The unexamined life is not worth living – Socrates The more I experience coaching, the more Socrates seems wiser. Even coaching is ripe for a thorough examination. Every field that has canonical principles and prescriptive guidelines actually is. A certified coach enters coaching with a deliberate structure and an expected flow. The coach may feel like being in control. Life’s glorious spontaneity almost always shakes the coach out of a reverie. I was coaching an enterprising working professional the other day. We had arrived at a clear coaching goal. I was balancing head and heart in continuing the dialogue. The path seemed straightforward – in my mind. The heart was at ease.. And then, suddenly, things changed! My coachee became emotional and wasn’t in a good place. As coaches, we are taught to be prepared with our plan. In that moment, I realized one has to be prepared to let go of the plan as well. And so, I did. A silence, a prayerful silence enveloped our conversation and brought in a recovering pause. Initially, silence holds the thread of…
Maria Konnikova – Mixing Poker and Psychology
Ever heard of John H Watson? Dr. Watson?..Yes, of course! The world knows him as the person closest at hand to marvel at the brilliance of Sherlock Holmes. Maria Konnikova looks at Dr.Watson in a different way. She has written a book on Sherlock Holmes called Mastermind – How to think like Sherlock Holmes. And that makes her realise that between the two – Holmes and Watson – it is Watson who plays the role of the coach by continually asking questions. Watson’s relentless questioning improves Sherlock’s thinking by forcing him to verbalise his thought-process. Isn’t that a brilliant appreciation of Watson and his role in creating the legend of Sherlock Holmes?! Maria’s conversation with Shane Parrish ( The Knowledge Project) has multiple subjects all interlinked to each other. Thought-process, decision-making, the role of luck and chance and emotions. All of them interesting, made even more so by Maria’s own story. A PhD in Psychology, Maria experienced an inexplicable bout of illness. She recovered from it, but this incident and a few personal adversities made her reflect on the role…
The Peter Drucker Diary – Entry 5
The work of a genius or giant often presents an anomaly. Reverential regard obscures the real work. People know the name, but haven’t engaged with the work. In this series, we take one Peter Drucker quote or excerpt and seek to understand it. Entry 5 “Expect the job to provide stimulus only if you work on your own self-renewal, only if you create the excitement, the challenge, the transformation that makes an old job enriching over and over again” A job, especially in the context of an organisation, is in place for producing consistent results as demanded by the nature of the task or the wish of the customer. This creates routine. Any routine becomes mindless after some point of time. People go through the motions and deliver the minimum acceptable results that bear the stamp of consistency. For the organisation, most such results are low-stakes and deemed acceptable; and so, everybody plays their part in the drift downwards towards mediocrity. Peter Drucker puts the onus for a positive handling of the situation on the job-holder. Do not expect the…
LeaderPlay – Compensating for flawed employment
Sometimes, I believe that compensation is the perfect word for high salary packages. As leadership positions dwindle, how else can you compensate an ambitious performer who had been misled into believing he or she will be at the top of the heap one day. The unspoken truth about personal development within organisations is that the potential for self-growth for individuals working under the same setup for long is limited. There is no real exposure to the sheer range and diversity of the world outside. This exposure makes so much of a difference.You compensate the ambitious performer for not being able to provide them that; after all, you want your best racehorses cooped up in the stable. Funnily enough, the organisation can avoid this compensation by rethinking why it has to prevent employees from seeking substantive growth experiences elsewhere, if not outright multiple employment. And it is a win for the organisation as well. Enabling your employee to engage uninhibitedly with the world is the best engagement strategy one can think of. Universities who demand that full-time faculty also take on…
The Peter Drucker Diary – Entry 3
The work of a genius or giant often presents an anomaly. Reverential regard obscures the real work. People know the name, but haven’t engaged with the work. In this series, we take one Peter Drucker quote or excerpt and seek to understand it. Entry 3 “Success always obsoletes the very behaviour that achieved it” Think about the courtship period of a couple. There is a notion of ‘cute’ that every man and woman remembers their partner having bestowed on them – during this lovey dovey period. This cuteness makes the heart go bonkers in crazy, stupid love and then..the wedding bells ring! And then what? The same behaviour now makes your partner come after you with a sledge hammer or Thor’s hammer! You scratch your head and wonder – what’s changed?! The great Henry Ford famously said that the customer can have a Ford car in any colour as long as it is black! Ford was the perfect practitioner of Frederick Taylor’s ‘Scientific management’. His assembly line was the embodiment of maximum efficiency so that production could be scaled up…
