Adam Gilchrist on Leadership

​At the NASSCOM India Leadership Forum 2014 in Mumbai last week, Adam Gilchrist delivered a great keynote with some good humor and interesting anecdotes from the dressing room. He drew a lot of inspiration from his teammates and skippers in framing the lessons on leadership.

Belief

Attitudes are contagious – is yours worth catching?

At the first team meeting of the 2001 Aussie tour to India, Steve Waugh wrote this on the whiteboard.

Hope

A human being can survive:

• 40 days without food
• 3 days without water
• 8 minutes without air

But not a second without hope.

Trust

In the first season of IPL, Deccan Chargers has a great team on paper. However, they finished last in the league and the underdogs Rajasthan Royals won.

Gilchrist said that while the idea of the league was people playing with players from across the world with different cultures and routines, the team merely did lip service on the promise.

For the next season, Darren Lehmann joined the team as coach and declared the principle – Create an environment everyone wants to be a part of. The silos were amended, and Deccan Chargers won the season!

Focus

Wherever you are, be there.

“The way Sachin handled fame, fortune and expectations is awesome. He’s the only person who carried all that fame, fortune, and excellence together.”

Being Lonely

“We arrived in India in 2001; 31 years without a series win and my first one here. I score an 80-ball hundred in the first Test which we won. I’m like, this is very easy. What the hell have the guys in last three decades been doing?

The next Test match, the best Test I’ve played in my career, Laxman and Dravid spoil our party. I score ducks off first ball in both the innings. A king pair! As I walked to the pavilion, fans in the stands were lighting flares and cheering, and in the packed Eden Gardens, I felt very, very lonely.”

“Whether you walk or not, when you have nicked, is an individual choice. Ponting has always respected that. But when I reached dressing room after walking after the umpire judged me not-out in the World Cup semi-finals, I had to hear a lot of things!”

Team

Forge a relationship with team members beyond business.

It is very important to know your team… not just in their role in the organization, but as individuals.

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Disclosure: I attended the event on an invite from NTT DATA, one of the top 10 IT services provider globally. My expenses were taken care by the company and their agency. However, none of my posts on the blog or on my social channels were influenced or moderated by them.

A Clever way to track web sentiment

A new service lets you link to stories through domains like loath.es or iwantth.is. Bitly, the link-shortening service, has something small and good for you to play with. They call it Bitly for Feelings, and it adds a clever new capability to social media.

Google Glass : a slew of intriguing new features

 

Google Glass wearers were treated to some new features with  XE10 update, but what’s hiding under the hood might be even more promising. Android Police posted their APK teardown earlier today, and their findings are nothing if not intriguing. Among the features that may be on the horizon are a handful of new commands hidden in the GlassVoice APK, like the ability to succinctly ask Glass to call you a car, schedule an event, create a 3D model, translate phrases and start a round of golf. Even more interesting are the possibilities presented by potential music playback and gaze integration. Indeed, the files buried in the Gaze folder — which include double blink detection — may signal that eye control is one step closer to becoming a reality. You can find the full teardown at the source link below.

Quantum dynamics comes to Minecraft

Google has partnered with Mojang and a team of prolific Minecraftmodders to create a mod that adds quantum physics to Minecraft.

The qCraft mod doesn’t aim to replicate quantum physics exactly, but it brings principles of it to life in Minecraft‘s blocky world.

Yahoo Mail Changes

Tens of thousands of Yahoo users have taken to online Web forums to complain about the look and functionality of the new Yahoo Mail, one of several new Yahoo product updates introduced over the last 15 months at the behest of Yahoo’s new chief executive and former Googler, Marissa Mayer.

The Limits of Crowdfunding

Kickstarter has proven over the past year and a half to be a potent fundraising source for games — somegames, that is. The huge successes of projects like “Double Fine Adventure” (later officially titled Broken Age) and Torment: Tides of Numenera are tempered by the reality that about 70 percent of games projects on the site fail.

Social Touch raises $10M

Last year, Salesforce acquired Buddy Media for $689 million to become a marketing powerhouse.

Social Touch hopes to emulate Buddy Media’s success in China — and just snagged a more than $10 million cash injection to help brands like Proctor & Gamble, Dell, and Coca-Cola get their message out on China’s social networks.

6 Customer experience mistakes

Over the months, this blog has featured a lot of lists of best practices and tips. This post is going to be a bit different. There’s nothing better than learning from experience, and this time we’d like to learn from Netflix’ bad experience when it mishandled  attempts to change its offering and rates.

The Connected Car

Since the launch of General Motors’ OnStar service in 1996, vehicles with embedded cellular connections have become part of the connected world — an era of smart, connected products and infrastructure. Now, vehicle manufacturers are preparing to significantly increase the prevalence of these connections in their new products, and — more importantly — to employ high-speed broadband in place of the narrowband modems of the past. The connected vehicle is now emerging as a unique computing environment, distinct from the office, home, and on-the-go not just because it’s in motion, but also because of its significant constraints and its composition of both user- and vehicle-driven elements.

PayPal lets you pay with your face

UK consumers can now leave their wallets at home and pay using nothing more than their phones and faces thanks to PayPal’s “check in” app — at certain outlets.

The app works across iOS, Android and Windows Phone and highlights businesses nearby that let customers pay by PayPal. You can link your PayPal account to your bank account, debit or credit card, so that you don’t have to worry about being in credit in order to make payments.