‘Pakistan needs leaders, not managers’
Talking to a group of journalists on Wednesday before addressing the country’s corporate executives on the topic of “The Leadership Grid: A Pakistani Perspective,” Grid International Chairman Bruce Carlson said culture change in an organisation should best be implemented from top to bottom by altering people’s attitudes, values and beliefs.
“Problems are the same in every country. They may use different names, but the issues are similar everywhere,” Carlson said, referring to the differences in management theory and practices worldwide.
“Pakistan needs leaders, not managers. Managers administer, but leadership requires wisdom, understanding, forbearance and accountability,” Carlson said.
The speech may not have had much of a ‘Pakistani perspective’ as Carlson who is on his first visit to the country said that he did not know comment confidently about the corporate culture prevailing in the country. In response to another question, Carlson said he did not know if faculty members of Pakistani business schools had made any contribution to the theory of management by means of academic papers in research journals in recent years.
Grid International deploys a network of Grid consultants that addresses clients’ needs in over 40 countries on all six continents. Professionally trained Grid consultants work with multi-cultural, cross-industry clients, boards and CEOs, and help them overcome resistance to organisational change.
Published in The Express Tribune, June 14th, 2012.
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@Riaz Just read your link. It starts off well but in sum its rich in definitions & short on guidelines for practical implementation. Pakistan has managers aplenty. Its part of the pre-partition tradition of goras doing the planning and original thinking while the natives carry the plans out. The modern Pakistani equivalents are accountants, the local staff of foreign multinationals, bankers etc...all areas were the design and macro-planning are done by foreigners and locals act as implementators. This is exactly what Ali Salman says. I fully endorse his view that what we need most is VISION, aka original thinking, original and creative solutions to problems. Dr X, I am fully with you. Politicians are utterly useless leaders. At best they have good intentions "Neeath aachee hai" but are incapable of translating intention into workable plans. Looking at the most successful leaders in the former USSR and in China, most were engineers. Engineering is all about solving practical problems, and its students are trained to take a hands on approach. The bastion of original design and thinking in Pakistan is its nuclear weapon/missile industries (AQ Khan / Samar Mubarakmand and their numerous unpublicised but competent fellow-workers). See also my response to http://www.opinion-maker.org/2012/04/pak-us-masters-and-slaves/
What Pakistan needs is leaders, not politicians.
All the more, we need ideas. Pakistan is full of leaders, without much followers, largely because leaders are mostly self proclaimed, and devoid of any vision.
Pakistan needs BOTH- leaders with a vision AND competent managers to implement that vision. You can not expect good results unless you have both.
http://www.riazhaq.com/2010/01/incompetence-worse-than-graft-in.html