What do we seek from an organisation ? Wealth? Yes. Knowledge and skills? Yes. Anything else? Power? Well...we will never admit it but
organisations create the framework that allow for various manifestations of power to emerge. They create bosses and subordinates, team members and team leaders, dotted line and solid line reporting.
But power is one thing we never discuss openly. We shy away from it — perhaps because it is not tangible or measurable. Yet empowerment and disempowerment can make or break an organisation, making it perhaps more powerful than economic and intellectual resources.
In Hindu mythology, all that which can be transacted between two human beings takes the form of three goddesses: Laxmi, Saraswati and Durga. Laxmi is the goddess of wealth; Saraswati is the goddess of knowledge. Durga is Shakti, the goddess of power.
The first two goddesses are easy to identify and well acknowledged by organisations. Lakshmi appeals to the wallet and Saraswati to the head. One manifests as topline, bottomline , growth, equity, market capital, payslip, perks and reimbursements while the other manifests as intellectual property, formulas, methods, processes, training, learning and experience. Lakshmi can be given and taken ; Saraswati can be given but not taken. But what about Durga? Can she be given or taken?
Durga is shown killing a buffalo and typically we are told that she is killing the demon, the bad guy, the villain, the evil person and some say, the ego. So Durga then becomes about courage and bravery to protect ourselves from threats.
But why do we need protection? What are these threats? Implicit in the idea of protection is the idea of fear. The existence of Durga pre-supposes that all humans are afraid, and hence are in need of security. For that we need power — weapons to make us feel safe.
Power then becomes the antidote to the poison of fear. In fact, it transforms itself into the currency of all emotions. Give it to create security, take it away to create insecurity. Give too much power and the secure can get arrogant.
Everyone knows how power has made people corrupt. Everyone knows how organisations become dysfunctional when employers and employees start playing power games. The craving for wealth and the control of information then becomes rather outrightly just an ugly manifestation of underlying power games.
When asked what they seek from bosses, most employees admit it is not money or knowledge: it is usually emotional comfort, a sense of security. In other words, they seek power. Likewise, what do bosses seek from employees — respect , obedience, creativity, involvement. Both sides seek power. This is one transaction where each one has the infinite capacity to give, and take.
All over India, Durga is worshipped as mother, a term rarely associated with the goddesses of wealth and knowledge. She is Amman in the South, Ma in the East, Ai in the West, Mata in the North. In Tamil Nadu, in temples such as Kamakshi of Kanchi and Meenakshi of Madurai, she is depicted holding not weapons but sugarcanes and a parrot.
Sugarcane and parrots are symbols associated with Kama, the god of love and desire. Why is the goddess of power holding the symbol associated with Kama? What is the relationship between the trident-bearing mother and the sugarcanebearing mother? Are they the same? What has love got to do with power?
In love, we feel secure, unthreatened. In love, we don’t feel invalidated or insignificant . We feel we are allowed to be ourselves . We feel powerful. In other words, love happens when the power games stop. Then there is intimacy, a willingness to accept and admit the truth. There is no need to be afraid. There is no desire to destroy anything. In love, the trident is lowered and the sugarcane is raised.
This is most evident in Paradise Cafe, a small restaurant next to the Central Bus Depot. The Café has a workforce of seven — two cooks who prepare the tea, coffee and simple snacks, two cleaners, two waiters and one manager. The manager is in charge of purchase, cashiering and overall administration.
The tasks are well known and the pay is minimal. But the working conditions were very different when Sandeep was the manager as compared to now, when Dinesh is the manager. In Sandeep’s time, everybody hated the job. It was a day filled with screaming, shouting, swear words.
They were kicked awake in the morning and they were abused right until it was time to sleep. Life was hell. But with not many options in the neighborhood, all six employees clung to the job and carried out their duties, accepting that this was their lot in life. Then Sandeep had to move back to his village; his father was ill. The proprietor appointed Dinesh as the manager.
