Dr Shrikant Datar's Leadership Workshop

Notes taken from the workshop

Important : How to exercise judgement and How to exercise leadership.

3 aspects of leadership are path finding, problem solving and implementing. B schools focus only on problem solving and not enough on the other two.

Current academic approaches to leadership are trapped into OB area because structurally they seem to be the owners of leadership courses.

In current systems of teaching the terms and turf is set by the teacher and the students do not have much say.

SAMEER BARUA

"Knowing" is taught in classrooms, "Doing" is done in simulated environments and "Being" can happen in events that happen outside the classroom

"Doing" means executing tasks as a team member, executing a project, conducting performance review, designing and making effective presentations, selling products, acting innovatively.

To have the right "being" is very important in getting things done through others (because merely knowing and doing yourself is not sufficient). Purpose of business, responsibilities of a leader, inspiring, influencing and guiding others, recognizing the impact of one's actions and behavior on others, building awareness of one's own personal strengths and weaknesses.

Can there be science without humanity? management without morality ?

ATANU GHOSH

Exercise : an external leader is assigned to a group of 6 students who interact with him and understand his style. Then the compare and contrast his style to that of the other leaders chosen by other groups.

Indian philosophy says  people learn from 4 sources (1) Teacher (2) Self reflection (3) Experience (4) Learning From others,

Exercise : Reflective note writing

XLRI makes it compulsory to spend 3 weeks in rural areas before you join the course.


A leader must have mindfulness, compassion (when you help others, you actually help yourself), ethics, sustainability, diversity (everyone is unique - different types of intelligences, how to leverage your uniqueness)

Leadership means taking responsibility for who you are. Enthusiasm comes out of leveraging your gifts to serve others.

We are hard wired by the age of 7

Mentoring makes others grow and in that process you too grow

MANOHAR REDDY

It took me time to realize that the problem that seems to be with others is actually with me. I have not changed much so how can I change others?

Western schools believe a lot on objective behavior. But just because you know does not mean you will behave. Because you may not have internalized.

Unless you can train the heart and the gut, mere training of the brain is useless.

TECHNIQUES

Cognitive learning
Rehearsing
Sharing experience
Hand holding
Preparing agenda and action plan
Implementing
Doing an assignment

If management is practice and is a social activity, it is clear that immersion is necessary.

Life is a teacher but it is not only harsh (first you pay dearly and then you learn) but it will teach you when it happens and not when you need it. That is why schooling is needed.

Teachers, instead of covering many things in the class, try and uncover a few.

We are all "swimologists" but dont know how to swim.

Conceptualization based on observations maintained in a diary 

Imparting leadership skills (knowing) is comparatively easy, creating leader's perspective (doing) is difficult, creating a leader's disposition (being) is almost impossible. 

Institutes teach. Institutions serve communities.

Leader is the one who brings in a change.

Should a school become great by choosing great people or should a school take ordinary people and make them great?

Too social on social media - too vulnerable !

Whether you are blabbering to press or a TV camera or typing into Facebook,  it can land you in trouble. Some examples...

HP publicly announced its intent to sell off its $ 41 Billion PC business! What for? The hundreds of salespersons trying to sell HP PCs will find themselves swimming against the current due to that one twitter message. Did HP really want this? 
 
When the CEOs and VPs tweet, they are bound to let something slip no matter how careful they are. If something happens they will lose their jobs and board seats. They have nothing to gain and everything to lose.

 
It was a sight watching Goldman Sachs executives defend themselves in front of a Senate subcommittee over Goldman’s hedge against the coming mortgage collapse. The biggest problem was the way their own emails documented how they bet against their own customers.


Employment checks now include social media activity. So don’t say you’re looking for a job on LinkedIn when you’re already employed!

On Job Fitness

Recruits at the elite New York Police Academy are put through a vigorous six-month training and are required to demonstrate mastery of the curriculum by achieving a minimum passing score of 75%. Each recruit is also evaluated in 12 individual scenarios as well as numerous role-play exercises and workshops before he finally graduates.

