Linchpin Labs

 Below are some of the key practices to grow in the professional jourrney.  Align with your manager ;boss or senior management and make them WIN Work with them closely.  Ask your manager, how do I help you win? Help them achieve their goals and organization goals. Do it Consistently Not just once; but repeatedly.  Remember, its the Results that matter, not just the effort. Especially, this is very important once you reach the mid-level management (~12 years+ onwards).  If you are working as junior employee, effort matters.  Become visible and popular in the organization through the results and impact created either internally (within the company) or external (clients). Try new things; experiment new ideas.  Generate Money (₹ $ €) . This is the ultimate forever.  Generate opportunities where you can expand your unit and organization Win deals  Understand how business works; what is your business-model Make trend your friend ´What´s trending ...

  Open on Google slides here -  Notes and Summary - What I learned about investing from Darwin by Pulak Prasad Download the PDF here -   Notes and Summary - What I learned about investing from Darwin by Pulak Prasad

A summary and key pointers from the classic international bestseller book titled "How I raised myself from Failure to Success in Selling" By Frank Bettger

No.1 thing we should solve for today in order to increase the likelihood of a customer buying a high quality low regret deal is "Customer Confidence". It's not customers confidence in supplier, or its brand, product or sales professional. It's customers confidence in themselves. Their ability to make large-scale decisions on behalf of their company. i.e.  Have we asked the right questions Have we looked at the right information Are we even agreed how confident are we that we even agree on the right problem i.e. this is the best solution 4 significant forces eroding Customer Confidence on an ongoing basis Decision Complexity - B2B buying decisions have become increasingly complex as more and more stakeholders have gotten involved in that purchase decision with competing priorities competing metrics Information Overload - Its not a customer struggle with a high quantity of information but they struggle with high quantities of high quality information. Everybody's ...

A deeply insightful course on Digital Strategy and Action by Dr. Peter Cohan , Lecturer of Strategy at Babson College , Massachusets, USA. Check the lecture by Dr. Peter Cohan - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9WdNKsx970McydQpJlJ9l59tiQzr39Al  Below given slides capture key pointers from the course. 

 Please go through the presentation by globally renowned CEO Coach and Management Guru - Prof. Ram Charan on Digital Leadership.  Disclaimer: This presentation was delivered at FICCI@90 event  available in Youtube. All the content and ideas belong to Prof. Ram Charan. The slide is prepared as a reference material and for community contribution and not for any commerical purposes. 

This is the summary of the book titled 'Doing Agile Right - Transformation without Chaos' published by Harvard Business Review Press 2020. The authors include Darrell Rigby, Sarah Elk, and Steve Berez who are the Partners at Bain & Company, Inc.  This captures the essence of a roller coaster ride for every organization undergoing Agile. The ideas in the book are not only just applicable to enterprise IT and also to the Business side of it. The book not only provides ideas, but also stimulates thinking and creates an urge.  It does not stop by covering just one aspect like Innovation, but also encompasses different angles such as budgeting (i liked most), funding, reviewing, customer loyalty and obsession, functional silos and bureaucracy and GOLDEN MEAN. 

 

Here are some of the hard truths about innovation cultures and challenges faced by organizations when it comes to managing innovation.  5 challenges to Innovation Innovation is episodic (Go to Silicon Valley; Burn post-its in a room) Resources are trapped and held hostage by incumbent businesses Trying to fit innovation into the structure you have today Too little diversity of thought; too little access to customer experience  Treating assumptions like knowledge The hard truth about innovation culture is, its more and more a discipline and not a random act.  5 harsh realities of innovative companies Tolerance for Failure but No Tolerance for Incompetence Willingness to Experiment but Highly Disciplined (A willingness to experiment does not mean randomly throwing paint at a canvas) Psychologically Safe but Brutally Candid Collaboration but with individual accountability Flat but strong leadership Courtesy, Inspiration & more details at  Prof. Gary Pisano at Harvar...