At first Dinesh was met with hostility and suspicion. But then, things changed. Dinesh had a way with words. He cracked jokes, made everyone feel valued and important. He praised the cooks, the cleaners, the waiters. He admonished them when work did not happen, but never in a way that took away their dignity.
Every evening after work, they sat together and chatted about their lives and dreams. Sometimes they even sang songs. The pay was still minimal, the tasks still the same, the work back-breaking . Yet, it was a happy little organisation. What changed? Lakshmi ? No. Saraswati? No. Durga? Yes.
Suddenly, the organisation was filled with a sense of emotional security. People felt safe and loved and protected. Dinesh would take care of them. He held the sugarcane and the trident – with the sugarcane he attracted positive vibes; with the trident he kept away negative vibes. No one in his team felt invalidated, insignificant or vulnerable.
Organisations often forget that at the core of the human being is fear — fear of invalidation, fear of impermanence, fear of insignificance. It is this fear that propels us to be who we are. It influences our behavior . Makes us ambitious, clever, cunning , generous, stingy for wealth and knowledge and affection. Emotion, not wealth or knowledge, is what makes and breaks relationships.
Organisations need to ask: what makes a boss rude and obnoxious? What makes him considerate and kind? What makes a subordinate proactive? What makes a subordinate shirk work? Usually answers are sought in measurable things — earnings and trainings. But the answer perhaps lies in the Durga being transacted between people.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Features/Corporate_Dossier/Manifestations_of_power_to_emerge/articleshow/4121302.cms
Friday, February 13, 2009
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Unlearn the Past to Create the Future: C K Prahalad
There was a time when the general belief was that the developed markets are the source of innovation and the benefits of their innovation may flow over time to emerging economies like India. That the opposite could be true, that the world could be more equitable and that innovation could flow from emerging markets to developed markets was never seriously considered. Why is the obvious sometimes so hard to recognise? It’s because of the tyranny of dominant logic.
Dominant logic is the result of a pattern of socialisation. All of us are susceptible to it. Often, the dominant logic is implicit. For over fifty years, developed country managers, consultants and academic researchers have been socialised to believe that developing markets cannot be a source of innovation. The academic community has, by and large, accepted this notion as well. The dominant logic provides the theoretical lens with which we see the world. I think it’s time to challenge this received wisdom.
We need to bring back a dash of curiosity, creativity and imagination into the discipline of academic research. To create the future, we have to un-learn the past. We all know the learning curve, but equally important is the forgetting curve — the rate at which we unlearn old habits that hinder our ability to spot emerging opportunities.
The fact is, emerging economies today are becoming the laboratory for new business models. Countries like India are resource constrained so you just have to be innovative here. 800 million Indians live in poverty — can they become a source of innovation and growth? Aspiring young consumers want world class goods and services at low prices. The challenge is to figure out how to do it.
There’s a market for everything in India be it laptops or packaged food. For example, India presents a new challenge and an opportunity for those in the healthcare business; a poor country with over 45 million people with diabetes. How do we get the life long service for diabetics who are poor at a price they can afford? There are big opportunities for building disruptive business models. Today, thanks to new technologies, connectivity and globalisation, price-performance envelopes are changing faster, in every industrial sector, than anyone would have expected.
A truly disruptive business model radically alters the economics of the industry. In the emerging markets, cell phone services offer an excellent example of disruptive innovations that have altered the economics of an entire industry. Bharti Airtel, for example, is adding three million new connections to its network every month, which will make it the largest cellular service provider in the world next to China Telecom, which operates as a monopoly.
Another characteristic of disruptive innovations is that they enlarge the size of the market. They improve functionality and make it difficult for incumbent players to react swiftly. And being based on logical, internally consistent business principles, they are sustainable in the long run.
Emerging market companies offer examples in the field of IT, ITES, pharmaceuticals and FMCG that fit all these characteristics. In India, we have disruptive products like the one cent shampoo sachet, the $20 hotel chain (Ginger), the $30 cell phone, the $35 DVD player, the $30 cataract surgery (Aravind Eye Hospitals) and the $2,000 car (Tata Motors). These products have taken things from the rich to the masses. They’ve used what RA Mashelkar calls ‘Gandhian engineering’, embracing resource constraints in the quest to do more with less for more people.
