Author: vinodnarayan
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Loneliness is not always Alone
There comes a point in life when you feel alone and realize it is not because you are physically alone. It is because you have become disconnected from yourself. No one can do that work for us. People can support us, but the journey of finding ourselves is one we must take alone. Some of…
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Predictability and Clarity
Clarity on what a team can realistically take on. Clarity on dependencies, risks, and tradeoffs. All of these are critical to a team’s success. When teams lack clarity, everything starts to feel urgent. Work keeps getting added. Priorities keep shifting. People overcommit because no one wants to say no. Eventually stress becomes the new operating…
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Between Fear And Awareness We Create Our Life
Last weekend an interesting thought surfaced. We are probably the only animals that do not step outside our shelters fearing that another animal might eat us alive. That is part of how humanity evolved, and in many ways it is a beautiful thing. But with that evolution also came the awareness that death is inevitable.…
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Delivery problems are not always execution problems.
When deadlines slip or releases struggle, the immediate reaction is often to question the team’s execution. But in many organizations, the real issues begin much earlier and much deeper inside the system itself. Teams are often trying to deliver inside environments filled with shifting priorities, overloaded backlogs, dependency chaos, unclear ownership, constant interruptions, and operational…
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When people remember you
I was not much of a reader as a kid… I loved movies and playing and fooling around. I always ran the opposite direction from books and words. But then somewhere in my late twenties I felt I was being left behind. I was not able to understand life like others did (I still don’t…
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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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