Leadership Crisis – Able Leader or Good Administrator

Have you ever wondered why we don’t have Indian MNC’s? Some of you might be wondering its because of business environment in country or due to lack of Skill, Scale and Speed. Answer is because of leadership crisis at top level, we don’t have Indian MNC’s. You might be thinking that Airtel, Mahindra etc are MNC but Are they true MNC’s like Microsoft, IBM, Sony or Apple. Today Leadership Crisis is one of the biggest challenge for any Indian Company. All organizations finds very difficult to identify able leader for top post. They find sea of Good Administrators but don’t find Able Leaders.

Now you must be wondering what is the difference between Able Leader and Good Administrator. It can be explained in 2 terms i.e. Strategy & Tactics. In simple terms Strategy is Where to reach? and Tactics is How to reach?

Able Leader has both Strategy and Tactics in place whereas Good Administrator focus only on tactics. Strategy is long term vision and tactics is short term approach. You need right mix of both to succeed. Best example is of Reliance Industries which had strategy in place therefore surviving from decades. On the other hand we have Karsanbhai Patel or Mafatlal’s who were leaders few decades back but because of lack of strategy in place they vanished.

Another major difference is that Able Leaders follow famous management philosophy of  Window-Mirror approach which is nothing but to take the people along with them. In this approach, in the event of success they go to Window and tell his team/people that its becoz of my team. whereas in the event of failure they look at mirror and take entire onus on himself.

Good Administrators follow reverse approach of Mirror-Window i.e. when they succeed they look Mirror and assume that its because of him only whereas in case of failure they blame entire team for same. Result, the entire team goes against Administrator.

The best example, i can quote of able leaders are Barack Obama and Narendra Modi whereas Good Administrators were Napoleon and Saddam Hussain (I  can quote examples from Indian Inc also but would not like to offend someone)

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