Sunday 3 May 2015

Leadership Crisis in 2015



World is facing a serious leadership crisis in 2015. This is hardly surprising due to lack of focus on creating a sustained pipeline of leaders for both public as well as corporate domains. When I say leaders, it means leaders who have followers and not the supervisors who have reportees as defined by org charts.

Crisis is much bigger than we think it to be. As humanity, we have failed to take action on:


  1. Global Warming- There has been quite a lot of energy spent on arranging the conferences, but hardly any change on ground
  2. Violence - Continues unabated in middle east, Africa and other places of the world
  3. Global economy- It is currently designed to fulfill greed of few, rather than universal development
  4. Discrimination based on gender, cast, creed and religion
  5. Over emphasis on communication as developmental goal. Basis science and research seem to have taken a back seat
  6. Hunger
  7. Diseases like cancer
List can go on, what is to be noted is that world today is lacking leadership to tackle these issues in systematic way, one by one. 

Leaders have to serve, they can't be sitting in ivory towers and preparing tons of waste paper in the name of strategic plans. These plans are useless unless they marry the dirt on the ground. Universal suffrage has been reality for such a long time now in most of the world, why are people not allowed to change their destiny? Because, public leaders don't allow them to.

Same hold true for corporate leaders. 
  1. Focus today is on meeting quarterly targets (QSQT - not quamat se quamat tak, but quarter se quarter tak), what about sustained growth for future? 
  2. How do we create completely disruptive business models (like ford, apple, nokia etc)? 
  3. How do we improve efficiency in all areas of working? Why should customer be paying for our inefficiencies?
  4. How do we improve employee engagement so that to make her enjoy the work rather then doing a job ( Do punch ek lunch)
  5. How do we integrate with universities to tailor make the curriculum to fit our needs and not the needs of institutes?
  6. How do we serve customer (BTW customer is not "Kashto -se-mar")
One can go on as long as she wants. Point is we need to act immediately so that humanity benefits. Greed is not going to take us forward, universal development is only solution. 

Corporate and government leaders need to serve and not command. They need to get to bottom of the issues, superficial solutions are not helping.

My solution would be to:

1. Mandatory working at shopfloor/ public facilities for future leaders
2. Public service to be part of graduate level studies
3. Selection of leaders by followers not by superiors even in corporate world

As always would love to hear from you, remember diversity of view would make debate even better quality




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