Time Travel: Unfiled Snippets

Here’s an entry that got sucked into a time warp. The lines below were written in the first week of September during an INSEAD week, but disappeared into a seldom-accessed Drafts folder on my pda-phone:-

Propped by in bed in Ibis Fontainebleau right now. Fatima is rolling about in the sheets, putting her newly bought inflatable Dora & Boots to sleep.

Quite an interesting day today…all about leading change and building networks. Lessons from Thatcher:

• Punch ’em like a boxer with a one-two sequence of rational & emotional arguments from each hand.
• Outprepare everyone.
• Use personal traits to get position, position to grow network, network to grow reputation & visibility, and to build platform for next position.
• Canny sense of timing – combine opportunism with strategic planning.
• If power is not growing, it’s eroding.
• Get the rhetoric right…study the fundamental themes that move humans.

Lessons from BP’s Vivienne Cox:

• Socratic method in strategy making.
• “I don’t want conclusions. I want ideas, options, choices – opening new lines of inquiry.”
• The leader is the enabler who creates the right circumstances for emergent strategy, socialization of facts, creating a buzz, setting the boundary conditions.
• Good intuition does not come out of thin air – it is based on massive data analysis.