Dual Transformation framework will help incumbent organizations stay ahead and not get into obsolescence. One of the interesting thing, I learnt or observed from Proctor and Gamble (P&G) is  Problems of predictability and How US$ 10 Billion (as of 2017) sales making Pampers was born.  Story of Pampers - “One top P&G executive said, we’re organized to deliver consistent, reliable results and that’s exactly the problem. P&G’s leaders were worried. They peered into the development pipeline and saw a problem . Line extension and incremental ideas crowded the pipeline. That prospect a declining growth not next or next decade. Beyond that. P&G leaders decided to systematically and reliably create ideas that the potential to create new brands and new categories.” Dual Transformation approach is proved by solid examples from various companies such as Aetna, Adobe, Singapore Post, Amazon, GBS Bank and many more.   Transformation A = Change the ‘How’ you deliver i....

Developing Original Ideas - by Adam Grant Originals are the ones with = Creativity + Change They take initiative Poke the status quo / box Not accepting the default way of working Improve the world Who can be Originals ? > Anybody Remember   1 : Question the default? You can find someone's job performance and how long they stay by knowing what web browser they use. Chrome, Firefox stay 15% longer than Internet Explorer and Safari users (who accept the default) Where / how do Originals evolve? Originality starts with " Curiosity " Tip 1 : Try "Vuja De" thinking  > Looking into the default or reverse thinking (e.g.) When Uber passed by, look at the no of empty seats; instead of the how many filled.  Tip 2 : Greatest Secret > What differentiates originals ? " Not the quality of ideas. Its the Quantity ". The more quality you have the more you create bad idea :) In a brainstroming meeting, we might ge...

“The story of innovation has not changed. It has always been a small team of people who have a new idea, typically not understood by people around them and their executives.” - Eric Schmidt Most frequently asked questions to Google executive : How does Google innovate? Can innovation be planned? Can it be taught? Here are the 8 ideas/steps that work @ Google. Or Google practices to infuse innovation. Think 10x Launch, then keep listening Share everything you can - Collaboration happens best when you share information openly Hire the right people - Referrals from current employees have proven to be a great way to bring talented new people into our company Use the 70/20/10 model  70% of our projects are dedicated to our core business  20% of our projects are related to our core business 10% of our projects are unrelated to our core business Look for ideas everywhere -  Use data, not opinions Focus on users, not the competition Insp...

High Performance Collaboration (HPC) Framework #TogetherStronger from Ragavendra Prasath Bibliography & Courtesy! 1. Book titled ‘Trillion Dollar Coach’ by Eric Schmidt & Jonathan 2. Book titled ‘Powerful - Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility’ by Patty McCord. 3. Book titled ‘Measure What Matters’ by John Doerr 4. Our favorite one The five keys to a successful Google team - https://rework.withgoogle.com/blog/five-keys-to-a-successful-google-team/

This is rendered from Mckisney publication -  https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/digital-mckinsey/our-insights/flip-the-ratio-taking-it-from-bottleneck-to-battle-ready Learn how to use OKRs. OKRs and its questions OKRs for teams - a sample dashboard

Whenever you read explanations about why a company is so successful, inevitably its success was attributed to the sheer brilliance of its management's team. Then in few years, the company fell off the cliff and began to unravel very quickly. When you read the explanations about why it had stumbled so badly, it was always attributed to the same management team; the folks running the company who had earned unfettered praise for so long. (1) This disturbed Clayton  Christensen   for a long years.  Clayton framed the question  'Gee, how could smart people get so stupid so fast?' Its because of bad management and doing dumb things.  Bryan Eisenberg, in his book, Be like Amazon explains about dumb things succinctly as it goes below.  Why do smart people do dumb things? Because dumb things produce immediate results. So immediate results are that bad? No. Immediate results aren’t always bad. They’re only bad when the actions you take to generate those re...

A Hustle I observed today. This is unusal and may be the new norm. This is applicable to everyone working in the company. You can be from Marketing, Pre-Sales, Engineering, Support, Technical Documentation, Quality, CXO or anyone.  Observed an urge to change. Try something new. Fail on that and Learn. Fear of startups or nimble companies eating our lunch.  Everyone becoming impatient supernaturally. Measuring the delay in milliseconds to provide uber customer experience and meeting the customer promises. They dont know where to start and how to do it. But figuring it out.  But the only thing is, we will be much better than yesterday and today by tomorrow. That is obvious. Changing for good.  Finally, the below image summaries, all my observations in just 32 words.