Question

Review the lecture and conduct academic research on leadership and, in particular, what is called the art and science of leadership. Pick one attribute of respected leaders and explain it. Then describe the best leader that you personally worked with; what attribute did that person exhibit?

200 words minimum

Answer 1

Q1. Pick one attribute of respected leaders and explain it.

Ans -

1. Goal Setting (Steve Jobs) - When Steve Jobs started building the Mackintosh prototype, he had an audacious goal of developing a personal computer (PC) that can be used and bought by ordinary people. Before that, only computer popular was Mainframe by IBM and it was humongous and not possible to access by ordinary people. Everyone disbelieved Steve at that time but the same people (and others) remember and thank Steve today because of his audacious goal set at that time.

2. Problem Solving (Phil Knight) - Phil Knight and his coach, Bill Bowerman started Nike with a single resolve to solve problems for the athletes shoes. They designed, prototyped and tested many shoe types and kept iterating the designs until they found the perfect design to scale up.

3. Growing a Team (Jeff Bezos) - After starting Amazon as an online book store, Jeff Bezos implemented a team building ethos "Disagree and Commit" that paved way to make Amazon world's largest online store and successful business team in the world.

Then describe the best leader that you personally worked with; what attribute did that person exhibit?

Answer - The best leader I worked personally was Dr. Debashish Bhattacherjee (Vice President Tecchnology of Tata Steel Limited). He possessed following qualities -

• Humility - Dr. Bhattacharjee completed his education from the coveted Cambridge University. Nonetheless he was very humble and he carefully listened to my ideas while I was the lowest grade officer in Tata Steel.
• Open to New Ideas - Whenever I had some crazy ideas about anything, I went to his room and shared it. Many of those ideas were not fasible. But he never discouraged me and always shared his excitement while listening to a new idea.
• Team building - When he headed research & development division of Tata Steel, he recruited many people from seemingly unrelated fields having little or no knowledge of steelmaking. When someone asked him about it, he used to reply that he believed in a diverse team so that ideas flown from all sides and they could have been implemented.

In sum Dr. Bhattacherjee possessed humility, was open to new ideas and created a diverse and cross functional team to lead our department.