Intro
Hello my dear readers,
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! I hope you are all safe and doing well. It's my pleasure to send you the second addition of the new style monthly Nainyte newsletter which is a careful selection of resources I believe are interesting for you to get into.
Let's get straight into it!
Find Your Purpose
Writing meaningful New Year's resolutions with Hoshin Kanri
It's December! The time for reflection and set-up of new objectives.
While I like the concept of noting down your New Year's resolutions, too often I hear vaguely defined sentences, which I doubt help people to achieve more.
I believe that New Year's resolutions shouldn't be a long list of actions you want to do, but rather a few personal breakthroughs which will stretch you.
With my experience of using Hoshin Kanri model in business, I wrote a blog post on how to define meaningful New Year resolutions which I think could drive personal breakthroughs.
Personal Growth
Barriers which hold us back to address microaggressions at work
It’s so great to see a constantly increasing number of male dominant companies which want to hire more female employees. Kudos to all of them!
However, a question still remains how these companies are going to retain female talent. Looking from my personal experience, I see microaggressions as a big topic which is still untouched in many organizations.
2020 self-reflection lessons learnt
The year 2020 is about to end! For me this period is great for taking a pauze and doing a self-reflection on my past experiences.
It’s not about living in your past and allowing your mistakes to hamper you, but rather appreciating all the experiences you had and extracting important lessons for your future.
While 2020 was crazy for everyone with the Covid-19 pandemic paralyzing almost the whole world, I decided to expend less energy on this topic.
Business
LEAN thinking lessons for every Digital Transformation program
Digital transformation heat wave is high these days and it doesn’t seem to go away any time soon! But still so many of those digital initiatives start with huge enthusiasm, yet end up with disappointment.
So what can we learn to increase success rates of digital transformations in business organizations? This time I thought to take a look at LEAN thinking and see what inspiration we could take from there.
Just take a look at new innovation coming from AWS!
Probably not many professionals would argue that data analytics is becoming an important skill to have for almost everyone in business organizations.
While complex data crunching is not everyone's forte, neither it needs to be, data-driven decision making is becoming unavoidable every leader.
After watching AWS Re-Invent event last week, I was so impressed to see QuickSight Q machine learning powered capability using natural language processing to answer your business questions.
This means you don't need to think how to slide and dice your data and worry how to visualize it. All is done automatically for you based on your request.
While data analytics is becoming easier to conduct, critical thinking (e.g. what question should I ask) is not yet automated for us. I think it's going to take a while until we can leave all thinking to machines.
Books
Value Drivers by Mark C. Scott
It is becoming more and more evident that business professionals need to collaborate better with IT colleagues and vice versa. There is simply no other way to drive successful digital transformations.
So mutual understanding of each other’s work is crucial here. While these days we have quite many online trainings and webinars on technology skills, business understanding for IT professionals is less covered, in my opinion.
When I get asked by technology gurus who want to better understand business, I always recommend this book. Even though it doesn’t read like an easy ‘novel’, it provides a great holistic view how to look at business from end2end perspective.
Factfulness by Hans Rosling
Besides traveling abroad, which is very limited this year, book reading is my favorite way to learn new things and continuously improve.
It is my pleasure that my recommended book was included among other Global Lithuanian Leaders (GLL) mentors in Lithuanian Delfi news portal. If you have still not read it, I would highly recommend picking up this book.
Make An Impact
Bracelets with a story
I am beyond excited that Bracelets with a story are finally available for purchase at my first web-shop on Nainyte.com and were already received by its first customers!
My lovely sister and myself are 'modelling' them as a symbol for women empowerment in rural Uganda. #StrongHand
Check it out if you would like to buy one for yourself or loved ones. This purchase means a lot to women residing in Uganda.