In India, the training schedules for fresh recruits ensure that they are put through a gruelling routine, which makes them fit physically and mentally. At the Police Training School in Meerut, Sunday Times saw a batch of newly inducted women constables going through a long training process, incorporating four-five hours of physical training, drills and games every day. “When constables leave us after the training, they are supremely fit,” says an instructor. “The problem comes after a few years in service, when they tend to become physically inactive.”

Though experts agree that policemen should be fit, many consider the use of physically demanding tests for promotion as unfair. Arvind Verma, a former IPS officer who now teaches criminal justice at Indiana University, feels the tests should also take into account whether physical fitness is necessary in the candidate’s functions. “A number of US court judgments have questioned this matter,” he says. “In Tooner vs Brown County, the courts ruled that wearing glasses cannot be considered a liability. In Thomas vs City of Evanston, the courts ruled that physical agility cannot be similarly considered a necessity and that it will discriminate against women. These judgments have established that any kind of physical and mental fitness test must meet three conditions — proper job analysis, content of the job and discernment of who can do it and who cannot. Not every policeman is out there on the field battling mobs and chasing offenders. Indeed, most are physically unfit and yet continue to do a good job.”

Human society development is linked to how they capture energy and food

Populations increase till the limit of what their energy-capturing technology and food-growing technologies allow. 

1. Initially our ancestors lived only on what they could hunt or gather. 
2. Then they spread out geographically in search of easy prey.
3. Then they harnessing fire and it enabled them warmth to venture into colder climates. 
4. Next step was taming wild animals for work and raising them for food.
5. Next step was planting wild seeds. Gave more food and energy.

The real  boom came in 19th century when we bgean using up the earth's stored-up energy in coal and then in oil. This permitted the making of steel, ships and factories and it also permitted agriculture to grow on an industrial scale. European countries and their colonies used were first and they spurted ahead of their competitors in Asia and over 19th and 20th centuries they came to dominate the world. 

Perhaps the energy revolution is petering out. Trains, autos, planes, electricity .. all were invented decades ago. Atomic power was pioneered a half century ago and the improvements have been incremental since then.

The digital revolution made several people millionaires but did not become a "game changer" because it did not contribute to the wealth of nations. A teenager now spends half his waking hours on the net or some electronic device. Does it make him smart or rich? 

Not every technological advance increases wealth. Take Twitter. Or nuclear weapons. Or  even a simple TV - a great entertainment device - a commercial success too - but has it  boosted the GDP or improved living standards?

PGPM (M) Strategic Marketing Class Today - Self Notes - EFL Case - Growing Water Purification Business

The Learning Objective was to teach how can a CEO contribute to the marketing performance of the company.

The content as well as tone of the class presentations was off the mark (this was expected) (sometimes one learns better by knowing what one should not do). The content of a CEO's important speech should not be marketing (it should be corporate) and it should not be inconclusively analytical (it should be decisive and action oriented) and it should not address a functional problem (it should be a cross functional and corporate level issue. 

Halfway through the sessions I introduced four frameworks

1. 7S
2. Corporate value depends on the extent of tangible and intangible resources
3. Intangible resources are relational, human and structural
4. strategy is fundamentally as a process of allocating resources to opportunities

I asked the class to formulate what the CEO should say such that it meets all of the 3 following criteria

• decisively influence staff, structure, structure, systems, values and style
• In doing so he should not overstep on the decision making of the functional or divisional heads
• he must address the areas which really matter to the company

