I went two whole months without watching TED talks. The first of many firsts. However, I pulled myself back on track and am here again with the five talks that left a mark on me this month. All through October, TED focused on talks related to Climate Change. Given that we are in the last … Continue reading Top 5 TED Talks: October 2020
A lot of what I know about HR today is based on experience, observation of trends, blogposts, news and conversations. When I analyze the systems that surround me, they too seem largely based on what organizations have done in the past, few experiments and many perceptions. While I question these often, I rarely dig deep … Continue reading First Principles
This post is a little late in the offing. There’s been a lot going on and I will tell you all about it soon, but first – the four TED talks that made me a tad bit wiser in August. Why is colonialism (still) romanticized? | Farish Ahmad-Noor : Sometimes it is a great orator, … Continue reading Top 4 TED Talks – August Edition
Good ideas usually have multiple differences. However, the key to finding the best ideas is to understand which differences lead to long-term competitive advantage. Basing your innovation purely on making something cheaper, or bundling offerings is short term thinking as it’s easy to replicate. The good ideas are these and much more. And the best ideas are so inventive there’s just no comparison.
A few weeks ago I wrote about my disagreement with referring to the business teams we support as our customers. This isn’t a widely accepted thought and today I will take my argument a step further by attributing the poor design of our HR interventions to this reference. Sounds contrary to popular belief, doesn’t it? We have been conditioned to believe that viewing our business as ‘customers’ will lead to better service. But it doesn’t.
One would imagine that in forward thinking organizations, innovation would flow in a straight line. Instead, the journey begins to resemble a circus show with one jumping over constant hoops and hurdles until the idea dies a slow painful death. The journey includes encountering people who hate the idea, those who love the idea but … Continue reading The Experimentation Budget
Backcasting starts by taking a leap into the future and embracing all that is preposterous. It focuses on all that outrageous, unique and breaks the shackles of feasibility.
Once in a while I get asked a question that leaves me stumped; not because it doesn’t make sense but because over time my world view has taken its own twist on reality. One such question I was asked very recently as a part of product design exploration was – “Do you refer to the businesses you support as client or customers?”
A Canadian physician William Osler once said that a man's best work was done before he was forty years old, and that by age sixty, he should retire. He called the ages between twenty five and forty the "15 golden years of plenty". Workers between ages forty and sixty were tolerable because they were "merely uncreative". But … Continue reading Retirement Age: Ageism in Action?
When Google asked employees to take a day off on May 22 to address work-from-home-related burnout during the coronavirus pandemic, my first reaction was to dismiss it as a PR stunt. After all how much difference can granting one day off make to employees?
