The content emphasizes that serendipity is not merely luck. It is something one can cultivate by expanding their “luck surface area” by showing up in rooms you don’t fully belong to, by sharing half-ideas before they are polished and other means covered in the article. Continue reading You Can’t Wait for Serendipity. You Have to Engineer It.
A Leadership Reflection for Women’s Day A friend recently told me about visiting a government office in Pune. When she needed to use the restroom, staff directed her down a corridor, past stacks of broken chairs and old filing cabinets, to a bathroom tucked away in a forgotten corner of the building. “I don’t know why anyone would even want to go there,” she said. The women working in that office had no choice. Most corporate workplaces are better than this. But not by as much as we’d like to think. The bathroom wasn’t hidden by accident—it was designed (or … Continue reading Designing Workplaces for Human Variability
Have you ever promoted a “star” performer who consistently hit the numbers—only to discover, a year later, that the culture had weakened and the strategy had drifted. Or, for that matter watched a sales team smash quarterly targets on legacy products while your supposedly strategic new offering struggled for oxygen? I spent a year maxing out the metric my organization said mattered. At review time, a completely different metric got rewarded. It took me a while to realize this wasn’t bad luck or a biased manager — it was a design flaw baked into how most organizations operate. Most of … Continue reading Rewarding A While Hoping for B: Why Smart Organizations Make Predictably Poor Decisions
The article discusses “sunflower bias,” where team members conform to a leader’s opinion, stifling genuine debate and diverse views. This bias leads to poor decision-making, reduced innovation, and employee disengagement. To combat it, leaders should foster psychological safety by encouraging dissent, using anonymous feedback, and modeling openness to challenges, ultimately seeking true engagement over mere agreement. Continue reading Sunflower Bias in Leadership: Why Following Blindly Can Cost Your Organization
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