Nokia CEO's "Burning Platform" Speech

Finland-based Nokia faces a key test this week when chief executive Stephen Elop finally unveils a plan to reverse a sharp slide in the fortunes of the world's number one mobile phone maker. Nokia holds a strategy and financial briefing in London on Friday, two weeks after it reported a 21 percent slump in fourth quarter earnings and Elop promised: "The industry's changed and now it's time for Nokia to change faster." Here is a copy of the text from an internal Nokia memo from the CEO Elop to the company's employees. Here's over to the letter which several analysts have termed 'brutually honest'. Hello there, There was a man working on an oil platform in the North Sea and woke up one night from a loud explosion and found his entire oil platform on fire. Surrounded by flames, he barely made his way out of the chaos to the platform's edge. When he looked down over the edge, all he could see were the dark, cold, foreboding Atlantic waters. As the fire approached,  he had mere seconds to react - he could stand on the platform and be consumed by the flames. Or, he could plunge 30 meters in the freezing waters. He decided to jump. In ordinary circumstances, the man would never consider plunging into icy waters. But these were not ordinary times - his platform was on fire. The man survived the fall and the waters. After he was rescued, he noted that a "burning platform" caused a radical change in his behavior.  We too, are standing on a "burning platform," and we must decide how we are going to change our behaviour. Over the past few months, I've shared with you what I've heard from our shareholders, operators, developers, suppliers and from you. Today, I'm going to share what I've learned and what I have come to believe. I have learned that we are standing on a burning platform and we have more than one explosion - we have multiple points of scorching heat that are fuelling a blazing fire around us. For example, there is intense heat coming from our competitors, more rapidly than we ever expected. Apple disrupted the market by redefining the smartphone and attracting developers to a closed, but very powerful ecosystem. In 2008, Apple's market share in the $300+ price range was 25%; by 2010 it escalated to 61%. They are enjoying a tremendous growth trajectory with a 78 percent earnings growth year over year in Q4 2010. Apple demonstrated that if designed well, consumers would buy a high-priced phone with a great experience and developers would build applications. They changed the game, and today, Apple owns the high-end range. And then, there is Android. In about two years, Android created a platform that attracts application developers, service providers and hardware manufacturers. Android came in at the high-end, they are now winning the mid-range, and quickly they are going downstream to phones under $100. Google has become a gravitational force, drawing much of the industry's innovation to its core. Let's not forget about the low-end price range. In 2008, MediaTek supplied complete reference designs for phone chipsets, which enabled manufacturers in the Shenzhen region of China to produce phones at an unbelievable pace. By some accounts, this ecosystem now produces more than one third of the phones sold globally - taking share from us in emerging markets. While competitors poured flames on our market share, what happened at Nokia? We fell behind, we missed big trends, and we lost time. At that time, we thought we were making the right decisions; but, with the benefit of hindsight, we now find ourselves years behind. The first iPhone shipped in 2007, and we still don't have a product that is close to their experience. Android came on the scene just over 2 years ago, and this week they took our leadership position in smartphone volumes. Unbelievable.  We have some brilliant sources of innovation inside Nokia, but we are not bringing it to market fast enough. We thought MeeGo would be a platform for winning high-end smartphones. However, at this rate, by the end of 2011, we might have only one MeeGo product in the market. At the midrange, we have Symbian. It has proven to be non-competitive in leading markets like North America. Additionally, Symbian is proving to be an increasingly difficult environment in which to develop to meet the continuously expanding consumer requirements, leading to slowness in product development and also creating a disadvantage when we seek to take advantage of new hardware platforms. As a result, if we continue like before, we will get further and further behind, while our competitors advance further and further ahead. At the lower-end price range, Chinese OEMs are cranking out a device much faster than, as one Nokia employee said only partially in jest, "the time that it takes us to polish a PowerPoint presentation." They are fast, they are cheap, and they are challenging us. And the truly perplexing aspect is that we're not even fighting with the right weapons. We are still too often trying to approach each price range on a device-to-device basis. The battle of devices has now become a war of ecosystems, where ecosystems include not only the hardware and software of the device, but developers, applications, e-commerce, advertising, search, social applications, location-based services, unified communications and many other things. Our competitors aren't taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem. This means we're going to have to decide how we either build, catalyse or join an ecosystem. This is one of the decisions we need to make. In the meantime, we've lost market share, we've lost mind share and we've lost time. On Tuesday, Standard & Poor's informed that they will put our A long term and A-1 short term ratings on negative credit watch. This is a similar rating action to the one that Moody's took last week. Basically it means that during the next few weeks they will make an analysis of Nokia, and decide on a possible credit rating downgrade. Why are these credit agencies contemplating these changes? Because they are concerned about our competitiveness. Consumer preference for Nokia declined worldwide. In the UK, our brand preference has slipped to 20 percent, which is 8 percent lower than last year. That means only 1 out of 5 people in the UK prefer Nokia to other brands. It's also down in the other markets, which are traditionally our strongholds: Russia, Germany, Indonesia, UAE, and on and on and on. How did we get to this point? Why did we fall behind when the world around us evolved? This is what I have been trying to understand. I believe at least some of it has been due to our attitude inside Nokia. We poured gasoline on our own burning platform. I believe we have lacked accountability and leadership to align and direct the company through these disruptive times. We had a series of misses. We haven't been delivering innovation fast enough. We're not collaborating internally. We are working on a path forward -- a path to rebuild our market leadership. When we share the new strategy on February 11, it will be a huge effort to transform our company. But, I believe that together, we can face the challenges ahead of us. Together, we can choose to define our future. The burning platform, upon which the man found himself, caused the man to shift his behaviour, and take a bold and brave step into an uncertain future. He was able to tell his story. Now, we have a great opportunity to do the same.

