My father often jokes that he and I live better lives than Queen Victoria did. At first glance, this comparison seems absurd - after all, she ruled the world's most powerful empire of her time. Yet, while Her Majesty commanded vast resources and armies, she lacked what we consider basic amenities today: no temperature control … Continue reading Creative Destruction: The key to innovation
Despite my skepticism of corporate trainings, my team and I are working on designing a workshop for senior leaders. The aim is to help strengthen a muscle we believe (and they agree) is important. Last evening, the project team got together for a scaling and detailing meeting. With the initial pilot feedback for the workshop … Continue reading The Fishbowl analogy
At the start of 2021, I decided that in the spirit of independence, I would scrap the cadence of posting every Tuesday and post ‘whenever something interesting happened’. What I didn’t realize is that this turned out to be code for never writing. The realization hit early 2022 and once the rhythm was broken, the … Continue reading Cadence & Culture
The last week something amazing happened. For maybe the 100th time ever, an employee gamed a very well-designed HR policy in place at my friend’s company. As I witnessed her navigate the tightrope between wanting to penalize the employee and thanking him for bringing the loophole to light, I recalled yet another of my favorite … Continue reading Chaos Monkey
Launching a new product or service requires tremendous effort in defining the problem, crafting a solution, exploring alternates, and measuring impact. Yet it isn’t rare when despite having found a high impact solution to the problem, we find low adoption. This holds true for not only new launches but also any modifications to existing products … Continue reading The one metric to rule them all: Customer Effort Score
We’ve been discussing the question of ‘where work gets done’ for over two years now. Over this period, I’ve come across at least a dozen brilliant answers, yet they’ve all come apart at the time of implementation. They either get critically examined and shut down early in the process or are so far diluted by … Continue reading Velocity via modularity
There are four months left in the year and, as incredulous as it feels, it is time to think of what work would look like in 2022. As organizations continue planning to ‘return to work’ for what’s likely the 13th month running, the evidence on burnout is overwhelming. A study by the University of Chicago … Continue reading The case for eliminating (most) meetings & how
In my previous post, I touched upon individuals investing in two (or more) careers in parallel not only to hedge financial income but also lead happier and more creative lives. While I am still toying with what my second career will be and the path to get there, I couldn’t help but wonder if organizations … Continue reading Will organizations ever invest in ‘two careers’?
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.
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
The HR Business Partner Story 