Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Management: Leadership


Read a good article on fastcompany today and would like to share it here:

http://www.fastcompany.com/3006868/youre-only-strong-your-weakest-manager

here are some excerpt:


In practice, leaders who are detached from the messy process of managing fail. They don't know what's going on in their organizations.
Stanford University Professor Emeritus James G. March has said "Leadership involves plumbing as well as poetry." And I couldn’t agree more having experienced this throughout my career. The devil is in the details. Great leaders fail without good management.

What distinguishes today’s successful enterprise is knowledge--such as knowledge of the customer, the suppliers, and new business ideas that could emerge from anywhere.
The challenge for leaders is managing such extended enterprises which requires breaking many of the management rules we grew up with.
Rather than top-down hierarchical processes and approaches, they need to manage and govern cross-collaboratively.

As  a leader or future leader, you would need to get your hands dirty in order to do a great job. There’s a difference in those who “do the right thing” and “do the thing right”.




3 comments:

miauching said...

I can't agree more. For very long time, I have a pet peeve for too many self-proclaimed leaders out there who think they are "the one" who "do the right thing" and others are supposed to "do thing right" for them. Indeed, these are two very different things, but they don't separate a leader and a manager as clear as most people (wish to) make it out to be.

Unknown said...

JT, the distinction is indeed very important!

miauching said...

It certainly is. We should all be reminded both cases started with "do", only then we could talk about "right". No leader emerged with both hands clean.