When you look at the companies that have achieved this, you find their aspirations are greater than their resources. Here, it’s stretch and strategic intent that drives the innovation process. Imagination constraints, I’ve found, are far worse than resource constraints.
Disruptrive, resource-constrained innovation necessarily starts with a perspective best described as : “Price-Profit = Cost”. It makes use of advanced technology and leverages assets that are unique to the market. It has scale and logistics and it has the capacity to collaborate with other players.
For those who create the theories of management — us academicians — there’s a need to cultivate curiosity about new phenomenon and emerging markets and pass this to the next generation of scholars. Instead of the usual denominator management that we’ve come to be so good at, we need to focus on next practices, look for the new, the outliers. We need to think of strategy as innovation, tighten the academic-business link and build a new research connection. What’s needed is a transition in our thinking, to an inclusive model of growth where you do more with less for more people.
(The article is based on the opening address by the author at the Strategic Management Society conference at ISB, Hyderabad)
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Features/Corporate_Dossier/Unlearn_the_past_to_create_the_future_C_K_Prahalad/articleshow/3954977.cms
Gandhian Engineering
When the New York Times first used the evocative phrase Gandhian Engineering to describe the Tata Nano a year ago, it couldn’t have known how popular the term would eventually become. Gandhi was never known to be a big fan of science and technology, so linking engineering to his name was quite a neat feat.
The Father of the Nation was, however, famous for his frugality and the term frugal engineering has been around for a while. It was coined by Carlos Ghosn, chief of Renault Nissan, who used it to describe how Indian automobile engineers achieved so much more with the fewer resources available to them. Ghosn wasn’t imaginative enough bring Gandhiji into it, so alas, his phrase is destined to be superseded.
Gandhian Engineering has received further boosts from the speeches of RA Mashelkar and then CK Prahlad, who used the idea in his best-selling The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid. Be prepared to hear the term used very often at seminars.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Features/Corporate_Dossier/Gandhian_engineering/articleshow/3986773.cms
The Father of the Nation was, however, famous for his frugality and the term frugal engineering has been around for a while. It was coined by Carlos Ghosn, chief of Renault Nissan, who used it to describe how Indian automobile engineers achieved so much more with the fewer resources available to them. Ghosn wasn’t imaginative enough bring Gandhiji into it, so alas, his phrase is destined to be superseded.
Gandhian Engineering has received further boosts from the speeches of RA Mashelkar and then CK Prahlad, who used the idea in his best-selling The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid. Be prepared to hear the term used very often at seminars.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Features/Corporate_Dossier/Gandhian_engineering/articleshow/3986773.cms
Near Death Experience: Making Tata Steel most cost effective
“If you don’t act fast, you will die very soon”, was the short summary of the several hundred page report submitted by our international
B Muthuraman
consultant after spending several hundreds of man hours looking at various aspects of Tata Steel. This was in 1991. At that time, Tata Steel looked very different from what it does today — an outdated plant and technology, high costs, lack of customer and market orientation across the company, lack of innovation in processes and products — all a combined result of long years under administered control of the government in a socialist regime, protection from imports and lack of competition. All this meant that Tata Steel was not ready to face the consequences of the impending economic liberalisation, leave alone seizing the opportunities that would be created in the new era of an open and resurgent economy.
The report was a confidential one to the senior management of the company. It was easy to have shoved the report to the bottom drawer of one’s table and carry on with life. Many CEO’s may have done this since the report was an indictment on all of us. But we had a leader who chose to make the report public to all the key executives of the company and to the Unions. Accepting the “current reality” is, of course, fundamental to any improvement effort.
