Leadership and branding are hot topics. Leadership development programs are quite popular. There are many conferences and seminars on the subject of branding. Leadership development and brand development consume a lot of resources of businesses.
Leadership means different things to different people. It means ability to inspire. Leadership is charisma, courage, and even sacrifice. Leadership requires vision. Leadership is talked about in rarefied atmosphere of CEO conferences, business schools, HR meets, and strategy meets. There seems to be an unstated and unanimous agreement that leadership is too important, too-sweeping-in-its-scope, too-good-to-be-described, and therefore too-complex-to-be-systematically-deployed concept. Everyone is convinced that such indescribable leadership must be good for any organization.
Branding too captures imagination of people. For some CEO s it is a reverential bowing item to be ticked off the agenda. For CFO s it is a black hole of cash. Sales people think it is a watering hole for unsuccessful ex-salesmen. For M & A specialists it is a valuation game. It is a playground of creativity for advertising agencies. It is PR first for PR agencies. For many, branding means eye catching, entertaining, beautiful visual and audio communications or smart copy. Everyone knows branding and everyone has definite opinions about it.
Is there then any connection between leadership and branding? Leaders are responsible for branding. But they are also responsible for many other things. Are there any fundamental linkages?
Royalty vanished. Marxism communism vanished. Industrial revolution gave way to information revolution.Now capitalism and globalization as we know are likely to vanish. Old things like snail mail (post), typewriters, film camera vanished. Even not so rich people change their cell phones every year. If you say this is the age of consumerism, the threats of global warming, the threats of social unrest due to poverty and hunger will challenge it (unfettered consumption). Change is in the air.
To be a good leader one must develop sensitivity to ‘change’ and one must be constantly challenging assumptions. One may think that only the top leader has to be doing this. Not enough. An organization needs leaders at all levels who can sense, champion, and even create change. An organization needs to be equipped with multitude of eyes and ears and change agents, if it has to survive and thrive.
I got this idea from Srinivas Sridharan, my ex-colleague from Philips days. To quote from his profile,
” he investigates the nature of consumption and entrepreneurship exhibited by impoverished individuals and communities”
Indeed living is entrepreneurship for a large mass of humanity. Privileged people like us do not seem to reaize this. It is geat that people like Srinivas are exploring this. Travails of poor people has often been a subject of art, a recent example being the Oscar winner ‘Slumdog Millionnaire’.
People are very inventive and are great learners while waging the battle for existence. Nature ingrains these qualities in us. But the moment connections between daily bread and efforts snap, as they do when people earn some security the entrepreneurship deserts them…
Entrepreneurship when seen in the context of businesses needs to go beyond this desperate inventiveness and include qualities like
-learning, transferring learning into new situations
-connecting with value chains and other forces
-teaching the learnings to more people
At Learning Leadership, learners get to practice the above in their work situations.
Here is a quote from an ex-student of an Ivy League business school..
QUOTE
Every professor who cruised by seemed intent on achieving a super-ordinate goal and the students seemed equally concerned about maximizing their returns on an Ivy League education.
A decade later, I believe that B-school education prepared me for the challenges of a corporate career but with a missing ingredient — the art of creating value without getting caught in the trivial pursuit of management perfection.
UNQUOTE
Reams have written about value creation. The real problem is people, even the best of them, do not look where they should be looking -their work, offerings, value chains, under-served, over-served, or differently served customers. They are not thinking about these aspects.
How does one do this? Where does one get any help?
Learning Leadership programs provide framework and coaching support for thinking on the above.
