Incorrectly implemented OKRs can make your organisation less agile — The key takeaway for most people from John Doerr’s book, Measure What Matters is as follows: Objectives (O) are the what, and Key Results (KR) are the how. I am guilty of falling into this trap and making the same mistake as many other people — incorrectly interpreting OKRs as…

Three Strategies for Unlocking Balanced Productivity — While balancing the demands of hybrid work, we find ourselves caught in a paradox. Sometimes, we’re seduced by the thrill of challenges, the pressure of deadlines, or the desire to stand out, pushing ourselves to the brink of burnout. …

Embracing AI as a Brainstorming Partner: 3 Ways to Enhance Your Creative Journey — Human thinking is a chaotic interplay of ideas born out of memories and emotions. The mind conjures up related and unrelated information. Then combines it with imagination to create an output — as spoken words, written texts, artwork or innovative solutions to problems that challenge our current reality. In contrast…

A comprehensive guide to mastering OKRs and preventing them from devolving into a glorified to-do list — A 35-Year Odyssey — that’s the subtitle of a research paper published by professors Locke and Latham in 2002. It summarises 35 years of research on the theory of goal setting. Now that’s a paper worth reading. Here are some key points from the paper (my simplified rephrasing): The most…

Three Strategies for Optimal Productivity and Fulfilment — Tina had already fixed the bug her manager assigned her, and it wasn’t even 11 am. She had been to the break room twice, and it was too early for lunch. She picked up her iPhone and started scrolling down her social media feeds. “Hey Tina, are you coming to…

Is your team thinking about the right problems to solve? — “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do. We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.” — Steve Jobs In the modern world of high technology, we pay people to solve problems using their creative thinking. We can observe…

We don’t need aliens to enslave humans. We do it to ourselves. A century back slavery was rampant and legal in many parts of the world. Even today it is probably there in the dark corners of inhumanness.

Goals should be challenging and inspiring, not easily achievable. — The SMART goal-setting methodology is dumb. It leads to uninspiring goals which are set and forgotten. Research indicates that challenging goals stimulate higher productivity, bring out the best in people, and lead to greater satisfaction. “The value of an ambitious goal is not measured by what it will bring to…

It may sound weird, but it has enormous health benefits. — I can’t even remember where I heard it for the first time. Maybe it was some self-help podcast. I dismissed it as some new age woo-woo. But somehow felt like something worth trying, so I embarked on a bit of adventure to find a tree to hug. You must be…