Over the next ten years, several improvement initiatives were undertaken across the company. Quality Circles, Value Engineering, 6 Sigma, TPM, Total Operating Performance Programme, Knowledge Management – you name it, we had it. There were campaigns like “Customer har haal mein” across the company. More and more employees got involved in improvement programmes. We perhaps had as many consultants as there were in the world! We learnt from everyone around us. Executives were sent to some of the best leadership development programmes in the world. We went to wherever we could get new ideas.
It was amazing that we spent huge sums of money on consultants from whom we learnt a great deal, on training that improved the calibre of our people, on visits to overseas steel plants that gave us global exposure. It is hard to believe that a company that found itself in dire straits with many shortcomings and low profit margins was willing to spend huge sums of money on improving the quality of its people. This expenditure on people was done at a time when most companies in the world would have thought of curtailing these very expenditures.
With all the efforts we undertook during these 10 years, we had become one of the lowest cost producers of steel in the world by 2001, and a company that the global steel industry started recognising. We had arrived at a stage where we could dream of a future and take firm steps to build that future. We did dream. We did strategise, we did make plans, we did take actions - which is why we are where we are today.
The current economic situation is far tougher than what the company found itself in, in the nineties. It almost looks as if the world economy was waiting for us to get prepared – through the experience of the nineties and later on, to get our systems and processes better aligned ..... that won us the Deming Prize recently. There is one thing that I have learnt through tough times – which is, prepare your people, place trust on them, empower them, enable them, energise them, make them envision their future and then they will perform beyond your expectations.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Features/Corporate_Dossier/Near_Death_Experience_Making_Tata_Steel_most_cost_effective/articleshow/4050395.cms
B Muthuraman
consultant after spending several hundreds of man hours looking at various aspects of Tata Steel. This was in 1991. At that time, Tata Steel looked very different from what it does today — an outdated plant and technology, high costs, lack of customer and market orientation across the company, lack of innovation in processes and products — all a combined result of long years under administered control of the government in a socialist regime, protection from imports and lack of competition. All this meant that Tata Steel was not ready to face the consequences of the impending economic liberalisation, leave alone seizing the opportunities that would be created in the new era of an open and resurgent economy.
The report was a confidential one to the senior management of the company. It was easy to have shoved the report to the bottom drawer of one’s table and carry on with life. Many CEO’s may have done this since the report was an indictment on all of us. But we had a leader who chose to make the report public to all the key executives of the company and to the Unions. Accepting the “current reality” is, of course, fundamental to any improvement effort.
Over the next ten years, several improvement initiatives were undertaken across the company. Quality Circles, Value Engineering, 6 Sigma, TPM, Total Operating Performance Programme, Knowledge Management – you name it, we had it. There were campaigns like “Customer har haal mein” across the company. More and more employees got involved in improvement programmes. We perhaps had as many consultants as there were in the world! We learnt from everyone around us. Executives were sent to some of the best leadership development programmes in the world. We went to wherever we could get new ideas.
It was amazing that we spent huge sums of money on consultants from whom we learnt a great deal, on training that improved the calibre of our people, on visits to overseas steel plants that gave us global exposure. It is hard to believe that a company that found itself in dire straits with many shortcomings and low profit margins was willing to spend huge sums of money on improving the quality of its people. This expenditure on people was done at a time when most companies in the world would have thought of curtailing these very expenditures.
With all the efforts we undertook during these 10 years, we had become one of the lowest cost producers of steel in the world by 2001, and a company that the global steel industry started recognising. We had arrived at a stage where we could dream of a future and take firm steps to build that future. We did dream. We did strategise, we did make plans, we did take actions - which is why we are where we are today.
The current economic situation is far tougher than what the company found itself in, in the nineties. It almost looks as if the world economy was waiting for us to get prepared – through the experience of the nineties and later on, to get our systems and processes better aligned ..... that won us the Deming Prize recently. There is one thing that I have learnt through tough times – which is, prepare your people, place trust on them, empower them, enable them, energise them, make them envision their future and then they will perform beyond your expectations.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Features/Corporate_Dossier/Near_Death_Experience_Making_Tata_Steel_most_cost_effective/articleshow/4050395.cms
Truth, Honesty best policy
The word truth is loaded. Everyone has his own concept of what it means. The human experience is grounded in perception. There is telling the
True Lies
truth, as in not telling a lie.