Why Finland leads in education ?

In a clearing outside the Kallahti Comprehensive School in Helsinki, a handful of 9-year-olds are sitting back to back, arranging sticks, pinecones, stones and berries into shapes on the frozen ground. The arrangers will then have to describe these shapes using geometric terms so the kids who can't see them can say what they are.

"It's a different way of conceptualizing math when you do it this way instead of using pen and paper, and it goes straight to the brain," says Veli-Matti Harjula, who teaches the same group of children straight through from third to sixth grade. Educators in Sweden, not Finland, came up with the concept of "outside math," but Harjula didn't have to get anybody's approval to borrow it. A teacher can pretty much do whatever he wants, provided that his students meet the very general objectives of the core curriculum set by Finland's National Board of Education. For math, the curriculum is only 10 pages (up from 3½ pages for the previous core curriculum).

The Finns are as surprised as much as anyone else that they have recently emerged as the new rock stars of global education and it  surprises them because they do as little measuring and testing as they can get away with. They just don't believe it does much good. They did, however, decide to participate in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), run by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The Finns have participated in the global survey four times and have usually placed among the top three finishers in reading, math and science. In the latest PISA survey, in 2009, Finland placed second in science literacy, third in mathematics and second in reading. The U.S. came in 15th in reading, close to the OECD average, which is where most of the U.S.'s results fell.

Finland's only real rivals are the Asian education powerhouses South Korea and Singapore, whose drill-heavy teaching methods often recall those of the old Soviet-bloc Olympic-medal programs. Indeed, a recent manifesto by Chinese-American mother Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, chides American parents for shrinking from the pitiless discipline she argues is necessary to turn out great students. Her book has led many to wonder whether the cure is worse than the disease.

Which is why delegations from the U.S. and the rest of the world are trooping to Helsinki, where world-class results are achieved to the strains of a reindeer lullaby. "In Asia, it's about long hours — long hours in school, long hours after school. In Finland, the school day is shorter than it is in the U.S. It's a more appealing model," says Andreas Schleicher, who directs the PISA program at the OECD.  There's less homework too. "An hour a day is good enough to be a successful student," says Katja Tuori, who is in charge of student counseling at Kallahti Comprehensive, which educates kids up to age 16. "These kids have a life."

Finland has a number of smart ideas about how to teach kids while letting them be kids. For instance, one teacher ideally stays with a class from first grade through sixth grade. That way the teacher has years to learn the quirks of a particular group and tailor the teaching approach accordingly. But Finland's sweeping success is largely due to one big, not-so-secret weapon: its teachers. "It's the quality of the teaching that is driving Finland's results," says the OECD's Schleicher. "The U.S. has an industrial model where teachers are the means for conveying a prefabricated product. In Finland, the teachers are the standard. "

That's one reason so many Finns want to become teachers, which provides a rich talent pool that Finland filters very selectively. In 2008, the latest year for which figures are available, 1,258 undergrads applied for training to become elementary-school teachers. Only 123, or 9.8%, were accepted into the five-year teaching program. That's typical. There's another thing: in Finland, every teacher is required to have a master's degree. (The Finns call this a master's in kasvatus, which is the same word they use for a mother bringing up her child.) Annual salaries range from about $40,000 to $60,000, and teachers work 190 days a year.

