The Hindu Business Line : Don't lead if you don't have the right to lead

THE key to becoming an effective leader is not to focus on making other people follow, but on making yourself the kind of person they want to follow. Thus reads the preface of John C. Maxwell's The Right to Lead. Contrary to popular belief, you can become a better leader by sharing the power you have, advises Maxwell. "You're meant to be a river, not a reservoir. If you use your power to empower others, your leadership will extend far beyond your grasp". More:

There are some common threads in uncommon leaders: They are futurists, lobbyists, catalysts, specialists, optimists, economists, activists, strategists, enthusiasts, pragmatists, industrialists, and finalists.

Leaders take risks. But they don't always take the safest route. Rarely can a person break ground and play it safe at the same time. Often, leaders must take others into the unknown, march them off the map.

"Show me a man who cannot bother to do little things, and I'll show you a man who cannot be trusted to do big things." (Lawrence D. Bell)

Leadership is influence, nothing more, nothing less. That means it is by nature relational. Today's generation of leaders seem particularly aware of this because title and position mean so little to them. They know intuitively that people go along with people they get along with.

It is wrong to lead when you don't have the right to lead.

Beware of Hulk

BODY has the ability to fight disease and to repair itself, to some extent. How about research to push the `power of regeneration' to its limit? When a bright scientist, Bruce Banner, goes about such a study, the military gets interested because it sees a potential application of the results on the battlefields of the future. In the course of his experiments, an accident occurs, pumping heavy radiation into Bruce, triggering off something deep inside his body. Anger takes over and he transforms into Hulk. The motion picture screenplay was by James Schamus and the book by Peter David. A few glimpses of Hulk:

The cyclotron holds about 2,000 litres of liquid helium, maintained at a temperature of minus 270 degrees Celsius. Shutting it off cold means that the core temperature will eventually rise to room temperature. The liquid helium will then convert to 2,000 litres of helium gas, enough to fill approximately a million balloons. It is like putting water into a pot, screwing a lid on tightly, and then putting the pot on a burner. Sooner or later — probably sooner — there is going to be an explosion.

In those final moments before he had interposed himself between the gamma cannon and the others, his life had flashed before his eyes. Imminent death triggers that rush of memories, the computer of one's brain dumping all the memories like one great final purging of the hard drive. The memories had been shaken up for the first time in ages. They floated in the river of his memory like disturbed silt.

Driven by imperatives he could not begin to articulate or comprehend, the Hulk exited the house by the most expeditious means possible: He simply walked through the front wall.

And, as for you, there is the back door.

Buddha business

YOU know the Buddha. You know your business. But how can the Buddha help you manage your business and your life? Geshe Michael Roach has the answer in The Diamond Cutter, a book that Amazon.com sees as "a cross between the Dalai Lama's ethics and Stephen Covey's 7 habits". The book has three layers: first, a translation of `the diamond sutra', an ancient text of conversation between the Buddha and his disciple Subhuti; second, quotes from some of the best commentaries of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition; and third, Roach's views on business strategies. A selection:

Buying diamonds in Navsari is like nowhere else in the world. Imagine trying to get through a mob covering an entire mile or two of dirt road in the middle of a small Indian town. Each screaming man in the mob is clutching a tiny folded scrap of paper, and in the paper is a small diamond or two, slightly bigger than the period at the end of this sentence. The stones are still covered in the cutting oil, leaving them a dull grey, and in the bright sunlight only a fool — or a highly trained Indian dealer — would attempt to buy a stone, unable to tell if it's pure white (expensive) or bright yellow (worthless).

Suppose, O Subhuti, that some disciple on the path of compassion were to say, "I am working to create a perfect world." They would not be speaking the truth.

Running numbers was where people came to a dark room and gave money to a man who gave them a number, and then when lots of people had given lots of money and each gotten their own number, the man would close his eyes and pick one number and that person would win all the other people's money (after the man had taken out some of the money for his trouble). Now it is called `lottery'.

There is a direct relationship between the amount of gratitude we feel for others and how happy our lives are: Very happy people tend to be strongly aware of how much others have worked to help them be happy and comfortable, whether they were paid to do so or not.

Nothing is more sad, nothing is a greater problem waiting to happen, than a company or an executive who has become complacent, who has had success too long, too steadily.

Replete with introspective material.

The Capra connection

FROM the author of Tao of Physics, Fritjof Capra, here comes another book, The Hidden Connections.

For Capra, there are two developments which will be vital to humanity's survival: global capitalism and ecodesign for sustainable communities.

The problem is that these two are on a collision course. So, what do we do?

When a cell reproduces, it passes on not only its genes, but also its membranes, enzymes, organelles — in short, the whole cellular network.

Naked DNA is never passed on, because genes can only function when they are embedded in the epigenetic network.

Thus life has unfolded for over three billion years in an uninterrupted process, without ever breaking the basic pattern of its self-generating networks.

Wenger defines a community of practice as characterised by three features: mutual engagement of its members, a joint enterprise and, over time, a shared repertoire of routines, tacit rules of conduct and knowledge.

Leaders often find it difficult to establish the feedback loops that increase the organisation's connectedness.

They tend to turn to the same people again and again — usually the most powerful in the organisation, who often resist change.

The so-called `global market', strictly speaking, is not a market at all but a network of machines programmed according to a single value — money-making for the sake of making money — to the exclusion of all other values.

The biotechnology industry is pursuing numerous projects in which cloning techniques are used for potential financial gain even through the health risks are often high and the benefits questionable.

For example, mice have been engineered to develop cancer, and the resulting transgenic animals have been patented.

Choose Capra for heavy-duty reading.

(Books courtesy: Landmark, Chennai. www. landmarkonthenet.com)

Tailpiece

"I think I can."

"But I think you can't."

"I think you can't think about what I can or can't."

ReadingRoom@TheHindu.co.in

D. Murali

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Don't lead if you don't have the right to lead