanisms of knowing something rather than the content of the knowledge it...

How to find Opportunities to Unlock Significant Performance

Premise One of the things that every leader is expected to do is to find ways to drive significant value from their teams. Good leaders are always trying to look for opportunities that can unlock significant value creation. If you know me at all, you know that I am a big fan of the work done by Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt, the creator of the “Theory of Constraints“. He had this belief that the biggest constraint that any business faces is Management attention. If we rephrase this, the biggest constrain...

Price of Discipline or the Cost of Regret

In this memorable quote, best selling author Robin Sharma compares regret with the effort of taking action. It costs us either ways. If we take action, it costs us in time and energy and if we don’t act, it costs us in regret over time. It is upto each one of us which bill we choose to pay. So, let’s choose wisely!

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First Principles Based Leadership: Six Perspectives That can Help us Transform from Good leaders to Great Leaders

Premise The most important act we do as a leader is our interactions with those we lead. The quality of these interactions lead to the results we achieve through them. To transform from average or good leaders to great leaders, we need to develop the ability to assess any given interaction and respond based on the need of the situation and the person we are interacting with. I believe that we can do this well, if we can learn to think and behave from six different perspectives for every interact...

First Principles Based Leadership – Introducing Systems Thinking for Leaders

Premise This post is relevant for you irrespective of where you are currently situated in leadership ladder (Individual contributor, team lead, leading teams, leading managers, leading lines of business or leading organisations). While systemic awareness this is a foundational skill, it gets more and more crucial as you climb the leadership ladder. So, we would be better off learning about this while we are early in our careers and build on it as we grow by adding nuances and being intentional a...

Benefiting from Leadership Advice

Premise There is a lot of leadership advice available on the internet – free and otherwise. I offer a lot of them myself, here on this blog. There are innumerable number of books being written on this topic, so much so that at times, it can become too daunting for someone looking for help. However, as leaders, we need to know which advice or ideas are relevant for us and which one’s are not. There are two key criteria or filters that we need to apply in order to decide whether a piece of advice ...

Simplifying Complexity

We live in and work in a nest of complex adaptive systems and one of the characteristic of this kind of system is that with time and experience, things tend to become more complex and interdependent. As a leader, it is our responsibility to understand this increasing complexity and make sense of it. Then break it down to its simplest form and share this with our teams, so that they don’t have to struggle with this complexity in their work. The question then is how can we do this for our teams. T...

Leading Under Pressure

Premise: I read an article with the same title, written by Theodore Kinni for strategy+business (a pwc publication) and it reminded me of an blog post I had written almost a decade back about the role of leaders in absorbing pressure, to allow their teams to perform at their best. (the original post here). In the post, he shares the components of the Pressure Equation, originally attributed to Dane Jensen, CEO of performance consulting firm Third Factor and author of the new book The Power of Pr...

Lessons in Leadership from the Award Winning TV Series – The Rookie

Earlier today, I finished watching 5 seasons of the TV Series – “The Rookie” on Netflix and learnt a lot about leadership from the series. For those of you, who have not heard about the series, here is how it is described on Wikipedia: The Rookie is an American police procedural television series created by Alexi Hawley for ABC. It follows John Nolan, a man in his forties, who becomes the oldest rookie at the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). It is based on real-life LAPD officer William Nor...