"It's very expensive to educate all of our teachers in five-year programs, but it helps make our teachers highly respected and appreciated," says Jari Lavonen, head of the department of teacher education at the University of Helsinki. Outsiders spot this quickly. "Their teachers are much better prepared to teach physics than we are, and then the Finns get out of the way. You don't buy a dog and bark for it," says Dan MacIsaac, a specialist in physics-teacher education at the State University of New York at Buffalo who visited Finland for two months. "In the U.S., they treat teachers like pizza delivery boys and then do efficiency studies on how well they deliver the pizza."

The Finns haven't always had everything figured out. In the 1960s, Finland had two parallel education systems after primary school; brighter kids went one way, laggards went the other. Reforms began in 1968, scrapping two-tier education in favor of one national system. Things still weren't right. "In the beginning, we weren't happy at all," says Reijo Laukkanen, a counselor at the Finnish National Board of Education. In the '80s, Finland stopped "streaming" pupils to different math and language tracks based on ability. "People in Finland cannot be divided by how smart they are," says Laukkanen. "It has been very beneficial." Next to go, in the '90s, were inspectors who oversaw annual school plans. Schools were so hostile that the inspectors became afraid to make on-site tours.

"Finland is a society based on equity," says Laukkanen. "Japan and Korea are highly competitive societies — if you're not better than your neighbor, your parents pay to send you to night school. In Finland, outperforming your neighbor isn't very important. Everybody is average, but you want that average to be very high."

This principle has gone far toward making Finland an educational overachiever. In the 2006 PISA science results, Finland's worst students did 80% better than the OECD average for the worst group; its brightest did only 50% better than the average for bright students. "Raising the average for the bottom rungs has had a profound effect on the overall result," says MacIsaac.Some of Finland's educational policies could probably be exported, but it's questionable whether the all-for-one-and-one-for-all-ness that underlies them would travel easily. Thailand, for instance, is trying to adapt the Finnish model to its own school system. But as soon as a kid falls behind, parents send for a private tutor — something that would be unthinkable in Finland. Is Thailand's Finnish experiment working? "Not really," says Lavonen.

Interesting piece from Prof Yash Pal of UGC

END OUTCOME OF EDUCATION

I am personally not so disappointed by the quality of the genetic pool of students in our schools and colleges. I find urge, passion and curiosity – particularly curiosity that unfortunately withers away with age. There is a will to learn - and also to go off in tangential directions which, they often cannot - because our learning is imprisoned in disciplines and circumscribed by our examination system. We are forced to compete in mindless race to get high marks and the coaching classes are  very effective in killing curiosity and creativity.

FREEDOM MOVEMENT OF EDUCATION

Meandering through subject areas should be encouraged. We should remove all obstructions against such meandering and discipline crossing. We must become effervescent places, exploring and often going in different directions. Demand for absolute uniformity turns students and teachers into stones that need to be polished and cut the same way. We should realize that, while information can be delivered, each child creates its knowledge almost autonomously.  

NEED FOR DIVERSITY

Diversity should not frighten us. Institutes should not become a cubical for a single discipline. Many started as single disciplinary institutes but their greatness started when they burst out to cover a large universe of knowledge. We have professional colleges without anything to do with philosophy, linguistics, psychology, poetry or worrying about the bulk of the people living in a world of poverty, discrimination and oppression.  Our IIT’s and Institutes of Management can graduate into the class of great universities if they venture out to include subjects in humanities and sciences.

BREAK THE WALLS

I want to replace the impenetrable walls and boundaries in following areas:

1.      Between Universities and Research Laboratories

2.      Between Industry and academic Institutions.

3.      Subterranean Learning/Innovation and Formal Education and Research.

4.      Disciplines and the resulting Infertility of Information.

5.      Instructing and Learning from Children:

6.      Intellectual Understanding and Societal Brain Washing.

FOREIGN UNIVERSITIES

We cannot import whole, fully dressed, foreign universities, sometimes with Ivy on their walls! This has never been done anywhere. When a hundred years ago Americans found that their universities needed vigor and excitement they did not set out to import some of the great universities of Europe. Instead they persuaded a large number of truly excellent and creative individuals to come to American institutions to change their climate and make their own careers. That is how the great Graduate Schools of America were developed.