ConceptsNest

   Close your eyes and imagine yourself standing in front of a towering wall with small, colourful pegs scattered along the structure. Around your waist is a snug harness, and you begin to scale the wall, one step at a time, climbing higher and higher. Every move you make is methodical, forcing you to think with your body as much as your brain. There are mental health benefits of rock climbing that exceed the physical ones, and we don’t necessarily have to be a master of the sport to reap them. Leadership can be learned anywhere. Reflecting back on rock-climbing sessions, we realized how much this experience can be a metaphor for leadership experiences. Rock climbing offers many opportunities for personal and professional development.   1. Collaboration and Differing Perspectives: . . . -> Climbing is solitary, yet highly collaborative in nature. To climb safely, you must have someone to belay and/or spot you, meaning you are always part of a team. Acti...

Conversation on how Henri Fayol’s management principles & Maslow’s hierarchy of needs create a complete leadership model that blends structure with human motivation. In most careers, there comes a point where technical tasks give way to leading people, setting strategy, and shaping vision . Today, that transition is expected — but in the 19th century, many companies simply promoted their best technicians. Henri Fayol challenged that norm, arguing that the qualities of a great worker did not automatically make a great manager . Who Was Henri Fayol? Henri Fayol was one of the first to formally define what effective management looks like. His 14 Principles of Management identified the skills needed to lead well — insights that still influence management theory today. Alongside these, he created Five Primary Functions of Management that provide a big-picture framework for running any organisation. What Is Administrative Theory? Fayol called managerial skills "administrative func...

OKRs are powerful—but not foolproof. The key is clarity: knowing what matters most, and how progress really looks. Why do some companies seem unstoppable while others stall? The secret often lies in how they set and pursue goals. Enter OKRs – A Discussion. OKR is an acronym for Objectives and Key Results —  a framework for visioning and setting goals within an organization that was popularized by Google. We often wonder how successful companies continue to navigate and grow and know exactly what direction to go . The trick seems to be an almost irresponsibly aggressive approach to growing key objectives with a talented group of people.   Today, OKR is used at a seemingly broad variety of companies, from larger established firms like Anheuser-Busch and Deloitte to younger tech companies like Eventbrite and Twitter. Therefore, what are OKRs and how do they work, and — most importantly — do they work. Many leaders ask how they can align their team to the vision and set goals w...

  ***Continued from Chapter 01 (Covered previously: Decision Making, its styles, different Cognitive Biases) Link to Chapter -01 Common Patterns in Decision Making The upside of understanding various patterns in decision-making is that they lead us to think about how the mind preforms its many complex functions in countless situations and how our awareness of time, space, and the various narrative and cognitive frameworks can help decode the factors that shape our decisions. Here is a graphic presentation of what author Venkatesh Rao puts forward in his book. The graphic shows “Information Location” across the x-axis going from Internal to External and “Visibility of Mental Models” on the y-axis going from Low to High. The distinctions among the four classes of basic decision patterns (above) are not arbitrary. They are based on the distribution and visibility of situational information . Information originates either in the decision-maker’s head or in the environment , and we ei...

The Benefits of Work-Life Balance Flexible working is more than just a trend. It represents a huge change in the way that organizations manage their work and their people. Even before the coronavirus lockdown, many organizations were exploring new ways of operating that allow people to have a better work-life balance. Ways that increase their engagement with, and control over, their work. The lockdown has forced us to adapt to new working patterns quickly. And now, as the restrictions start to ease, we're thinking about adopting some of these new practices in the longer term. What Is Flexible Working? Flexible working is any work pattern that differs significantly from the traditional, office-based, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. standard. It can involve working from home, working flexible hours, job sharing, or a mixture of all of these. The different kinds of flexible working are: A) Working from Home Working from home is exactly what it says: work carried out by employees in their own...