Mukesh Gupta's Blog, page 6

Destroyer of Dreams = Worry

STOP!!! DON’T WORRY!!! No matter your situation; No matter how bad you feel; No matter how bad it might seem; don’t worry!!! Instead Do something!!! Anything!!! Anything, that can make things better; Or not!! What matters is that we believe that we have the agency to do something to make things better and exercise that agency to ACT! And NOT TO JUST WORRY!!! Worrying doesn’t help anybody and increases the probability of things getting worse!! So, dont worry.. Take action instead..

Do Something

Yesterday, I watched something that I thought was special. I watched Michelle Obama issue a rallying cry to Americans, “TO DO SOMETHING”, which resonated with the audience enough to get them chanting – “DO Something”. You can watch her full speech here. I always wondered why is she not going after the office herself, but I guess we will see about that. Now, I believe that the difference between a leader and someone who is not a leader is that leaders “Do Something” about things. When you see inj...

Three Lessons in Effective Communication from a Funny Ad

I stumbled on to an ad on my Instagram feed, that I had found very funny when it originally aired. You can watch the ad here before we go any further. When I rewatched this ad from the lens of what can I learn from it, I found it had a lot of lessons for us as leaders and as communicators: Lesson 1: Setting the context Whenever we are trying to tell a story, it is important to set the context within which the story is going to play out. The idea here is to make the context as familiar […]

Lessons in Leadership from the movie “Raayan”

I recently watched the Tamil language movie – Raayan and really liked the movie. It is a typical commercial movie, following the life of three siblings with the eldest one trying to protect the younger one’s. Here is the plot according to Wikipedia: The film follows Kathavaraayan “Raayan”, a fast-food hotel owner in North Chennai, who begins to protect his family when they inadvertently get muddled in a war between two rival gangs. Here are a few lessons in leadership that I took away from the d...

Bullet Point Meetings and Campfire Conversation

I was watching a recording of the highly energetic and insightful anthropologist Jitske Kramer, delivering her keynote at the Nordic Business Forum 2022 and was stuck by one of her insights: Bullet Point Meetings: These meetings are all about taking actions and tactical thinking. These meetings are about listing down what needs to be done and checking them once done. This is all about day-to-day activities that needs to be done to keep the lights on for our businesses. These meetings are all abo...

Insights on Leading for Innovation

I watched this conversation between Mo Gawdat, former Chief Business Officer for Google X, tech entrepreneur, and author of the best-selling books “Solve for Happy“, “Scary Smart” and “Unstressable” on the High Performance podcast and found myself rigorously nodding my head in agreement or going wow, why did I not think about it like that. If are a leader who wants to lead a team of innovators, spending this hour listening (and hopefully adopting some of his ideas at work) to this conversation. ...

Lessons in Leadership from the movie Indian 2

Recently, I got to watch the Tamil movie Indian 2, which stars one of my favourite actors ever – Kamal Hassan. The movie is supposed to be a sequel to a hit Tamil movie released in 1996 with the same name. While the premise of the movie remains the same (it’s the story of an anti corruption crusade of one man by becoming a vigilante), the treatment in the sequel is, let’s just say different. Whether we like the movie or not is our subjective opinion. So, to each our own. However, I think there a...

Residual Communication

I read this post about Residual Communication written by the British advertiser Dave Trott and it left a deep impression on me. You can read his post here. The idea is pretty simple – what do people remember from what we said, long after we said it. As a leader, I believe that we should obsess about residual communication. What do people remember the most after we had done sharing our vision, strategy or any idea. Our effectiveness as a leader depends on this. We will move on to other meetings a...

Improving Cognitive Diversity in our Teams

Mike makes a great point about 100% agreement within our teams. When we start seeing an increase of 100% agreement on our point of view, it is time for us to do two things: 1. Stop sharing our point of view until every one on the team has shared their opinions, without in any way giving away where we are leaning towards. That way the teams can share their honest opinions rather than toe the line that we lean towards. This is critical to avoid group think and encourage diversity of thought. 2. Id...

Talent Vs Opportunity

This is a rant. Please ignore if you are not in a mood for somebody’s rant! I strongly believe that talent is equally distributed across any segment that we can think of {men vs women, rich vs poor, straight vs gay, Asian vs European vs African, black vs brown vs white folks, early talent vs experienced talent, developed nation vs developing nation, students of Ivy League universities vs public universities, etc). However, what differentiates the level of success in these segments is the distrib...