There is telling the truth by articulating an opinion, even if there is a risk in doing so. Then there is what I think is the purest truth: selftruth. The essence of self-truth is knowing who you are, why you’re here, and acting accordingly. To me truth is synonymous with accountability.
One of the biggest mistakes leaders make is to withhold the truth and avoid accountability with their own people. Even when there is no official communication, the need for information does not go away. Something will fill the vacuum. There will be huddles in the hallways, private conversations behind closed office doors, or e-mail flurries that never do the company any good.
There’s no way around it. People are always smarter than organisations give them credit for; they can smell a dead fish before management does. Even when it is not explicitly stated, your customers know the truth, your people in the organisation know the truth, and your suppliers and business partners know the truth.
Harold Geneen, the CEO of ITT who grew an $800-million company into a $28-billion global conglomerate, demanded real facts, not details disguised as facts, in order to keep on top of his farflung empire.
In explaining his obsession with the truth, he said: “I believe it is an immutable law in business that words are words, explanations are explanations, promises are promises – but only performance is reality. Performance alone is the best measure of your confidence, competence, and courage. Only performance will give you the freedom to grow yourself.”
If you’re truthful and accountable to the truth, everyone around you knows. When faced with uncertainty, honesty and accountability trump everything else. Performance is the truth to measure yourself by.
Layoff Truths
When I was in one of my first significant leadership jobs, it was my responsibility to orchestrate a round of layoffs. It was one of the toughest moments in my relatively young life as a manager, so you can just imagine how I felt when I heard that a member of the management team had accidentally left the list of people to be laid off on the copy machine. I sat down and thought to myself, “Oh s____,” and then, “Oh s_____” again, “I don’t want to have to deal with this!” So there I was with a knot in my stomach, struggling with how to handle the situation, when my assistant looked at me and said, “Howard, only the truth sounds like the truth.”
She was right. Even though ignoring the mistake and pretending it hadn’t happened would have seemed much easier, I realised that the only thing
True Lies
I could do with a clear conscience was to tell the truth. I called a full company meeting for the next morning. We sat down in a room filled with a couple hundred people and talked about the state of the business, the situation we faced, and why we thought the layoffs were necessary. Why hide anything? We had everything to gain and nothing to lose.
Taking the nerve-racking but simple step of being honest with everyone in the company made a huge difference in the way people handled the difficult situation. What was the result of this honesty? Well to my surprise, it was more honesty and more communication, and it made a difficult time a lot easier to deal with. Instead of people looking around for the bogeyman, they participated in the process.
I committed to daily briefings and kept people updated along the way, which helped everyone deal with how they were feeling. People can handle more than we think. We want to know the truth, so we can make our own judgment about it. We still had to lay off those people, but they were lot more prepared for it because we had communicated with them honestly and openly throughout the process. One person’s big mistake turned out to be one of my most important business and life lessons.
In this era of ethics scandals, economic downturn and an environment of overall lack of trust in leadership, telling the truth — and telling it with care becomes more important then ever. But too many times the care is missing. A leading electronics retailer, either afraid or unwilling to deal directly with the truth, made the wrong kind of headlines when they laid off several hundred employees via e-mail.
How could that possibly build trust in an organisation? Such lack of care affects not only the people who are let go but all the people who are still there, who have to wonder if they are going to be treated the same way.
The inability to deal with the truth in a straight-up way has ramifications beyond the immediate situation. A culture of caring and honesty is the backbone of an ethical and productive organisation. When that culture is eroded it can be a monumental task to rebuild it. The inescapable reality is that when a sense of caring ends, the sense of trust and shared purpose ends with it.
