I'm not afraid of an army of lions led by a sheep ; I'm afraid of an army of sheeps lead by a lion -- Alexander The Great Drishyam 2 is a really good movie with a very simple plot. It is a gripping tale of a police investigation and a targeted family which is threatened by it. So what has that got to do with leadership lessons? Well, there is a lot of learnings that we can take from the protagonist role - Georgekutty. Mohanlal has done the role to perfection and what has he done is the main moot point of this blog. How well he has handled a crisis situation in his family in a very calm and composed manner. There has always been a question - what makes a good leader? There are 1000s of blogs and books that give you answers which to most of us (include me first) enters through one ear and flies through the other within seconds. Since there is no right way or a wrong way, everyone can have his or her point of view and the debate continues endlessly. So rather than pondering over what are the skills required I would like to change the perspective of trying to learn from every person or activity that we encounter around us. There is another school of thinking which even questions if leadership can be taught or learned. Basically, their approach is that it is an inborn skill that can only be sharpened and never created. Now let's drop all these debatable viewpoints and just try to learn small things from our everyday life - that is a better teacher than books, videos, and blogs (all put together) Most of us always think that leadership skills are much like any other normal soft skill but in reality, we are wrong. There is no one size fits all solution in terms of leadership. Let us see for example in the current political arena - there was Trump, you have Kim Jong-un, Putin, Modi, and Angela Merkel. All of them are good leaders but when you look at them closely - they all approach the same skill using different techniques and points of view. This means that leadership needs to be learned from everywhere and not from a single source. I do not wish to dwell on the movie or the plot but want to highlight a few instances from the movie and then connect them into practical corporate life and share a few lessons on leadership. Of course, Jeethu Joseph did not think of this story from the leadership point of view but he has certainly created a great leadership experience in the form of Georgekutty who is not well educated and hails from a remote village but has a great presence of mind - on a mission with a strategy to get his family out of a crisis. So let's get to the moot point before I forgot what I started. Are you ready?
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Ensuring that the benefits of globalization are shared widely remains a challenge. -- Sushma Swaraj Globalization has been a buzz word for more than 2 decades and also the most over abused buzz word in the corporate world. Even before I try to denounce it, let me try and understand what it is anyway. In this frame of mind I started researching on this topic and I landed upon a really great book titled “Small Is Beautiful” By Ernst F. Schumacher. Before I get into the book, let me tell about this author Ernst F. Schumacher, a renowned German-British economist and statistician who is best known for his proposal on the human scale. Mr. Schumacher wrote on economic topics for the Times (London) and slowly became one of the chief editorial writers. This book “Small is beautiful” is a collection of essays and was bought to the wider audience by one of his friends. The main theme of these essays was that we cannot plainly assume that the problem of technological production will be solved by capitalism which meant eroding the finite natural capital that nature has given us and depriving the future generations of its benefits. As globalization and its effects have been studies over and over again by many researchers and organizations, the subject has been divided into three sub-categories: political, economic, and cultural. Political globalization refers to the presence of the international governing body that acts as a world government. UN is the example of political globalization in practice. Economic globalization deals with spreading good, services, technology, and information among nations. Finally we have cultural globalization: there is a very strong trend in making all cultures around the world turn into Western lifestyle. This has be done via the pop culture, international trade pacts, communication and media via Internet and social media platforms. All these combined have made the modern world to be summed into one thing: Consumerism (Which was also started by the Americans) To put it simply, the east are slowly getting translated into a miniature west – slowly decaying the long lasted local heritage and culture. There are some good things in globalization but when added the negatives, it seem that the negative angle has a clear edge. There is a huge negative force which performs only one thing – the loss of national identity. This book argues the same and I will try to summarize the book in a crisp and concise mode possible. [Warning: Lengthy read] Before we work on Artificial Intelligence why don't we do something about natural stupidity? -- Jean Baudrillad ( French Philosopher) AI has in the recent times been embedded into many of our daily chores and some of them even without our knowledge. The trend is increasing as you read, and the capabilities are also increasing. There are many real world examples which are used by companies and some critical government agencies even for their day to day activities. Then there is Hollywood which gives us a little bloated view of AI. So it comes to your mind - is AI a real thing? From a different angle, in the past 5-6 years many VC and big corporate giants have invested a lot of money in this technology. Are these big mega billion dollar investments really going to get them returns or are we heading towards the next bubble (after the dot.com) called the AI bubble? Is it an AI wave or bubble? Not many are able to answer at this moment. The concept of AI goes back a long way, from the Turing machine and we have seen tremendous improvement then on, In the current wave, all the AI startups are reaping money into their R'n'D department. However the reality is far different from the sci-fi Hollywood imagination. All the AI of today does is just mundane repeatable work, which in the common man's dictionary is called "BOREDOM WORK". If what Hollywood predicted was true then by now we should have seen a lot of autonomous robots roaming around the planet and most of them with guns in hand. The most successful robots of today are not doing anything more than document classification or predictive analysis or in fact answering to "Alexa what is the weather today?" (you could get it by just looking out of the window). Most of those solutions are currently working on Social Media platforms only. So where is the disconnect coming from? Let us assume that a news reporter gets an information that a japanese robot was able to solve the Rubik's cube in less than 1 min, it is not a breaking news. In fact all of the AI developments till today have to be classified as "boring tasks" only. Now the naturally stupid journalists tend to twist the story into a breaking news headlines. People like to read about AGI, humanoids, Robots that talk and other science fiction Hollywood style applications. So the news needs to be automatically jazzed up. In reality, any one of these above said tasks to be implemented with the current AI technology system - the answer is it's not possible or even remotely feasible. Why? We have not been able to remove the human intervention from the loop fully till now. So we are back to the starting point - is AI real or hyped? |
AuthorVasudevan is a Leadership Mentor and an Executive coach. I run an online website geared towards helping creative entrepreneurs and future managers to build their dreams. Archives
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