Mukesh Gupta's Blog, page 50

Standing Out

 

We stand out

When everyone is self-obsessed, by being selfless

When everyone is shouting on roof-tops to be heard, by being silent

When everyone is trying to go fast, by slowing down

When everyone seeks scale, by focusing on that which can’t be scaled

When no one can be trusted, by being trust-worthy

When self-promotion is the norm, by shining the light on someone else

When everyone is trying to be interesting, by being interested

When everyone is running after the next big thing, by cher...

Why Are Meetings so Important and How to Make them Effective and Fun

Premise:

Not a day goes by when I dont hear someone complain about yet another meeting that they need to attend and how it is such a waste of time, money and effort.

Yet, there is enough written about the way Alan Mulally, the ex-CEO of Ford, turned around the company in his stint as the CEO, primarily using a weekly cadence meeting with his entire leadership team , called The Business Plan Review. You can read more about this and how he ran these meetings here.

What he has shown is that m...

10 Things to Practice Everyday

Move:

If there is one set of actions that can have disproportionate benefit for us, then it has to be movement. Our body is not designed to remain seated for long hours. It has been known for ages it is better to keep moving through out the day rather than exercising for an hour and not doing any physical movement for rest of the day.

Our body craves movement.

It is well-known that women around the world outlive men and are also less likely to suffer from fatal chronic diseases. There ar...

A Simple Guide to Building an Engaged Team

Premise:

We don’t need tons of research to tell us the importance of having employees who are engaged in their work. It shows up in a lot of different ways that we can see. The result of an engaged set of employees shows up when an employee goes beyond his call of duty to serve a customer or when a team gets formed organically to address some specific issue that has cropped up during the day.

It is no surprise either when that having such an engaged workforce can and does become a true compe...

The 12 Stages of Burnout

Premise:

As leaders and entrepreneurs, we are people with a lot of drive and motivation to do stuff. In our hustle to make progress, we often don’t realise if we start suffering from burnout until it’s too late.  So, when I looked up for a reliable way for us to find out if we are suffering from burn out, I came across this white paper written by Herbert Freudenberger and Gail North.

12 Phases of Burn out

They have divided burning out  into 12 phases. You can read their entire paper here.  Th...

Leap When You’re “Almost Ready”

It was almost 9 years ago. We were at a team building outbound in an adventure camp. Among other adventure games, we also had the opportunity to try out Bungee jumping. It was not very high, maybe about 250 ft tall crane from which we were supposed to jump off of.

Having participated in all the adventure games, we wanted to try bungee. Out of the 12 odd people in the team, only three people were willing to jump. I was one of the three. One of my friends who thought that this was a crazy act w...

How can We Encourage Experimentation and Risk Taking Among Our Employees

This is one of those stories that we hope never happened with us.

I was a fresh graduate with no experience and in my first job. I had decent success in my first job and had reached a point where I had built enough trust with my boss that he allowed me to run one of his branch office. As part of the role, I was supposed to handle sales and procurement both. And in my eagerness to do well for my company, I sold a specific product to a customer at a price that was deeply discounted (I quoted t...

What’s Killing our Creativity?

Scene 1:

I was visiting a hospital today to visit someone who is admitted there to get through a minor surgery. He was supposed to check into the hospital at noon on a given date and check out at about 4:00PM the next day. This means that he had to spend about 28 hours in the hospital. Even for these 28 hours when he was in the hospital, when he was officially on medical leave, he was still working. He was checking his email, responding to his call
s and even checking his social media feeds...

Finally a Mixed Reality Tool That Has the Potential to Bring MR in Mainstream Use

 

Disney Research recently released a white paper on its experiment with Mixed Reality and Augmented Reality. They address the one challenge that was stopping the widespread adoption of Mixed reality in everyday business scenarios – the requirement that the user wear an expensive device on his self and thereby literally get transported to a different world and it was an isolated experience for this user.

They say:

We create a solution for multi-user interactions in AR/MR, where a group can s...

Does Your Business React, Respond or Create?

Bernadette Jiwa wrote a short but insightful post about the difference between responding and reacting to situations.

She writes:

It was impossible to walk down any high street in June without running into a notice informing you fidget spinners were BACK IN STOCK. The fidget spinner was clearly ‘thething’ of the moment. A month later we’re already beginning to witness its decline. Another fad bites the dust.

A fad by definition is transient. It’s success hinges on what people are talking abo...