Outmoded Executive Education and Leadership Training

Training is no longer comprehensive.


Let me share a quote with you and some thoughts of others who think they know what it means,implies, assumes and maybe there is something for you in these to think about...

Professor Abraham Zaleznik: 'Leadership is made of substance, humanity and morality and we are painfully short of all three qualities in our collective lives."

SUBSTANCE, IND - Firma P.Lahti Tmi
"Based on this there is no more truth that in Enron and WorldCom there was badly lacking leadership with integrity and instead those two companies and also many other companies were and are still run by greedy managers."

 M. RINIVASA RAO, Reviewer of the book written by Mark A. Thomas, the author of “Gurus on Leadership,”
 With this profound articulation of deficiencies in contemporary leadership, Zaleznik differentiates between managers and leaders as his Harvard Business Review article “Managers and Leaders: Are They Different?” reveals.
According to Zaleznik, management is all about operating in a culture that “emphasizes rationality and control.” It is within this type of environment and organization where “it takes neither genius nor heroism to be a manager, but rather persistence, tough mindedness, hard work, intelligence, analytical ability and, perhaps most important, tolerance and goodwill.”

Book Review By Prof.M.S.Rao – “Gurus On Leadership” Authored By Mark A. Thomas (Publisher – Viva Books Private Limited)
"He differentiates between managers and leaders. His Harvard Business Review article entitled, ‘Managers and Leaders: Are They Different?’ received the McKinsey award for the best Harvard Business Review article in 1977 and was re-published as a classic in 1992. Earlier and later articles received the same recognition."

UK: THE LUST FOR LEADERSHIP. - If we are so dissatisfied with those up front, asks Simon Caulkin, is it time to re-examine the conventional model?

"There's the John Wayne, gung ho, follow-me attitude - but if there is no perceived reality or no human touch then it is unlikely to touch the constituents you want to lead. And without morality you may as well be Adolf Hitler. Leadership is the ability to change compelled performers into willing participants."

 

James Bolt: Leader of the Future article

"In his 1989 work, The Managerial Mystique, Harvard Business School professor Abraham Zaleznik writes that leadership is made up of "substance, humanity and morality. We are painfully short of all three qualities in our collective lives" (p. 124). Executive education has focused primarily on business skills. Also, most leadership seminars have presented leadership as an isolated issue apart from the individual and business challenges executives face, suggesting that leadership can simply be added on top of other skills, much like picking up a foreign language before going overseas. Such narrow training produces leaders who are not fully developed. Executives seeking a complete development package must often acquire it piecemeal. To develop leadership skills, they may attend courses offered by management training companies. To improve their business skills, they might spend a summer in a university executive program. This ad hoc approach is ineffective."

The last one was the best one!

Related articles

• Sucker to Saint and Other Views of Our Moral Behavior (bjconquest.com)