Serendipity and Learning

 As a trainer, one of the ways I build the audience connect with metaphors and examples. For instance, in India if you used Sachin Tendulkar and Vinod Kambli as an analogy - everybody who was more than 5 years old in the 90s gets it.  Similary, there were cult movies and dialogues and statements and events people are familiar with. Sometimes when you want to drive home a point, these analogies come in handy.  According to me, this is one of the toughest leaps in training people who are from a different culture.  But now, over the last few years, with the fragmentation of content and the things people watch and relate to and recollect, this corpus is shrinking. There are audiences who swear by GoT while there are others that GoT even exists. Ditto for comics, bollywood, hollywood, classical music, sports, fitness and hobbies. There is almost no "mainstream culture".  Of course there is,  it is just tough to define it in a way that everybody in the room relat...

 Many of us have an aspersion to networking and networkers. As do I. Some years ago, in one of my conversations while taking over a new role, I was asked to network. Given my reluctance to network, I redefined it in my head. I redefined networking as "meeting for work" or "create work and a necessity to meet". Networking (or the lack of it) continued to haunt me when I was working a consultant. Until I came upon the Giver/Taker/Matcher framework of Adam Grant. The motto of networking is to network without networking. Or in other words, networking without expectation of anything. Or in other words, be a giver to your network and watch it grow.  Over the last few months, I have given my time for coaching, brainstorming discussions, reading articles or CVs, connecting job seekers to companies (and vice versa), made a course for an educational institution, engaged on panel discussions with students, worked on organizing an event. And within the company, worked on projec...

 Many years back I was (as usual) breathlessly presenting an idea to a colleague. I was relatively new in the firm and I thought I had found something interesting. The colleague listened to it calmly and said, "This is such a great idea, but hey, I have just submitted a proposal for exactly this to the boss." I was disheartened and stopped working on the idea.  Time passed and every time I spoke to the colleague about the idea - it was always round the corner. In fact it was round the corner till the time I quit. That was when I read the story of cookie-licking . This is a slightly old blog - it is all of 13 odd years old, but give it a read.  So, this colleague was indulging in cookie-licking by preventing my team from working on this idea. And as time passed, I discovered that the said colleague had many licked cookies and yet, no cookie was ever eaten.  Thoughts as I learnt that one of those initiatives was still "just around the corner"

A s I read Leadership BS - I found myself agreeing to many of the points raised by James Pfeffer. The first thing was the use of inspiration,  the second is an over focus on charisma (or executive presence); the fact that many consultants are only trainers, not practitioners. For trainings(I have had many clients tell me - I want you to inspire the team) of which I am not a great fan of - I believe inspiration is more a personal journey and people get inspired by different things in different ways. So, if your training program promises to be inspirational, you are probably being led up for short term feel good but long term zero utility value.  For those who of you who know me and have attended my trainings, I rarely, if ever use examples or stories like Steve Jobs (or <insert favourite tech tycoon names>) . The only place I do use is to share an example of say, first principle thinking. Else I believe that those are stories anyone can read in books and you need a traine...

Continuing from Leadership BS  Why do leaders think they are leaders? Once you attend leadership programs workshop, read it, see it, talk about it - you end up believing you are doing all of it - while you are not doing it in reality.  And leaders begin believe their own story. And this happens not just to leaders, happens to athletes, businessmen, artists and so on... And they begin to believe that they are infallible and then boom! So, how to ensure a reality check? 

In Leadership BS - this is the authors  take on what is wrong with the leadership industry. It is 1, well intentioned, values laden. 2, set of prescriptions - lots of shoulds and oughts. 3, that are mostly not representative of most people in leadership roles and 4 are recommendations that are almost certainly not implementable and may be fundamentally misguided.  In which case, what should a training program look like? 1. Assessments, observations, honest feedback (the most difficult part in my view). This is difficult because unless observations are unbiased and feedback is honest (best from peers) this cannot happen. Also leaders are leaders - people do not share honest feedback to leaders for a variety of reasons. Assessments are also expensive - so often they are the first thing that is ditched (second being the next one) 2. Lots of practice. That comees by investing in long term behaviour change (the second most difficult thing) It is difficult because of budgets and tim...

I was reading "How Innovation Works" by Matt Ridley . And in that he asks a question - what came first - the moon landing or baggage with wheels? You will be surprised to know that it was the former. The reasons for baggage not having wheels are many - from the travel pattern to the design of travel areas to the demography of travel - but whatever it is, many a times, there is a particular time that an innovation takes root - and some ideas are simply ahead of their time. This was a fascinating story and there were others from olden to modern times. One of the myths about innovation is the flash of insight that changes everything. While that flash does happen and you might get that insight or that brilliant idea - from there to actually making, selling and creating an impact are a far longer road. And the history of innovation has repeatedly proven that innovation is a long and often difficult process. Innovations and innovators build from each other (and rightly so), jump di...