Mukesh Gupta's Blog, page 7

First Principles Based Leadership – Building our Systemic Awareness

Premise In this series of posts about First Principles Based Leadership, we have already covered the importance of and how to improve our self awareness, social awareness, cultural awareness and contextual awareness. In this post, we will explore the importance of systemic awareness and how can we continue to improve our ability to understand and be more aware of the systems within which we operate in. We live in a world where everything is inter connected. There is a system at every level of ab...

First Principles Based Leadership – Improving our Contextual Awareness

Premise In this series of posts about First Principles Based Leadership, we have already covered the importance of and how to improve our self awareness, social awareness and cultural awareness. In this post, we will explore the importance of context and contextual awareness and how can we become more aware of the contexts that we operate in. We live in a White Water World (as defined by John Seely Brown and Ann Pendleton-Jullian) where our environments tend to change pretty rapidly. Becoming aw...

First Principles Based Leadership – Raising Cultural Awareness

Premise In this series of posts about First Principles Based Leadership, we have already covered the importance of and how to improve our self awareness and social awareness. In this post, we will explore the importance of cultural awareness and how can we become more culturally aware. Any and all deep dive into cultural awareness can only start by having worked and improved our self and social awareness. Without high levels of both self and social awareness, it is very difficult to improve our ...

Expectations and Innovation

First Principles Based Leadership: Improving our Social Awareness

In my first post (which you can read here), in a series of posts about “First Principles Based Leadership”, I shared the importance of developing five types of awareness (self, social, cultural, contextual and systems) in order to build that foundation for becoming a First Principles based leader. Today, in this third post, we will talk about how we can improve our social awareness. When I talk about social awareness, I mean the ability to know what is going on with the people we lead and work w...

First Principles Based Leadership – Cultivating Self Awareness

In my last post, I shared the importance for leaders to work on five different kinds of awareness (self, social, cultural, contextual and systemic). Today and in the next four posts, I will delve into how can we go about cultivating and improving each one of these awareness. Today, let’s explore how we can go about cultivating and improving our self awareness. Any and all deep dive into self awareness can only start by delving deeper into our consciousness. We can do this in a few different ways...

Foundation For First Principles Based Leadership

Premise: One of the foundations for First Principles Based Leadership is for leaders to be aware. Leaders need to work on their awareness on five different levels. 1. Self Awareness: First and foremost is for us, as leaders, we need to work on improving our self awareness. When I talk about self awareness, I am referring to knowing what we want to achieve and why we want to achieve it. Is it for our own sake (ego driven) or is it for the sake of the team that we are leading (service driven). Whe...

Best Practices Vs First Principles Based Leadership

Earlier today, I read a blog post by Greg Satell titled “This Is One Big Reason Why So Much Business Thinking Is Crap“. In the post he shares his insight on how business fads are created, propagated and result in much waste before fading away. I agree with him whole-heartedly. Building best practices through case studies and interviews, in my opinion is somewhat similar to how blind men would define an elephant, just by feeling a part of the elephant. There is a lot that can go wrong in the proc...

The Focus…

Failure and Success

Failure is often considered to be the opposite of success. However, truly successful people know that failure is an integral part of any success! It’s very rare indeed that someone finds success without meeting failure along the way. If they do, the success doesn’t last as long as they would like it to! So, we would do well to learn how to look at failure and how we deal with it when we come face to face with it. When we do come face to face with failure, it would be great to look to what we can...