Change or Perish

“Jack (Welch) was a great CEO, but he really controlled his world. Those days are over. I’m in the risk-management business. You’re not in the control business today, you’re in the risk-reward business.” - Jeff Immelt, CEO GE

Insight
The accelerating impact of technology on the natural forces of market competition are taking the world by storm & the unconventional business model adopted by Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp of: get users, get them to use more of your product/service & then make money is difficult for traditional businesses to understand, says Uday Kotak. “As a banker, when I sleep at night, I worry about whether I’ll have a bank next morning, or will there be an Ali Bank or a Flipkart bank or some other bank doing  what we do.” he says.

Jeff Immelt & Kishore Biyani's no risk, no reward attitude of reinventing yourself is the way forward.

Be Your Own Judge

“If you want to get rid of being judged for being a man or a woman, Indian, or American, Brown or Caucasian, you need to to be your own judge and set your own benchmark. I have kept my head down and worked very hard. Eventually people get impressed by your dedication and calibre more than anything else.” - Actor Priyanka Chopra

Insight
More often than not in India, Browns bow to the Whites out of a colonial hangover and women bow to men out of a cultural hangover. Stop comparing yourself with the rest and focus on excelling in whatever you do.

Being Relevant

“There are no small roles, only small actors,” said Boman Irani to fellow actor Sonam Kapoor. And that made her realise that she needs to make herself relevant in everything she does and to constantly prove her relevance.

Insight
To evolve, to keep up with the times, give everything you do your 100% and being resilient, keeps you relevant.

Amitabh Bacchan was out in the filmdom wilderness when he decided to do television, which other film actors had up till then shunned as a comedown. And that became his platform for his bounce back into films.

What’s your take on making yourself relevant?

Defining Success

Naveen Jain is serial entrepreneur whose company Moon Express, is the first private company to land a spacecraft on the moon. Talking about when customers don't come on board easily, he says, “...Your success is not about your bank balance, it is about how many lives you have touched.”

Insight
One of the most critical task in today's materialistic times where the money god seems to have the largest following, is to define what success means to YOU personally. Here are 9 ways incredibly successful people define success.

http://tinyurl.com/jv5p2sv

The 10/90 Leadership Rule

10% of leadership has to do with your DNA. 90% has to do with how you use the right combination of what you have, into behaviours to suit your work context.

A Leadership Coach can assist you in putting together your very own leadership recipe through creating awareness of your potential and modeling it for success.

Dealing With The Uncontrollable

There are some people who are fated to play second fiddle, - eg Shashi Kapoor to Big B, Ronaldo to Messi, & Djokovic to Federer, says sportswriter Akshay Sawai. Bonafide achievers all, but nevertheless not the public's first choice. Djokovic initially  hated the feeling & displayed his ire to the partisan crowds, having taken to yoga and meditation & eating goji berries, he now merely smiles at them.

Insight
Life sometimes throws situations at us that we can neither fight, nor understand why they happen. To deal with such times, each of us has to arrive at his own mix of coping responses.

Showing Care And Concern

When an Air Asia plane flying from Indonesia to Singapore crashed in 2014, Group CEO Tony Fernandes, unmindful of the advice of his lawyers, felt that as the face of the brand, it was imperative that he had to be with the airline staff, and most importantly, considered it his responsibility to be there for the relatives of the victims.

Insight
When leaders display concern and care for their staff and customers, they reciprocate by becoming more trusting and forgiving of the leader and the company.

Creating Your Own Leadership Framework

“Great leaders complicate leadership development. The sheer volume is overwhelming, and the lessons that emerge from one leader’s experience may be completely inapplicable to another’s”. - McKinsey research

Insight
Leadership material is voluminous and other's experiences are not transferable. So how do you develop your leadership skills? Inner engineering by yourself. Here's how:
1. Understand your work context,
2. Inventory your strengths & choose the the ones the ones to use/build,
3. Define your values & set boundaries,
4. Examine & reset your paradigms
5. Create own leadership framework

Or, #Connect2Coach.

The Warm Leadership Style

A growing body of research by Amy Cuddy and her colleagues suggests that the way to influence—and to lead—is to begin with warmth. Warmth is the conduit of influence: It facilitates trust and the communication and absorption of ideas. Even a few small nonverbal signals—a nod, a smile, an open gesture—can show people that you’re pleased to be in their company and attentive to their concerns.

Insights
Prioritizing warmth as your leadership style helps you connect immediately with your people, demonstrating that you hear them, understand them, and can be trusted by them.

Mindfulness Practice

“When asked which leadership tools they aim to develop, most MBA students list “practical skills” as highest on their priority lists. We have found that understanding oneself, one’s triggers, and one’s emotions through mindfulness & meditation enhances one’s ability to master these concrete skill sets”. - Yael Shy in Harvard Business Review

Insight
Practical skills call for good judgment in action, conduct, & the handling of everyday matters. Mindfulness helps us to concentrate on the here & now, become more aware of how matters affect us, & learn to change the way they relate to our inner self.

