The best trendspotters are people who have this insatiable curiosity. It is not about age, background or education. You could have older people who possess a sharp curious mind and younger people who don't. Prof Henry Mintzberg (at McGill University), Klaus Schwab (at the World Economic Forum) and Paulo Coelho in my mind are great examples and inspiration of people who continue to be curious and have an innate ability to tap into trends. Paulo Coelho for example, is one of the first to have used twitter to interact with his readers (over 300,000 followers @paulocoelho), or to identify and promote pirate sites that offer his books illegally electronically on the Internet (http://paulocoelhoblog.com/pirate-coelho/ ) a great example about how you can have the courage and the vision to question your own industry…

We all know that the role of the manager is to assign tasks and matching resources, crack the whip (or cajole the team) to ensure it is on track for the deadline. What would a leader do differently if entrusted with the same task? After all, leaders too, have to run organizations, meet customer expectations and create value for all the stakeholders. So what is this new element called 'making meaning' doing in an already crowded task list? For long we have considered things like 'meaning in the workplace' in the same category as candyfloss and not taken it seriously. That I am afraid is changing. The leader helps people see meaning beyond the limits of the mundane tasks and chores.

Leadership Development involves “identifying and measuring leadership qualities, screening potential leaders from non-leaders, then training those with potential.” The definition makes it sounds like a simple recipe with which to keep cooking up a steady flow of leaders. I wish it were.The Leadership Development function exists to help the organization gauge the future, create the model of leadership that will be needed to be successful today as well as to create a benchmark of what the future will demand of leaders. Once the benchmark is set, it is all about identifying potential talent that can be groomed to take on the mantle of leadership in future and then deciding what will develop those leaders to build the competencies that will make them successful in navigating the organization in a world we do not know yet. It is about preparing for a world we do not know, for skills we do not know about yet and using methods we do not always understand.

Several organizations have launched initiatives to promote Diversity. Why do we need to build diversity in the workforce? If the consumer group is diverse, having the same diversity represented in the employee groups makes it easy to develop the product which is aligned to the consumers. This makes sense for consumer goods but how does his pan out in case of industrial goods. Taking the argument further, if the buyer group is not diverse, does it still make business sense to drive diversity in the organization?In my opinion, the single reason to drive diversity is about providing a non discriminatory employment experience. Equal opportunity is the strongest reason. To be denied employment based on any criteria other than merit is discriminatory and illegal in many countries.How do we implement this in the workplace?