John F. Kennedy said this (one of my favorite quotes) – “There are risks and costs to a program of actions. But they are far less than the long range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.” Comfortable inaction is the state where the immediate implication of not doing something is not visible, but in a […]
Rapport building isn’t just something you do when you first meet someone or as a part of a sales call or a negotiation. As leaders (and human beings) one of our goals must be to build better and deeper relationships, and one of the tangible ways we can do that is through an ongoing other-focused […]
When we work as an individual contributor in early years of our careers, we are in-charge of our own outcomes. At some point, we get promoted to a leadership position, and we have to get things done through people. This is one of the most significant transitions in our careers, and the one that is […]
If you are a leader, you will invariably face situations where: People will criticize you for doing something. People will criticize you even for not doing something. Your decisions will go against you. You will face a lot of resistance in your initiatives. Roadblocks will be encountered People will closely analyze your decisions. You may […]
A few years back, I was facilitating a team that was responsible for pulling off a project in a completely new technology. This also meant that each one of the team members had to take initiative and explore new areas of the technology. While the project had a designated project lead, we saw many team […]
When we work on large scale projects, long term assignments or complex change initiatives – we decompose our work into smaller chunks that are more manageable. Geeks refer to this technique as “modularization”. We create a set of smaller tasks that we perform according to a schedule to achieve milestones, and hence the objective. It […]
January 2011 – a new year that started with new energy, new hopes and new aspirations. A year to take our endeavors to the next level and relentlessly chase excellence. Perhaps a reason why I started my year with this post on Excellence. In case you missed reading any of my posts, here is a […]
Jack Welch said, “An organizations ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the greatest competitive advantage.” Continuous learning and its respective implementation to generate desired business outcomes is at the core of successful organizations. Peter Senge defined a learning organization as the one “where people continually expand their capacity to create […]
When we run a business or execute a project, we set clear goals of what we want to achieve, create detailed plans, devise strategies and set up milestones. But leadership, just like life, is ambiguous and paradoxical. People default, conflicts happen, clients change their requirements, demand/supply suddenly flips, things just don’t work as expected, delays […]