Making Winning a Habit

“I work everyday,  and my ambition is just to do something better than I last did.“ - Author Patti Smith

Insight
When competing with ourselves, there are two voices within us which are clamouring for our attention. One cheers you on as a winner and the other boos you down as a loser. Who wins?  The one you CHOOSE to listen to.

Choosing a Niche

Dr. SC is a Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) practitioner in Singapore. He is 85 years old and his clinic always full of patients. He remembers not only the names and combinations of hundreds of herbs and things that go into TCM, but also the names of every one of his patients.

Dr RC, his 40 year old daughter who practices in the neighbouring clinic. She specialses in acupressure, saying  TCM calls for a good memory - and she doesn't have one.

Insight
Focusing on a niche skill to overcome one's weakness is a good career choice. Or is it?

What do you think?

Goals Require Accountability

“Weight loss goals are never achieved just by getting on the scale. Similarly, thinking about NPS as simply a score, without changing the way you actually do business, will never improve customer loyalty.” - Cvetilena Gocheva

Insight
Goal achievement begins with intention but produces intended results only with a planned and consistent change in the way we have been doing things.

Obvious? Yes, but also a reality many of us on the goal achievement path are oblivious to.

Become accountable #Connect2Coach

The Enlightened Leadership Dynamic

“Our greatest hope as leaders of this country is not to go down in history as the best ever. Our aim is to go down in history (as having helped)  Singaporeans to stand tall and see further.” - Singapore Labour chief Chan Chun Sing

Insight
Our personal philosophy of leadership is a dynamic and constantly evolving journey from self interest to enlightened self interest. An ultimate state, where our self-interest lies in furthering the interests of others.

How well are you dealing with the leadership dynamic?  #Connect2Coach

Collaborative Leadership

A man once asked Pablo Picasso why all his art was so screwed up? Why didn't he paint reality instead of these distortions? Hesitating for a moment, Picasso asked, “So what do you think reality looks like? “
Showing him a picture of his wife, the man said, “Like this. It's my wife. “
“Really?” said Picasso, “She's very small. And flat too. “

Insight
Reality is subjective. Encouraging open discussion, leaders can surface  the subjective realities of their team and uncover new perspectives. By incorporating the suggestions & addressing the objections, the decision becomes a commitment to action.

Life Choices

Bookmyshow's founder-CEO Ashish Hemrajani believes, "Ambition is a positive energy.  Desire can be unrelenting. I still live in the same house,  work from the same office and I am pretty much the same man I used to be when I started off 16 years ago."

Insight
"Don't give money way too much power over your life. It's not about how much you make, but the life that you make with the money you have. “ is an advice Suze Orman, TV financial guru says, she would have appreciated when she was 22.

What are the life choices you have made? How well have the served you?

The Art of Change Management

“Like old masonry buildings—such as the Musée d’Orsay in Paris ...that have new glass & steel added to their existing structures, today’s leading companies must integrate the contrasting elements of stability and speed to create a more functional, modern whole.” de Smets et al, McKinsey Quarterly

Insight
Change management is an art akin to the 4 arts of music. Thus you:
INTERPRET what needs to remain unchanged to provide stability & what needs to change to provide speed of customer response
ARRANGE priorities
COMPOSE change activity and
IMPROVISE along the way
Let the music begin!

What's your insight?

Feel For Your Customer

Hard-sell  morticians at the China Dragon Garden graveyard in suburban Beijing set up hundreds for gravestones bearing the names (living) local residents in gold letters. Sales staff would show residents their names, saying, “Look! That could be you.”

Insight
Being close to your product is good, and creative marketing even better, but not at the cost of distancing yourself from customer sensitivities. Know your customer, feel for your customer. #KnowYourself #Connect2Coach

The Advantages of Setting A Range of Goals

“It's impractical to have a growth target being a number. A range is more practical. It gives more room for policymakers to exercise their creativity boost the economy” - Iris Pang, Greater China Economist

Insight
An important objective in setting goals is to make them both challenging and attainable. Emerging evidence suggests that shifting from single number goals to high-low goals offers an increased advantage.
For instance, the impact of being set a high-low goal on members’ sustained motivation to pursue their goal was striking. Only half assigned a single number weight loss goal persisted with the longer-term target, but nearly 80% of those assigned a high-low range weight loss goal did.

Don't Take Your Success For Granted

“We aced at everything, creating products and designing them etc. Going in, I thought, that was it, that’s all we needed. Marketing, HR, and media relations were all BS. How I was proved wrong. Having a great product will not sell itself.” - Rahul Yadav at IIT E-summit 2016

Insight
On his desk, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz keeps a bottle of Mazagran, a carbonated coffee drink he introduced in 1994, and which failed to sell.

When riding waves of success remembering our past failures can serve us well.
#KnowYourself #Connect2Coach