At each of my programs, I would generally get inundated with questions… These questions are almost never asked during with workshop per se, but during breaks, after the program, before the session starts – or sometimes, a few days after the workshop over a phone call. Generally, I had a habit of writing the questions that come my way in a book – so that I use this as ‘material’ for the next sessions that come by way : and storytelling started this way : as a way of answering a question to enable the gleaning of a concept through an incident or a story. This is what inspired the first book Jargon Free Management – a compilation of simple management areas of focus that I generally train on during my Leadership Workshops, compiled into a simple to read book… Later, I started working on other topics – using the same story telling format.
In 2017 I had a freak accident and broke my leg – requiring me to have a titanium plate and 7 ’screws’ as part of the surgery to correct my leg. 4 months of ‘bed rest’ ensued and bored out of my mind, I dug out my old books, and all the questions posed to me and written down over the years became the inspiration for the No Nonsense Series… As we started Luminary, I was keen to get our trainers to share their perspectives and insights: and as an ‘experiment’, I tagged team with Anton and Tatum to co-author a No Nonsense Book – and worked out a framework that would enable the three of us to work on a book together. It worked so well that we put a small, robust process around it. Then, Fahad reached out on one of my posts: and I invited him to come home and write a book with me: and this, believe it or not, was the first time I was meeting him face to face. We finished the No Nonsense on Public Speaking in just one day (with a little help from Anton as well)! Emboldened, we got others involved – and this series became a wonderful way for us trainers to put things together – and is now something we do every month.
In 2019, Shaakya (my daughter) turned 17, and we started having wide ranging conversations about ‘popular advice’: and I, in my usual ‘unorthodox’ ways, tried challenging her… Our constant verbal sparring sessions gave rise to the ‘Cut the Crap’ series, which she later become a co-author of…
Then came Covid…. With the entire country in lockdown, and Luminary taking the lead in moving into the online space for Webinars and On Line Training solutions, we have the good fortune of collaborating with many subject matter experts for our much celebrated 3 part series of Webinars. These collaborations are what inspired the series ‘Guru Guide’ where we looked at sharing deep insights as well as original tools for practitioners to work with.
Management Lessons from the Movies started out as a bit of a laugh way back over 16 years ago where we messed around with the concept of ‘learning from anything’ and used movies as a metaphor. Over a coffee, reminiscing, the idea of writing a few books around some of the movies we watched together as a young team came up – and we started making small booklets around some of the most inspiring movies we had viewed.
