Beyond Weekend

At work you are expected to successfully deliver every task, every project, on time every time. If you fail once, you may possibly not get the chance again. Every piece of work you deliver carries with it the 'attributes' - was it precisely what was required, was it delivered on time; have YOU added value with YOUR contribution? Take a moment to think - your deliverables show your qualities. If you were the stakeholder would you say "Wow!" by the stuff you delivered?

To continuously live up and exceed the expectation of your customers and stakeholders, continuous learning is key. Learning the skills and gaining the knowledge to deliver 'Wow! quality work' is an essential component of an individual's growth. Always remember, if you can't live up to the expectation or even deliver more than what is expected, then someone else will!

Are you learning to live up to these expectations?

What have you learnt today? What have you learnt in the last one week, a month, an year?

What have you learnt which will help deliver more for your customers?

Action:

• Create a learning log. Write down what you learn every day. If you are not learning, it will show!
• Have a learning goal. What should you learn to deliver more and add more value to your work? Anticipate your future deliverables (short term and long term), analyze the industry trend, understand the customers' need and their business and design your own learning plan.
• Set timelines by which you would achieve these specific learning goals. Smart learning in quick time is the necessity of today.
• Track your learning on a regular basis. Are you progressing in the right path and on time?

You grow not by years of experience but by the knowledge you acquire and implement.

Keep learning. Keep growing.

I read Rajesh Setty's latest book #Th!nkTweet: Bite-sized lessons for a fast paced world! and re-read it the very next day.

It is packed with wisdom and the bite-sized lessons will provoke you to think and think again. The benefit of a book comes only when we take a learning out of it and then practice the insights in our daily life. This book shows the path to immense learning through 'bite-sized lessons', all written as tweets within 140 charecters. Indeed, Rajesh proves here that 140 charecters is enough to make us think.

This may be a small book which would take you just about an hour to read through but do not judge the book by its thickness. It is a book which should be read and re-read, to think, introspect and put the learning into practice. In todays world where time is most valuable, this book has a very high ROI for the time you spend on it. The tweets will provoke your thought and let you introspect on the way you live today!

Foreword by Guy Kawasaki (@guykawasaki) says it all in a tweet - "#Th!nkTweet is a cool little book filled with twinsights, twumor, and twinfluence of Twitter."

I take another learning from this book 'project': Rajesh has been into tweeting since December 2008, that was about six months back, only. It is inspiring to see how he has been able to leverage the twitter platform to come up with his idea of publishing tweets in a book form. You can do wonders if you have the vision and you know where exactly you want to go.

You can follow Rajesh in twitter at @UpbeatNow

You can buy the book at Happy About (publisher) or Amazon.

To read more on this book and to follow the buzz around it, check Rajesh Setty's website. If you enjoy the book, let others know.

Thanks again Rajesh for this great book and wish all the success.

Enjoy reading and quick learning!

(Book cover photo source: rajeshsetty.com)

Mind Mapping is a technique by which we can capture our thoughts and logically put them together based on their dependencies, relationships or associations. If you have not used this technique, this post would be useful to introduce you to the power of mind mapping and the value you may get by using the mind mapping technique.

When we brainstrom to solve a problem, to capture the approach to a new project or even managing our To-Do list, we probably record our thoughts on the whiteboard, on a notepad, in a document or spreadsheet. I do find it a bit restricted to logically document my thoughts when I record in spredsheets. In turn I risk to not capture an idea. Its difficult to record the free flowing ideas when limited by a few rows and columns. A whiteboard ofcourse makes it easier, but does not allow to quickly share with my colleagues who are located around the world. The alternative to this is to capture my thoughts in a Mind Mapping software.

To see what Mind Mapping is all about, watch this video. Here Tony Buzan, who is known to be the inventor of modern mindmapping speaks about this powerful technique.


There are many Mind Mapping tools available on the internet. I personally use a open source mind mapping software, FreeMind. Its easy to document my thoughts logically and then export it to a spreadsheet, a document or even in a pdf, if I do need to share my ideas with someone not using this tool.

Hope this helps to capture your thoughts with ease and without limitation and increase your productivity and creativity.

Last week I heard about Servant Leadership from one of my colleagues. The concept made me interested and I went on to do some reading. This leadership philosophy has resonated in me and I am in search of a deeper insight of this in today's corporate world.

Servant Leadership is a leadership philosophy where you serve first and then be the leader. This philosophy was presented by Robert K. Greenleaf in 1970 where he said:

"The servant-leader is servant first… It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions…The leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types. Between them there are shadings and blends that are part of the infinite variety of human nature." (courtesy - greenleaf.org)

A servant leader is identified of having the following charecteristics:

1. Calling - a calling to serve others
   
2. Listening - a keen interest to listen to others views
   
3. Empathy - an ability to understand others situation
   
4. Healing - to emotionally support when things are not all well for someone
   
5. Awareness - an awareness of the surrounding and being informed of the happenings
   
6. Persuasion - others work for you because they want to and not because they have to
   
7. Conceptualization - an environment to encourage others to share ideas openly
   
8. Foresight - an ability to anticipate the future happenings and trends as much as possible
   
9. Stewardship - to work for the larger benefit of the society
   
10. Growth - help others grow
    
11. Building Community - develop a sense of being in a community among the team members

There is a sense of calmness and selflessness in the leadership approach. Collaboration, empowerment and foresight are so necessary in today's corporate life. Servant leadership talks of all this and more. It encourages a sense of bonding and a spirit of team work to achieve organizational goals where many are surely more 'powerful' than one.

Does Servant Leadership appeal to you? How many of the above charecteristics do you practice? Are you a servant leader?

Thanks for reading.