wisdom is free

It is amazing how many times in management forums, seminars,conferences and even routine professional life the two words-MANAGEMENT and LEADERSHIP is interchanged frequently and is misrepresented.It is assumed that if a person is holding an office of power, authority, responsibility he/she would automatically be a leader. There is nothing wrong in such assumption except that in many cases this assumption is proved wrong in times to come and there is a substantial loss incurred by the organisation due to faulty leadership. The questions arise how are management and leadership different from one another?How is it that some people may be great managers and poor leaders while many leaders can be great managers as well as mediocre managers but never poor managers?Is there a dearth of leaders in reality in our businesses, society, governance? and most importantly how to identify pseudo leaders and limit the harm they inflict on soceity and institutions.

Why not a benevolent Dictator ! I was quite taken aback by this question put to me by a friend last evening. He was obviously shaken by the images of continuous corruption scandals, inability of state to provide basic things like security to people, and more sinister lack of acknowledgement that things are going astray. I remember the times in college debates when we used to actively debate the obvious benefits of democracy over dicatotorship. There were ready examples next door-Pakistan provided enough examples of mis-governance, abuse of human rights,lack of rights etc to proponents of democracy. Even though there was much to be desired in our own backyard in terms of governance, and execution of rule of law in the country the general consensus was that we never actually thought that in our lifetimes we will reach a stage where we will again debate if benevolent dictator is better than  a government steeped in crony capitalism, inaction, and a malevolent desire to subvert th...

 The year was 1947 and India was on the verge of independence. But freedom would not come to one nation, but two: India was to be divided into two and a separate nation for muslims called Pakistan was to be formed out of it. Mahatma Gandhi had vehemently opposed it.He could not bear to see his country getting dismembered in the basis of religion. All his life he had laboured to bring about a realisation of unity among different religions among his country men. In fact his life’s calling was    not so much political as much it was social. The unity he saw in Sermon of mount in the book of john in Bible and the bhagwad geeta and the in leo tolstoy’s works ,he wanted to spread it among the vast majority of poor illiterate and hungry Indians. So when it was apparent that India and Pakistan would be formed and hindus and muslims instead of living in peace were fighting each other Gandhi didn’t find any reason to celebrate the independence. He famously and wryly remarke...

The   year was 1947 and India was on the verge of independence. But freedom would not come to one nation, but two: India was to be divided into two and a separate nation for muslims called Pakistan was to be formed out of it. Mahatma Gandhi had vehemently opposed it.He could not bear to see his country getting dismembered in the basis of religion. All his life he had laboured to bring about a realisation of unity among different religions among his country men. In fact his life’s calling was    not so much political as much it was social. The unity he saw in Sermon of mount in the book of john in Bible and the bhagwad geeta and the in leo tolstoy’s works ,he wanted to spread it among the vast majority of poor illiterate and hungry Indians. So when it was apparent that India and Pakistan would be formed and hindus and muslims instead of living in peace were fighting each other Gandhi didn’t find any reason to celebrate the independence. He famously and wryly remar...

It was curious to see the recent posts in newspapers after the CBSE declared its results as per the new system of grades and CGPA. While it did reduce the suicides numbers which are reported every year after the results(atleast there weren't many which got reported in media) and hence fulfilled one avowed objective of our honourable education minister, it did however threw some very interesting observations. The first was that a student can get low marks and still get higher grades. There were students who scored consistently average marks in all subjects scoring better grades than students who were scoring very high marks in one subjects and average or may be less than average in other subjects. While the student who is an average student and not expecting to be a top ranker will feel satisfied and elated on being clubbed with top rankers, a top ranker student would not feel happy if clubbed with below par student. Such high potential students may loose motivation to pursue exce...

As news twittered in that CK Prahalad is no more, my mind raced back to a short engagement that I had with him once during a seminar in mumbai. I remember coming back awe struck with his thought processess and the brilliance that shone by way of his logic. He will remain one of the most influential thinkers of our times. May God rest his soul in peace. It also brought a question in my mind that why is it that all famous management thinkers of indian origin haill from Ivy League universities. It has to do something with the environment at these universities which fosters learning, research,collaboration and young brilliant minds thrive in such environments. The task for all of us here in India is how to build such an environment so that at least a fraction of young minds are engaged in such high quality work. It has always been noticed that new innovation, new ways of thought are always triggered in universities. Nothing is more powerfull than a mind which is free to think without...