Tag: Work
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Real Work is Before Planning
One thing I am reminded of after every planning cycle is how much work happens before the planning event itself. When people look at a successful planning event, they often see the agenda, discussions, and final commitments. What is less visible is the preparation that made those conversations possible. Planning is rarely successful because of…
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The Hidden Cost of Misalignment
One thing I have noticed over the years is that the cost of misalignment rarely arrives as a dramatic failure. More often, it accumulates through small moments of friction that seem insignificant on their own. It shows up in small ways. A conversation that needs to happen twice. A decision that remains unclear. A dependency…
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Away from Work for 3 days
I spent three weeks in India on vacation. When I returned to work, something surprised me. I’ve been away from work before. I’ve come back to overflowing inboxes, new priorities, and projects that had moved forward without me. This time felt different. It wasn’t the volume of work that caught my attention. It felt as…
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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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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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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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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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