I picked up a conversation with a few friends yesterday on the creative process, and that got me thinking about how inspiration or muse strikes. I have been a “process” guy professionally who also understands/respects the importance of creativity, the sort of creativity that changes the world for better. Our schools teach us “formulas” and […]
I have always loved great quotes and I started collecting these bite-sized packets of wisdom since my early days as a student. Quotes encapsulate years of experience and wisdom from great thinkers in just a few words – words that inspire us to act and put things in perspective. Great quotes have always had a […]
Many years back, when I ran a web development shop, I once visited a customer who owned a flooring tiles manufacturing unit. Since they were one of the leading players in their industry, I was curious to see how they worked. Our customer took us to visit their manufacturing plant where I could “see” a […]
Improvements don’t happen if organizations don’t have someone responsible for it. This is the reason why a lot of organizations have senior executives who think about and plan improvement initiatives. From a strategic viewpoint, this makes a lot of sense. However, there is another side to it. Just because there is one person responsible for […]
Drucker got it wrong. Drucker famously wrote that “the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.” I’m as much a fan of Drucker’s as any management scholar, but I have to part ways with him here. The purpose of business is NOT to create or to keep a customer. Certainly it is […]
When leaders undertake process improvement/change initiative, they walk on a tight rope. On one hand, they have to improve the processes to deliver positive business outcomes. On the other, they have to ensure that improvement/change initiative does not slow down the current work and bring the overall efficiencies down. Both are crucial and striking the […]
Two things we know about change: Resistance is our natural reaction to any change that disrupts our current way of working. Things only change when the pain of change is less than the pain of remaining in current state. Ability to foresee, plan and implement change for better alignment to the market and generate better […]
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 […]
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 […]