Author: vinodnarayan
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Thoughts on Dostoevsky‘s idiot
There is a sentence in Fyodor Dostoevsky‘s ’The Idiot‘ related to the main character Prince Myshkin that goes something like this.. ’Compassion may be the only law that governs mankind‘ (though I will change that to humankind than mankind) How true and simple but at the same time how incapable we become to embody that…
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Why can’t we be Good?
I was introduced to Jacob Needleman‘s work in 2012. Pretty much the same time I was entangling myself with Jiddu Krishnamoorthi inorder to be free 😄 Through Jacob Needleman‘s work, I was introduced to Gurdjieff and his works. And even today I go back to all of them from time to time in my life.…
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The blame games we get sucked into
I think many workplaces have the same reflex when something goes wrong. A deadline slips, a production issue appears, a customer complains or a team misses expectations. The immediate reaction is often to find who made the mistake. But many times the real problem is not the person. It is the system producing the behavior.…
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Readiness is so important
Most delivery problems don’t start during execution. They start much earlier. When we convince ourselves we are ready. Readiness is probably one of the most less talked aspects of delivery. We treat it like a checklist. A few documents, some estimates, dependencies noted and we move forward. But real readiness is not documentation. It is…
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The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles
Some people spend their entire life trying to escape from where they are, while others spend their whole life trying to return to something they lost. I recently read The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles, and wanted to recommend the book here. The novel follows four young people traveling across America after difficult personal histories,…
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Why we need Poems at work
“You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body. love what it loves.” These are the first few lines from the poem Wild Geese by Mary Oliver. I read…
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Did I make the right career choices ?
I often look back at my career and ask. Did I make the right choices? It depends on what I wanted. It was all fun in my twenties. I did some pursuits in my thirties. But I was all the while lost, distracted, confused and directionless. One of my friends also told me this I…
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Some Thoughts on Reading
I think it is more and more important for us professionals today to read classics and poetry and short stories and memoirs. Books about things other than our profession. A lot of things can be automated but not people’s wants and relationships. We can force systemic behavioral changes but for us to connect with others…
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Improvement, Planning and Repeatability
Improvement is an interesting word, especially when the change we are talking about takes time. Because improvement is not just something we measure. It is something people should feel. Not just understood, but experienced, a sense that something is moving in the right direction. There will always be naysayers, people who prefer to complain rather…
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If people hate Mondays, something is broken.
I’ve never fully understood the idea of Monday blues. Monday is a beginning. A reset. A fresh page. And yet, for so many people, it feels like something to endure rather than look forward to. I see it across teams and conversations. People who actually enjoy parts of their work—their colleagues, their interactions, even the…
Penpositive 