Significant Leadership : How to find where it lies
Take a look at the accompanying visual. Visuals simplify the appearance of complex reality. With the caveat of this being a conceptual model, it is still a useful one to find our place in the world. Significant leadership is the space where your greatest competence, your greatest passion and the world’s greatest need overlap. Where does one begin? Sachin Tendulkar began with his passion, and you might be surprised to know it was not batting! Tendulkar wanted to become a tearaway fast-bowler. When he went for Dennis Lillee’s fast-bowling camp, Lillee saw him bat and told him to forget about fast bowling. Isn’t that interesting? One of the greatest batsman in modern times needed feedback on his greatest competence! What comes in the way of identifying our competence? Ironically, it is the sheer ease of it, so much so that we do not think about it at all. What comes easy to us is dismissed. You can reflect on what is it you find very easy to do that is something of a task for your peer group ( people who…
What Disruption means for HR : Summary of a learning Session for marketing professionals
The Young & their interests We put ‘The Young’ as a customer category and spelled out what interests them. When time came to identify the industry/sector, we found that we had to scratch our heads a bit. This is significant. KEY POINT – The boundaries between industries and sectors are disappearing or getting blurred. Certain industries or product/service categories are fighting for survival itself examples – music industry, mobile service providers, movie halls, publishing industry, retail shops. This is because of disruption caused by technology. Disruption – Examples Netflix/ rentals ; Internet movies/ theatre screenings ; Uber/ rental cars & ownership itself ; Amazon/book stores ; itunes/Spotify / Rhythm house ; Kindle/ Printed books; Mobile apps/ television viewing ; Online booking/ travel agencies ; Paytm/ card-swiping. Bottomline is that a company can move into an entirely different product line or service category. is the most famous example. If watching television via app catches on, ‘television’ as a product category gets wiped out. Hotels will struggle big time if one house in every street decides to become an Air B&B partner. E-commerce…
How to be an Employee : Peter Drucker’s classic career advice
Being an employee is an art, says Drucker. And he says getting fired from your first job may be a good thing! Isn’t that interesting? Peter Drucker wrote on this topic almost forty years back. The Basic Skill He starts off by asking, ” What can you learn that will help you in being an employee?” The answer, unsurprisingly, is communication. Drucker calls it a basic skill which very few students bother to learn. This one basic skill is the ability to organize and express ideas in writing and in speaking. For Drucker, an early start is beneficial. ” The foundations for skill in expression have to be laid early : an interest in and an ear for language; experience in organizing ideas and data; in brushing aside the irrelevant; in wedding outward form and inner content into one structure; and above all, the habit of verbal expression. If you do not lay these foundations during your school years, you may never have an opportunity again. You should take courses in the writing of poetry and the writing of short stories. Most…
Triggering the ‘active’ in Active Listening. What scuba-diving & the hospital emergency scene teach us?
You are scared and excited about being underwater for the first time! As the scuba-diving instructor speaks on how to go about the whole thing one last time, you hang onto each word for dear life. You grab tighter as the instructor moves on to ‘trouble-shooting’ instructions. You ask anything & everything that comes gushing onto to you. You repeat instructions, paraphrase the meaning as you understand it, ask whether you got it right. You are determined to get it right & you care a little less of what others make of you! If you are going to do sky-diving or bungee jumping, you will likely be the same. You may have never heard or known about ‘active listening’ in your whole life & you still end up practising it! Active listening is listening in a way that reaffirms we are communicating; the speaker & listener both experience that they are making a real effort to understand each other. We are exhorted to learn it & get trained on tips & techniques. We don’t know any of it, & yet we…