Anu Subramanian - UCSC Extension in Silicon Valley

 This week, we’ve dissected AMP to take a look at what can enable us to acheive self-actualization. In my opinion, AMP is an important component of work culture and should be a key inclusion. I’d like to see more companies do away with old management practices and embrace AMP more actively. I’d also like to [...]

I tried a little experiment a week ago. I told my 12 yr old to put her banana peel in the compost bin. She asked, “But, why?”. (Don’t ask… that’s just how pre-teens communicate.) I said, “Because I said so”. Guess what! Didn’t work Later in the day, I told her to put an apple [...]

Mastery is perhaps one of the most interesting ones. The quest for knowledge and the desire to constantly improve in whatever you are passionate about is a powerful driving force. Consider the example of a budding young soccer player who starts playing at the age of 8. By the time this young player gets to [...]

Daniel Pink describes Autonomy as our urge/ability to self-direct. Why is this significant? – Because the collective sum of our knowledge, experiences and wisdom can generate impressive solutions to a problem and creative ways to address a situation. – Because as human beings we each have our own quirks, work patterns and goals, and you [...]

AMP = Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose. Now this is a power-packed acronym! These three words power the engine within us that takes us to greater heights, and help us achieve self-actualization in the personal and professional environment. Located at the peak of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy, self-actualization is described in the following way: “What a man can [...]

In keeping with the theme of innovation and my quest to quash myths that hinder it, I wanted to address the last fallacy on my list: ‘Great minds think alike’. This phrase is sometimes thrown out as a pat on our backs for agreeing with each other. It stems from our inherent need to find [...]

In my previous post, I put out my take on how innovation and discovery come from thinking out-of-the-box, and by thinking the impossible and going for it. A key component to ensuring we’re keeping the right perspective is to make the past our friend, not our foe. We often make the mistake of thinking that [...]

  Say what? I can’t tell you how many times I hear this, and it bugs me to no end. Colin Powell once said, ” ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ is the slogan of the complacent, the arrogant or the scared. It’s an excuse for inaction, a call to non-arms”.  Alright, so the [...]

One of my resolutions this year was to make a list of all the typical workplace myths from various sources and then try to bust them. Now that we’re at the half-way point in the year, I figured it was fitting to do a review of how I did.  In this series of posts, I wanted to share [...]

The thirst for knowledge is an interesting struggle. It drives us to better ourselves and serves as motivation. However, our quest to learn more about a particular thing can cause us to put blinders on and go down a road that may take us away from our original heading. Where do you draw the line? It [...]

The much-debated ‘Lessons Learned’ process is worthy of a mention in this series. It is one of the most important aspects of project management and organization leadership in my opinion. A leader’s commitment to the success of projects, their people, and the company, is demonstrated to a large extent by their ability to learn from past [...]

There are times when a company that was poised for success and destined for glory, fizzles and fades into the background. The money was there, the concept was saleable, and customers were clamoring for their offering. But something went wrong. So what was it? The answer – the management team! The fact that a leader [...]

My first post in this series described one of the most important leadership lesson I learned - to allow your team members to become better leaders themselves by simply getting out of their way. One way to support that effort is, when there is a problem, to resist the urge to jump into the fray and come [...]

Several years ago, I found myself on a team that was in the clutches of a controlling and overbearing project leader who quickly sapped the team of all its creativity and enthusiasm. I then began to systematically scribble notes to myself on all the things I would never do when I became a project leader [...]

We’ve all had to surmount project communication challenges at some point in our job functions. We are in a world of globally dispersed teams where we sometimes never get to see each other. Naturally, email communication is often deemed a convenient method to get messages across without having to work around team schedules. However, a badly [...]

Have you seen soccer teams come together? Soccer is very much a team sport. Players use their individual talents to advance the ball towards the goal, but ultimately pass to others on their team who are in a better position to score. In doing so, they sacrifice their moment in the spotlight for the good of [...]

It’s that time of year! About now, most companies embark upon a yearly performance appraisal process to provide feedback, deliver praise or criticism, and set the stage for the upcoming year(s). This is a somewhat rigid and heavily scrutinized HR activity. What can a leader do to motive their teams outside the confines of this process? Here [...]

Can the perfect process weather the perfect storm ? In the first two parts of this series we saw what the mechanics are of introducing processes and how processes can be tailored to your project(s). So now you’ve got the perfect process, but you’re still not meeting timelines or quality and performance objectives ! Why ? More [...]

I’ve seen too many examples of good process initiatives that went wrong because there just wasn’t a an effort to match the process with a project. Below are examples of process intiatives that went wrong – 1) Organization-wide processes that only work for certain project types. Would you use the same hammer or spanner for different DIY projects ? Probably not. It’s a good idea [...]

The task of managing project processes usually falls upon the project management organization. This, in my opinion, is a good thing. The project leaders have the the ear of the management team, the trust of the project teams, and a unique cross-functional perspective. I was once asked by the CTO of an engineering organization to help him design the “RIGHT” project process [...]

Have you ever worked for someone who said ALL requirements are high priority ? Yeah ! We all have. Customers often are insistent upon the delivery of a certain feature set by a certain timeline that may seem impossible to meet. If everything is high priority, nothing is ! Project teams often bear of the brunt of this indecisiveness. Impossible targets, [...]