Monthly Archives: January 2025

My Learning on Writing

Posted in My Learning by

When I draft emails, I always remember the below mnemonic, I read in a magazine.

The ABC of writing – Accuracy, Brevity & Clarity.

After joining work, I learnt a similar mnemonic: KiSS – Keep it Short & Simple)
Then I found this essay Write Simply by Paul Graham. I learnt to write short & simple emails. But my blog posts are very lengthy. Gradually learning to make what I write short & simple.

Please click & expand for a wealth of resources & references. Please remember the KiSS principle.

My Learning from ‘We are LimITless’ – phase 2

Posted in Ideas, My Learning by

Who is Elvis? 

The ones who shine a bit brighter, the ones who are maverick, the ones with lots of energy and charisma. 

Felt good to be part of a program “We are LimITless.” The phase-2 of the culture journey focused on building a culture of collaboration by expanding your network. Why do we need to expand our network?

Collaborating effectively and working well in a matrixed organisation is crucial to achieve collective goals and progress. When we only reach out to people we know, for advice & support, we are limiting ourselves to same team, same routine and missing out on the diversity of opinion & perspectives, thereby slowing down on innovation process. By expanding our networks within the company, we increase our exposure to fresh perspectives, new ideas, opportunities and insights, build new skills and grow our self-confidence.

Volunteered to be a culture influencer, running a few experiments with support of org’s toolkit. In one of the experiments, we nudged & reiterated the teams to try Diversity Collision.

A few more experiments were, networking at leisure, pair and share, scheduled networking, sense checking with someone before presentation or sending a mail, discover hidden value about a colleague, happy-to-help, mentor-mentee and crowdsourcing.

Below are a wealth of resources that will help you network better and collaborate. In case you do not have subscriptions to the respective publishers, you might be allowed to read 3-5 articles free, per month.

Please click & expand for a wealth of resources & references:

Experiments with Diversity Collision

Posted in Ideas by

A few years back, at the Construkt fest, I witnessed an induced networking called “Construkt Collision.” The hall was filled with people, standing. When the conductor of the event says, “Change,” every 1 min, we say “Hi” to the person around us, briefly introduce ourselves and also get to know the other person, exchange business cards, until we hear the next “Change,” after which, we move and meet someone new. It was interesting.

During the “Power of Diversity” week celebration at office, wanted to try something similar, help people meet diverse colleagues they haven’t interacted with and we came up with “Diversity Collision.”

I felt we were not able to achieve active participation in this collision probably because colleagues were shy to reach out to people they do not know or have never interacted with. To overcome this, in one of the offsite gathering, we requested the host to announce and nudge participants to sit alongside someone they have never interacted with and when breaking for lunch, to share the lunch table with someone new and get to know them better. Slight force or nudge helped to break the inertia/shyness 🙂

In hindsight, I thought, we also could have also tried placing a bingo sheet on colleagues desks and asked them to meet, interact briefly and get signatures or names of people, under questions/options like:

  • Someone born in specific month
  • Someone wearing a particular colour shirt
  • Someone from another state/country than yours…etc.