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Review: The $100 Startup by Chris Guillebeau

Through his new book titled “The $100 Startup – Fire Your Boss, Do What You Love And Work Better to Live More”, Chris Guillebeau shares amazingly inspiring stories of people who transformed their ideas and skills into viable businesses. Some people start on their own because of situations and others start based on their internal […]

Taking Charge of a Team? Avoid These 4 Mistakes

Managers often end up in a situation when they are hired to take charge of a team/department that already exists and performs to a certain level. New leaders often find it difficult to generate acceptance because a team/organization is a complex network of emotions, relationships and issues. The history comes along, but is invisible to […]

Leadership and Building Emotional Infrastructure

Last two posts (here and here) focused on managing the emotional aspects of workplace to build a culture of engagement. While I was writing about it, I came across a very interesting paper titled “The Emotionally Bonded Organization: Why Emotional Infrastructure Matters And How Leaders Can Build It” by Vijay Govindarajan, Professor of International Business […]

9 Simple Ideas for Employee Engagement

My last post emphasized on balancing processes and practices with emotion when leading projects. HR folks know this as “employee engagement”. In simplest terms, people have a choice to do a great job or a mediocre one. They exercise this choice based on the emotional connection with purpose of project/team/organization. Why all this buzz around […]

Leading Projects: Balancing Rational with Emotion

A start-up or a fledgling organization relies on individual heroism of their people to successfully deliver projects. These team members are enthusiastic, engaged and willing to see the project succeed. They are emotionally connected to the purpose of project/organization. Emotion is the basis of how they operate. Then the organization starts growing. To manage growth, […]

Social Media and Leadership Success: A Few Parallels

When I first learned playing Guitar, I focused too much on notes, specifics and techniques. The more I practiced, the more I realized that notes, specifics and techniques are important for producing good music, but not sufficient. So what was missing? The starting point of becoming a good artist is to have an emotion, an […]

8 Life Lessons From Yoga Workshop

My first introduction to ‘Yoga’ was during my school. In physical education classes, Yoga was taught purely in form of complex physical postures. A few years back, I got in touch again by joining a Yoga workshop and gained a new level of awareness about it. This month, I again enrolled for an advanced workshop […]

Announcing: The ASTD Management Development Handbook

American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) recently released a fantastic collection titled “The ASTD Management Development Handbook”. This book provides current thinking on various management aspects by practicing management professionals. Lisa Haneberg, the editor of this book invited about 37 bloggers/authors to contribute their thinking – people who are active NOW, who are exploring […]

9 (More) Ideas for Effective Trainings

Trainings are at the core of most knowledge-oriented organizations and often considered to be key driver of employee behaviors, and hence culture. It is a lot of hard work, a lot of time, effort and energy spent. It better be effective. Here are 9 (more) ideas to ensure that trainings are effective (related ideas in […]