Leadership

The One Thing Leaders of Disproportionately successful Teams Do Differently

Here is a post by one of my all time favourite ad men – Dave Trott. I believe that this ability to engage in corkscrew thinking (as Dave puts it) or non-linear or non-obvious thinking is a necessary but not sufficient condition for disproportionate success in any endeavour. My podcast is called – Pushing Beyond the Obvious for a reason 🙂 In his blog, he lists out some of the results of corkscrew thinking and the impact they made on the world as we know it – Bletchley Park, Sten guns, anti-shipping mines, planes made of wood, inflatable tanks and […]

Leadership

What Memes Can Teach Us About Successful Adoption of AI

A recent survey done by MIT found that despite $30–40 billion in investments, 95% of generative AI pilots deliver no measurable P&L impact, with only 5% achieving multi-million-dollar value. The primary reason that they found was that AI systems failed to adapt to workflows, or evolve over time, unlike flexible consumer tools. They also found that there exists a “shadow AI economy”, which thrives as 90% of workers use tools like ChatGPT for personal tasks, bypassing stalled enterprise efforts. So, the question we need to ask is the following – While employees are using AI tools in their personal lives, […]

Leadership

The Ladder of Problem-Solving Expertise

Have you ever attended a meeting that was called to solve a problem and exited the meeting feeling that the meeting was a catastrophic waste of everyone’s time. You’re not alone. Most of us have been in that room. And most of us, if we’re honest, have also led that room. Here’s what I’ve come to believe after years of working with leaders and teams: the quality of a problem-solving meeting is not primarily a function of the people in the room. It’s a function of the level at which the leader chooses to operate. In my experience, when done […]

Leadership

Are You Burning Out Your Team?

The problem One of the findings of the 2023 Work in America™ Survey was that Workplace stress remained at a concerning level, with 77% of workers having reported experiencing work-related stress in the last month. Further, 57% indicated experiencing negative impacts because of work-related stress that are sometimes associated with workplace burnout. This burnout is not just due to having too much work. This overwhelm is due to a combination of various reasons, including but not limited to information overload, cognitive overload, technology and related change initiatives, attention fragmentation and unclear expectations. And as leaders, we are responsible to address this […]

Leadership

Leading in Two Time Zones

Premise: One of the biggest struggles that we, as leaders, need to deal with is the need to balance activities that lead to high performance today, while getting the team ready to deliver high performance in the future or, in other words, display contextual ambidexterity, as defined by Gibson and Birkinshaw in their MIT Sloan Management Review article in 2004. This creates tension. In a fast-changing context, what drives high performance today, usually is not what drives high performance in the future. And it is easy to fall into the trap of focusing too much in delivering current performance while […]