Mukesh Gupta
Mindsets to Thrive in 2023
In the past few weeks, we have seen organizations announce massive layoffs (more than 150000 people have been let go in the past 3 months alone. On the other hand, organizations complain that they are unable to find and retain good talent. W...
How could SouthWest Airlines spend A Billion Dollars for IT Modernisation
One of the biggest news story this last Christmas season was the cascading effect of flights being cancelled by Southwest Airlines. According to their SEC filing, they had to cancel more than 16700 flights over the holiday period in December, costi...
How Not to Slowdown Progress
Leo Szilard, in his book – The voice of the dolphins, and other stories has a short story titled The Mark Gable Foundation. In this short story, there is a conversation between two characters, one of who thinks that the pace of scientific chang...
Streets, Roads, Stroads and Leadership Effectiveness
I was listening to a podcast episode on 99% Invisible hosted by the inimitable Roman Mars and they were talking about Stroads, which piqued my curiousity. So, today, we will explore this topic but from a leadership lens. Before we go ahead, I t...
The Happy Leader: Boost Your Happiness and Leadership Effectiveness
There is no better time than the start of a new year to do some reflection on how to improve our effectiveness as a leader. There are a gazillion articles and videos about how to be a better leader and improve the efficacy of our…
Pushing Beyond the Obvious
In a recent blog, advertising legend Dave Trott shares the story of the insight that led the Wright brothers succeed in recording the first human flight in history, while everyone else struggled and failed. The key insight was that they underst...
Leaders, Futures and Foresight
As leaders, we are expected to have a vision of the future that we are leading our teams towards. To build this vision, we need to be able to think of the potential and probable futures, to decide and pick the one that we want…
Overcoming Resistance to Change
We live in a world with accelerating pace of change. For all us leaders, this accelerating change comes with the necessity to respond to these changes in a coherent, strategic and urgent ways. This translates into starting and leading change in...
Learnings from Participating in an Intrapreneurship Program
This blog is co-authored by Makesh Gupta and Rena Yu Ning Wang, and it is about our journey participating in the SAP.iO journey, with the idea of building a SAP Live Shopping Platform. This was originally posted on the SAP Community blog and has b...
3 Principles of Leading Under Conditions of Uncertainty
Premise: We are entering a phase where there is a lot of uncertainty. There is a consensus building up about an impending recession. There is a lot of flux within businesses. There are some sectors that are laying off people and at the same tim...
A Leader’s Super Power: Delivering Unprovoked Positive Antecedents!
I was reading a blog post written recently by Adam Voigt about UPA’s and I wanted to share that with all of my readers. Adam is first and foremost a skilled classroom practitioner and a highly successful Principal. Earning his first Principal...
A Framework for High Performance Leadership
I read a post by Michael McCune on Gartner’s blog about thought leadership and it resonated really well with me. In the post, he talks about the importance of original thought provoking content. Content that deepen’s someone’s understanding of ...
3 Skills for all Leaders to Cultivate – Naming, Framing and Priming
Premise: One of the key responsibilities that we have as leaders is to make sense of what is happening in and around the teams that we lead and share this with our teams as and when required. The way we do this could be either…
How to Win in the Age of Unreasonable Consumer
Are we willing to be more unreasonable than our consumers? If yes, then how and where? I recently stumbled onto a video of Adam Morgan (Co-founder of eatbigfish and the co-author of a brilliant book – A Beautiful Constraint) shares his perspectives on how we…
3 Questions to Ask Before We Start Any Transformation Effort
One of the biggest challenge when it comes to successful transformation efforts, is the stickiness of change in behaviour expected as part of the transformation. Any intervention is considered successful only if it leads to a lasting change in beha...
Seeing the Unseen!
Earlier today, I read a post by Martha Bird (@anthro_tweeter). She is a business anthropologist at ADP focused on understanding the cultural contexts of work and workplaces. In the post, she talks about the importance of “Leading with Intention and...
Three Primary Roles of a Leader
There is a lot of expectations from leaders, specially when we are in an environment that is ambiguous. Matt Church in his “Speakership” programs talks about the role of leaders and he says that there has ever been only three things that leaders ha...
Leading for Creativity and Innovation
One of the primary responsibilities of a leader is our ability to enable our teams to fuel their creativity and drive innovation. Kevin Roberts (who used to be the CEO and later went on to become the Executive Chairman of one of the most creative…
A System for Becoming Better Leaders
One of the most important thing that we can do as a leader is to find a way to continue to grow as a person and as a leader on a regular basis. This is one of the fundamental habits that transforms us from being…
Lessons in Leadership with Ken Wilcox, Emeritus chairman of Silicon Valley Bank
In an interesting conversation with Todd Jick (Reuben Mark Faculty Director of Organizational Character and Leadership at Columbia Business School), Ken shares lessons in leadership from his personal experience having been a leader for more than 3 deca...