Serendipity and Learning

This bright green book with a yellow title has always caught my attention, but I had never read it.  Imagine my surprise that when I finally picked it up as part of a preparation for a workshop that it was such a fantastic book. Playing to win by Alan Lafley and Roger Martin is one of those books that is up there when it comes to learning about how strategy can be crafted and implemented in real business. There is much in the book - and unlike other books - this book is really a leaf out of P&G, but with frameworks and models that can be applied anywhere. Image from here . It is these 5 questions played in a loop (well, iteratively) that are the juiciest part of the book and as simple and obvious as they are, it is this place where the strategy play happens. So, yes, simply put a great book to be read by anyone who is anywhere close to strategy...

The first few minutes when you meet someone as a consultant are vital. The person on the other side is evaluating you. Whether you are in a meeting or in a consulting discussion or in facilitation, those first few minutes are vital. How this happens is the people on the other side ask a question and watch how you respond. Depending on how you respond, the conversation goes uphill or downhill. It is important to handle this well. How does one do it? One, by listening fully, being curious, asking the right questions. But this alone wont work - neither will purely paraphrasing - at this stage, they are very likely looking for specific answers. If you dont give specific answers or vacillate - it will also put you in a slot - from where escaping may be difficult. Take a cricket analogy for this. When you are new to the crease, the bowler tries you out by bowling a few interesting balls and sees how you react. Depending on how you react/stand up/perform the next steps happen. Take any

Atomic Habits by James Clear takes off where The power of habit by Charles Duhigg leaves off. It takes a behavioural route to building good ideas as opposed to a more checklist oriented approach. It has some interesting propositions - creating a 1% increment, building a stack of ideas, making desirable ideas easy and attractive while at the same time making undesirable ideas difficult and unattractive among other things. The power of compounding as attached to habits is what creates a superpower. You work out each day and in 6 months, it compounds. You read each day and in a few years, it compounds many times over. This is the part which resonated with me because my reading habit is a good example of how it is a well developed superpower - I wish I could say the same about my writing as well. And that is how skills are built - a bit each time. The book was recommended to me by a number of people and it lives up to expectations. 

Many years ago, India was primarily a third party services ecosystem. There were a dime a dozen third party IT service companies and BPOs. This wave ran out of steam soon enough,  leaving in its wake unemployable skills and managers. And all around us were complaining op-eds on how India does not have any products and has only services. Cut to today. Whether we have products from India or we dont, we have start-ups.  We have had them for a few years now, but what this ecosystem has created or led to creation is some really cool tech talent. This kind of talent either did not exist or was hidden, but the start up ecosystem has made this the talent very desirable. Start ups are formed, many fall by the wayside, some become big - the ones that fall by the wayside try again, the ones who are big enable many people to make money some of when pour that back into an idea that they are passionate about and every single such action leads to creating an ecosystem. Thoughts as I interacted

A conference is a place where there are sages on stages giving you gyan. Notorious among them are certain types of conferences where the same topics is discussed year on year. So, the net result is that conferences are places where people go, not to really get any knowledge, but to network. I had a chance to be a part of a 'Flipped' conference - Transformation Dialogues, where the audience asks questions and the panels go based on audience questions - under the larger umbrella of the topic. The topic at hand was strategy and every table worked (seriously) using the given framework and got their questions answered (by and large). It was fun to be a table facilitator and take the audience through the process, answer their questions and guide them through the framework. More power to the Flipped conference. PS: the flipside of the flipped conference is a ton of background work, so beware...

India has so many monuments that one spend a lifetime seeing them and still have a few left to see. Monuments, temples, sites, geographical wonders - there is a rich treasure trove for anyone willing to explore. This one is about Aurangabad - Ajanta and Ellora to be specific. We started with Ajanta - which is a spectacular sight whether you see it from the view point on the top or you go cave by cave and wonder at both the genius, artistry and rigor of the humans who did this for hundreds of years. Going over the caves, takes the good part of a day at a leisurely pace and it is a place one can spend weeks getting into nuances. And this - after a significant level of destruction. One can just about visualize what the original works might have looked like. And if Ajanta blows your mind away, Ellora takes you to another level. Specifically the Kailasnath temple. Imagine that someone decided to carve down (yes, down) a mountain - from the top and imagined a temple while carving it dow