Howard Behar is the former president of Starbucks Coffee Company
North America and Starbucks Coffee International
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Features/Corporate_Dossier/Truth_honesty_best_policy/articleshow/4084267.cms
True Lies
truth, as in not telling a lie.
There is telling the truth by articulating an opinion, even if there is a risk in doing so. Then there is what I think is the purest truth: selftruth. The essence of self-truth is knowing who you are, why you’re here, and acting accordingly. To me truth is synonymous with accountability.
One of the biggest mistakes leaders make is to withhold the truth and avoid accountability with their own people. Even when there is no official communication, the need for information does not go away. Something will fill the vacuum. There will be huddles in the hallways, private conversations behind closed office doors, or e-mail flurries that never do the company any good.
There’s no way around it. People are always smarter than organisations give them credit for; they can smell a dead fish before management does. Even when it is not explicitly stated, your customers know the truth, your people in the organisation know the truth, and your suppliers and business partners know the truth.
Harold Geneen, the CEO of ITT who grew an $800-million company into a $28-billion global conglomerate, demanded real facts, not details disguised as facts, in order to keep on top of his farflung empire.
In explaining his obsession with the truth, he said: “I believe it is an immutable law in business that words are words, explanations are explanations, promises are promises – but only performance is reality. Performance alone is the best measure of your confidence, competence, and courage. Only performance will give you the freedom to grow yourself.”
If you’re truthful and accountable to the truth, everyone around you knows. When faced with uncertainty, honesty and accountability trump everything else. Performance is the truth to measure yourself by.
Layoff Truths
When I was in one of my first significant leadership jobs, it was my responsibility to orchestrate a round of layoffs. It was one of the toughest moments in my relatively young life as a manager, so you can just imagine how I felt when I heard that a member of the management team had accidentally left the list of people to be laid off on the copy machine. I sat down and thought to myself, “Oh s____,” and then, “Oh s_____” again, “I don’t want to have to deal with this!” So there I was with a knot in my stomach, struggling with how to handle the situation, when my assistant looked at me and said, “Howard, only the truth sounds like the truth.”
She was right. Even though ignoring the mistake and pretending it hadn’t happened would have seemed much easier, I realised that the only thing
True Lies
I could do with a clear conscience was to tell the truth. I called a full company meeting for the next morning. We sat down in a room filled with a couple hundred people and talked about the state of the business, the situation we faced, and why we thought the layoffs were necessary. Why hide anything? We had everything to gain and nothing to lose.
Taking the nerve-racking but simple step of being honest with everyone in the company made a huge difference in the way people handled the difficult situation. What was the result of this honesty? Well to my surprise, it was more honesty and more communication, and it made a difficult time a lot easier to deal with. Instead of people looking around for the bogeyman, they participated in the process.
I committed to daily briefings and kept people updated along the way, which helped everyone deal with how they were feeling. People can handle more than we think. We want to know the truth, so we can make our own judgment about it. We still had to lay off those people, but they were lot more prepared for it because we had communicated with them honestly and openly throughout the process. One person’s big mistake turned out to be one of my most important business and life lessons.
In this era of ethics scandals, economic downturn and an environment of overall lack of trust in leadership, telling the truth — and telling it with care becomes more important then ever. But too many times the care is missing. A leading electronics retailer, either afraid or unwilling to deal directly with the truth, made the wrong kind of headlines when they laid off several hundred employees via e-mail.
How could that possibly build trust in an organisation? Such lack of care affects not only the people who are let go but all the people who are still there, who have to wonder if they are going to be treated the same way.
The inability to deal with the truth in a straight-up way has ramifications beyond the immediate situation. A culture of caring and honesty is the backbone of an ethical and productive organisation. When that culture is eroded it can be a monumental task to rebuild it. The inescapable reality is that when a sense of caring ends, the sense of trust and shared purpose ends with it.
