Management Is Not Leadership

The mistakes people make on the issue are threefold:

Mistake #1: People use the terms "management" and "leadership" interchangeably. This shows that they don't see the crucial difference between the two and the vital functions that each role plays.

Mistake #2: People use the term "leadership" to refer to the people at the very top of hierarchies. They then call the people in the layers below them in the organization "management." And then all the rest are workers, specialists, and individual contributors. This is also a mistake and very misleading.

Mistake #3: People often think of "leadership" in terms of personality characteristics, usually as something they call charisma. Since few people have great charisma, this leads logically to the conclusion that few people can provide leadership, which gets us into increasing trouble.

In fact, management is a set of well-known processes, like planning, budgeting, structuring jobs, staffing jobs, measuring performance and problem-solving, which help an organization to predictably do what it knows how to do well. Management helps you to produce products and services as you have promised, of consistent quality, on budget, day after day, week after week. In organizations of any size and complexity, this is an enormously difficult task. We constantly underestimate how complex this task really is, especially if we are not in senior management jobs. So, management is crucial — but it's not leadership.

Leadership is entirely different. It is associated with taking an organization into the future, finding opportunities that are coming at it faster and faster and successfully exploiting those opportunities. Leadership is about vision, about people buying in, about empowerment and, most of all, about producing useful change. Leadership is not about attributes, it's about behavior. And in an ever-faster-moving world, leadership is increasingly needed from more and more people, no matter where they are in a hierarchy. The notion that a few extraordinary people at the top can provide all the leadership needed today is ridiculous, and it's a recipe for failure.

Some people still argue that we must replace management with leadership. This is obviously not so: they serve different, yet essential, functions. We need superb management. And we need more superb leadership. We need to be able to make our complex organizations reliable and efficient. We need them to jump into the future — the right future — at an accelerated pace, no matter the size of the changes required to make that happen.

There are very, very few organizations today that have sufficient leadership. Until we face this issue, understanding exactly what the problem is, we're never going to solve it. Unless we recognize that we're not talking about management when we speak of leadership, all we will try to do when we do need more leadership is work harder to manage. At a certain point, we end up with over-managed and under-led organizations, which are increasingly vulnerable in a fast-moving world.


Courtesy: http://blogs.hbr.org/kotter/2013/01/management-is-still-not-leadership.html

Set Ambitious Goals

Success begins in the mind. You need to set your mind to do something if you want to achieve anything. You need to set a fish trap to catch fish.

Modern motivational gurus tell us to dream big, and to have a “can do” attitude. In The Secret Rhonda Byrne tells us that everything is possible.

We are told that we need to set ambitious long term goals, and clear short term targets. Just as the greyhound runs faster when chasing the mechanical rabbit, people are more motivated when pursuing identifiable targets.

If we achieve these goals we feel good about ourselves. Few things make us as happy as performing a difficult task well, and doing something useful.

What is more, making up our minds to do something makes us healthier and happier, regardless of our age, according to Harvard psychologist Ellen J. Langer, in her recent interesting book Mindfulness.

Langer warns about the dangers of limiting our opportunities by adhering to preconceived conceptions. She refers to the “destructive state of mindlessness.”

But reality has a habit of putting obstacles in the way of our dreams. We are not going to win every race. We may travel a long way down a road, only to find that we cannot quite achieve our original objective. If we only focus on the final goal, we can become uptight. Not only may this affect our chances of success, it makes us less likely to enjoy our journey.

In fact relaxed mindlessness has its benefits. Familiar thoughts and habits help us cope with the new experiences that we face in life. It is not practical to judge every new situation from scratch. Preconceived ideas are comforting, and useful.

Whether at work, or playing sports, or learning a language, we cannot constantly second-guess ourselves. We need to trust our “instincts”, which are mostly not instincts at all, but habits, the result of repetition and experience.

Life is not a short dog race, but a long journey with many detours. if we are too focused on chasing the mechanical rabbit and worried about short term outcomes, we may miss the enjoyment of every rich moment in our lives. If we relax, we are more likely to continue in our projects and acquire experience, knowledge and important life skills.

We should not allow ourselves to become disappointed if our achievements do not match our dreams. We should seek to enjoy what we are experiencing and achieving. This does not mean overstating the level of our achievements in some kind of empty assertion of our own self-esteem. It just means being satisfied with what are and what we have.

If need to combine the mindfulness of the motivational gurus with an effortless appreciation of life, every single day.

    The Sage is occupied with the unspoken
    and acts without effort.
    Teaching without verbosity,
    producing without possessing,
    creating without regard to result,
    claiming nothing,
    the Sage has nothing to lose.

    Dao de jing – 600 BC


Courtesy: http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/set-ambitious-goals-but-learn-to-accept-what-you-achieve.html

Aasoon

iskadar doosron keliye jeegaya mein, ki aaj apney liye roney ki himat nahi hoti,
sochtha hoon rokey apney aasoon kyon barbaat karoon, kya pata merey aasoonosey kisi pyasey ki pyas buch jaye.

The Poor Alchemist

There lived this special alchemist who has mastered the science of transforming an ordinary glass into diamonds. He has practiced this since his childhood and as he grew older he mastered the art so well that he was able to convert any glass into diamonds in a short span of time. After converting he wouldn't keep it for himself but give it away as he wanted to make a rarest diamond the world has ever seen. People loved and respected him for his noble character and his mastery at alchemy.

One day on his way he came across a new type of glass which he has never seen before. The composition of the glass allured him, he took this piece of glass to his workshop and started working on converting it to diamond. He spent sleepless nights working on it. Days passed into months but he was unable to convert it, he felt ashamed of himself and used to work harder, his health deteriorated but he still kept working. One day he finally decides that it is not possible to convert this glass into a diamond and that he should quit. He throws the piece of glass and walks away in search of another glass. That night during his sleep he feels something in his heart and starts running to the place where he threw the piece of glass. He searches the entire place next day but is unable to find it and breaks out saying, "Oh god I'm such a fool, I have been so obsessed in converting glasses to diamonds that I was not able to make out the difference between the two. I had the most exquisite and the rarest of all the diamonds in hand all these days and I was thinking it as a glass of different kind and working hard on it to make it the diamond I always wanted, without realizing that you have given me what I wished to have my entire life."

That alchemist never got that diamond again.

Dharti aur Badal

dharti ki bechaini ko badal ke siwa aur kaun samaj sakta hai,

par kabhi kabhi hawa badal ko apney saath uda le jati hai, aur dharthi badal ko bewafa samajney ki bhool kar bhait thi hai