Even before I joined the MBA program though, I was fascinated by leadership, especially the type of leadership that attracts first-rate talent and breeds unquestionable loyalty.

Over the next few weeks, I will blog about my personal leadership concepts “straight from the field” that are a direct outcome of my interest in that kind of leadership, combined with hundreds of hours of research from dozens of business books, and online content.

I dedicate this leadership series of blog posts to my own personal and professional leaders and more importantly to my current and former team members that trusted and believed in me as I built my leadership skill set.

Another new member this week, Mike Nelson.  All the nagging over the last few months has finally paid off

We spent a majority of the time this week on applying GTD project methodology for an internal super-secret internal initiative so we can’t talk much about that here on the blog.  It was a great exercise especially in identifying the vision/outcome of our initiative.

We discussed the last “Next Actions” stage for a few minutes after a brief chat on the 4th stage “Organizing”.

Look out for the mindmap for chapter 4 over the next few days and plan to attend the next meeting on September 7th.  I personally think these are getting more fun every time we meet!

this time we talked mostly about the vision/outcome stage of GTP’s project planning model.  Of course when Ganesh is involved and we are talking about vision, Steve Jobs comes up several times in various contexts.  We all agreed that 4 or 5 failures are natural before success comes knocking on the door.

Nothing will ever be accomplished unless one envisions the outcome in the form of “what success would look, sound and feel like”.  We have to give it up to the lottery-chasers since they have a clear vision of winning millions and retiring on a Caribbean Island…. however, far-fetched the chances of winning might be!

We also briefly covered my favorite topic of “Brainstorming”.  We once again discussed the basic rules of brainstorming as laid out by David Allen:

• no judging, challenging, evaluating or criticizing
• go for quantity, not quality
• no idea is a bad idea!

An interesting conversation thread started around when to stop brainstorming and switch to the next stage (organizing).  the general agreement was that the leader has to bite the bullet and guide the project when ideas stop flowing as fast and are yield lesser and lesser value.  And so I got my chance to remind my golden rule “Perfect is the enemy of good enough”

We spent some time mocking the start-up culture of the late 90s and how most companies operated without any trace of purpose for a business i.e. no one seemed to care that the primary purpose of a business is to “make money”.  Given that though, we agreed that start-ups do need a different mindset.  If they are only focused on making money, they may never get off the ground.  As Larry pointed out, the exit strategies for some entrepreneurs is just to sell out or take the company public.  And that is fine, as long long as they understand that IS the purpose.

We concentrated on our internal processes for the second half of the meeting, especially about the purpose of our daily stand-up meetings (a key part of the agile project methodology).  It seems like we abuse the daily stand-up for things that are not serving the actual purpose of that meeting.  We kind of agreed on some ground rules (informally) that directly address the purpose of this daily stand-ups: bubble up the external roadblocks to the top and find internal resources for technical blocking issues.

Some ideas we generated:

• focus exclusively on individual blocking issues
• be more specific about what an individual is working on or planning to work on rather than vaguely saying “I am working on 123 project for XYZ bank”
• maybe adopt/develop sophisticated tools that will give real-time access to the same blocking information rather than wait 24 hours to spit out the details in the “next stand-up” meeting?

Chapter 3 has the makings of a great topic already.  Join in next time if you missed the meeting today!

We discussed the six-level model for reviewing your own work which is popular among the geek circles.  The model has 6-levels starting from the runway height to 50,000+ feet level.

As expected the topic raised multiple passionate discussions that took us to the boundaries of philosophical nirvana :)  We talked about everything from the definition of happiness to life’s purpose.

Some definitions of happiness as coined by the elite group members:

• Happiness = # of desires fulfilled divided by total # of desires
• if you are smart you probably figured out how to increase your happiness level
• Happiness = # of hours you can sleep every night

We will probably close chapter 2 on that happy note.  Hopefully, we can switch to the “real-world” of GTD project management mode starting in April.  I will post the mindmap for chapter 3 in the coming weeks.

See you soon…

We talked about using Wikis and sharepoints for keeping track of projects both at a personal and team-level.

Some other random, yet relevant things we discussed:

• turn-off all email notifications (sound, prompt, icon etc.) within outlook to be able to concentrate on the task at hand – Talk to Troy or Bala on how to do this
• turn-off email completely (set it to offline mode) for better concentration
• We discussed at length about how the traditional view of an “ideal employee” behavior wherein he/she would simply correct his/her errors, others mistakes and creates the impression of never making mistakes may not be truly IDEAL.  It may be prudent of a leader to actually encourage noisy complainers, disruptive questioners and troublemakers!
• the reference came from a classic HBR Article titled “Why Hospitals Do not learn from failures?”

In the “Do” stage, we talked briefly about the four-criteria model for choosing actions in the moment and three-fold model for evaluating daily work.

If you missed this meeting, not everything is lost.  Catch-up with one of the other participants and just start showing up every 1st and 3rd Tuesday.  Guests are always welcome!

Some highlights:

• re-emphasized tools like ReQall, ClearContext, Jira, ReadItLater, PageAddict etc.
• Rajeev talked about how he maintains an envelop for his taxes and shoves all related document into it throughout the year so filing in Jan/Feb would be a breeze (yeah, right!)
• How different people handle the “waiting for” bucket?
• Troy and Melvin keep them in their Inbox until the loop is closed
• Bala uses the @WaitingFor outlook folder and the ClearContext Defer feature to stay on top of those times.
• Somehow ended up on a very interesting and intense discussion about “creativity and the workplace”; we discussed the following blog entries/case studies:
• http://hbr.org/2008/10/creativity-and-the-role-of-the-leader/ar/1
• http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/01/cultivate-teams-not-ideas.html
• We have two new members: Jeremy Bench and Troy Wilson… both of them are non-geeks so we really love their involvement

There was more reinforcement about why it is a really bad idea to keep things on one’s brain as opposed to a reliable documenting system outside the brain.

We had some interesting off-shoot discussions about off-shoring and GPS!

With regards to clearing the decks of mundane “stuff” in order to create time and energy for more creative streams of ideas, Melvin correctly pointed out that outsourcing fits into that picture quite well.  We talked about companies like Pfizer that provide “personal task outsourcing” to their employees in order to free up their time for more creative endeavors.

We also had a heated debate about leveraging gadgets (like GPSes) versus using your mental acuity in order to get things done.

This session marks the end of chapter 1 of the book.  Hopefully, we will get into more practical sections of the book as we start chapter 2.

Look out for another blog post with a link to the MindMap for Chapter 2.