It's not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive, but those who can best manage change -- Charles Darwin, Scientist We live in an era of constant change. Take, for example, even the virus CORONA has changed itself so many times in the last 18 months. Business, economy and materialism are always on the change. As they change, expectations are that the actors in the system also change seamlessly. How is that possible? Yes, if you don’t, you perish. Thus everyone tries to change. Is that change easy? My straight answer is No, it’s tough. Why? What they are demanding is a change which is very personal. Competencies that are all quiet, innate to oneself. We refer to it as “Soft Skills”. What are they? Soft skills include your ability.
The list is endless. I know most of you would have heard all these comments at least once in a financial year. Yes, during your appraisal feedback. The underlying problem is that everyone understands that importance but does nothing about it. Neither the education system nor the society framework nor parental guidance act. They do nothing to inculcate these skills during the formative years of the person. I am tempted to blame the education system at large for this mess. They take pains to make me understand Newtonian physics. Also, Einstein’s relativity, the structure of Streptococcus. In fact, who killed Aurangzeb and when did the battle of Plassey take place. Yet do nothing to improve my soft skills. They need to invest in improving one’s soft skills at school or college level. It’s left to the student’s responsibility. In the rat race of marks, these obviously take the back seat. OK, I got the problem, but how do we solve it?
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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? 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? Creativity involves breaking out of expected patterns in order to look at things in a different way - Edward de Bono "I am not a very creative person" - I have heard this phrase a lot of times in my managerial role for the past one decade. It is very easy to say and personally I feel that only unsuccessful people say that. Although it is an over generalization but it still hold true to 90% of the time. Not only am I saying this but world educationalists like Sir Ken Robinson and Yong Zhoa are lamenting the same thing that there is a decline in creativity of the students. This maybe due to the over stress that we put on scoring marks rather than pure learning. So it brought me to do some research on why should anyone be creative? To many people, creative often means Micheal Angelo or Mozort or Mandoin Srinivas or Stephen Hawkins. Yes these people certainly are creativity professionals but there are typecast as the "big-C" creative (Kaufman and Beghatto, 2008) but what I'm talking is about the "small-c" which de Bono described as "breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way". This is what I am claiming is installed inside everyone. As a leadership mentor I have spent quiet a long time with young and fist time managers and have pondered this point always. Is it really worth trying to unearth the creative skill within each one and what benefit does it give them? (Pay rise, better responsibility, power) After reading the book on creativity by de Bono I came to understand clearly, when the managers take the role - all the teachings of Engineering, the soft skills etc are swept under the carpet. It's their creative skill which brings them the rewards. The same can be applied to any profession - say for an artist, all his sketching homework may be dusting under the cot but his creativity is what everyone notices. "We have entered a new economy” as Yong Zhao says. And this new economy requires creative and innovative entrepreneurs, not the “medium skilled, middle class jobs that were the backbone of the workforce in the past". Thus creativity is important and has been established. How come I saying that to unearth it is a piece of cake? Leaders must be close enough to relate to others, but far enough ahead to motivate them - John C. Maxwell The current community trends shows very negative information floating around. It projects data as though the communities are becoming more and more self-centered and individualistic. I tend to agree with this generalization to an extent. We have become a lot self-centered than we were 30 years back. I do not want to delve on the WHY part but want to see how to improve the situation. With this as a background I did some research on how to change the way a community works. I wanted to get people to do more work such as getting them to come out on VOTE on election day, save water in their houses, give more to deserving charities, consume less electricity and finally keeping the office pantry clean by not washing their lunch boxes with left overs. In my current work place I tried to get many of the people to reuse the one-side printed papers and also to try and reduce the number of papers used in the printers. In order to get this program going, we introduced new initiatives and processes. It was all good but there was an inherent weakness in the system: PEOPLE. People needed to adopt this initiative for it to become a success. We made many colourful posters and employee reward programs for using less paper but I was not successful. The number of people who signed up for this initiative was very less but everyone kept saying it was a great initiative. So I went back to the drawing tables with a select team to think on how to get more participation. One of the members in the team suggested a small change. Instead of sign up portals, posters and email registrations, we just put up a small sign-up sheet near the printers and asked them to give their Name, employee number and sign it. Within a week the participation doubled. Wondering WHY?. |
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
June 2023
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