Howard Behar is the former president of Starbucks Coffee Company
North America and Starbucks Coffee International
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Features/Corporate_Dossier/Truth_honesty_best_policy/articleshow/4084267.cms
Sense and Sensitivity
Recently a newspaper reported an incident where Indian cricket captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni avoided calling on the Z grade security allotted to
him, as he rushed to catch an early morning flight.
“It is not right to be too feudalistic, it was better to drive down myself rather than disturbing the entire security team early in the morning for an eight minute drive from my house”, he said when probed on the episode.
Yet another report talked about Mukesh Ambani suggesting a compulsory one-year military training for all the youth in the lines of Singapore or Israel, that could help our nation have access to a large pool of youngsters towards disaster management.
Ambani was not just talking; he was in fact ready to walk his talk by promising to let his son go through such a training. If we contrast these mature opinions with the actions of some of our political leaders, we see a completely different picture.
In the midst of a national crisis of enormous proportions one of them saw an opportunity to demand sten-gun trotting security personnel for every legislator, another one an opportunity to sell the incident to the celluloid and yet others opportunities to blow their trumpets. Well, all these reports, might have been exaggerated to an extent, but the leadership lessons are clear:
Sense : People in responsible positions are expected to wear on their sleeve the most important virtue of all times, ‘common sense’. Leaders are supposed to measure every word that they speak, especially when those words could mean hope or despair to the people involved. When a leader is not sure what to express and how to express, a good rule to remember is that silence is golden.
Sensitivity : When people go through tough times, they expect empathy from their leaders rather than great rhetoric. At times extreme events happen due to lapses, but at times, they are black swans (events which are completely unpredictable).
In both cases, what is expected out of a leader is empathetic correction, which means ideally a leader should have been proactive in avoiding the mishap, but since it has already occurred he is expected to put himself in the other person’s shoes and feel at least a part of the pain. When a leader does that, truly from his heart, he understands that his existence is not because of a legal authority, but an authority that is conferred upon him by the benevolence of his people.
Leadership Takeaway :
Sense towards incidents and sensitivity towards his people are the most important weapons in the hands of a leader during times of crisis.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Features/Corporate_Dossier/Sense_and_Sensitivity/articleshow/4084395.cms
him, as he rushed to catch an early morning flight.
“It is not right to be too feudalistic, it was better to drive down myself rather than disturbing the entire security team early in the morning for an eight minute drive from my house”, he said when probed on the episode.
Yet another report talked about Mukesh Ambani suggesting a compulsory one-year military training for all the youth in the lines of Singapore or Israel, that could help our nation have access to a large pool of youngsters towards disaster management.
Ambani was not just talking; he was in fact ready to walk his talk by promising to let his son go through such a training. If we contrast these mature opinions with the actions of some of our political leaders, we see a completely different picture.
In the midst of a national crisis of enormous proportions one of them saw an opportunity to demand sten-gun trotting security personnel for every legislator, another one an opportunity to sell the incident to the celluloid and yet others opportunities to blow their trumpets. Well, all these reports, might have been exaggerated to an extent, but the leadership lessons are clear:
Sense : People in responsible positions are expected to wear on their sleeve the most important virtue of all times, ‘common sense’. Leaders are supposed to measure every word that they speak, especially when those words could mean hope or despair to the people involved. When a leader is not sure what to express and how to express, a good rule to remember is that silence is golden.
Sensitivity : When people go through tough times, they expect empathy from their leaders rather than great rhetoric. At times extreme events happen due to lapses, but at times, they are black swans (events which are completely unpredictable).
In both cases, what is expected out of a leader is empathetic correction, which means ideally a leader should have been proactive in avoiding the mishap, but since it has already occurred he is expected to put himself in the other person’s shoes and feel at least a part of the pain. When a leader does that, truly from his heart, he understands that his existence is not because of a legal authority, but an authority that is conferred upon him by the benevolence of his people.
Leadership Takeaway :
Sense towards incidents and sensitivity towards his people are the most important weapons in the hands of a leader during times of crisis.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Features/Corporate_Dossier/Sense_and_Sensitivity/articleshow/4084395.cms
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