Leadership: The Human Vessel to the New Business Frontier
As our workforces grow more diverse every day, and customers are demanding better, faster, and less expensive service, companies are faced with the challenges to create and meet the changes necessary to remain in business. The organizational environment must also learn to assess the direction of these changes while also being able to respond successfully to those that roll in at a completely different direction than expected. The leadership required to handle these wonderfully tumultuous times, so that organizations in transition remain profitable, is crucial.
Today’s companies become successful based on their abilities to create and manage change. They can no longer survive without “…courage and imagination – the courage to challenge prevailing business models and the imagination to invent new markets.'; As the globe continues to evolve into a marketplace with vanishing boundaries, competition becomes stronger, tighter, and smarter than ever before, ultimately forcing organizational change. The tidal strength of competition that has been upon us over the past few decades has fundamentally changed the “blueprints'; of many corporations and how they now need to be led. Businesses have awakened to the hard fact that leadership can no longer be defined by the effective management of people and systems, but most importantly by the effective leading of change. Leadership, or the lack thereof, is proving to be one of the most crucial determinants of whether organizations will survive and flourish in the next century’s business frontier.
“We live in an era of organizational reengineering. To become or remain competitive, leaders often must realize improvement through radical change, or reengineering.'; As defined by Jon R. Katzenbach, author of Real Change Leaders, radical changes are:
Those situations in which corporate performance requires most people throughout
the organization to learn new behaviors and skills. These new skills must add up
to a competitive advantage for the enterprise allowing it to produce better and
better performance in shorter and shorter time frames.
The changes that are most relevant are those that demand companies to redefine their org...
... middle of paper ...
...within their organizations as the primary factor for success. Although empowerment has become somewhat of a “buzz'; word within the business arena, it’s power is nonetheless stronger than any other tool used by leaders to get results from people. Because in its most simple form, empowerment is sharing the decision-making process with others, it is closely related to courage. Those companies that have stood the test of time, such as Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, Nordstrom, and Wal-Mart have infused into their organizations the practices of empowering their employees.
Leaders of the future must have the strength and fearlessness to go against the grain of old assumptions or paradigms. They must continue to trailblaze in their efforts to see that the organizations of the next century will remain in tact. They will be the encouragers of change for positive results; they will be the beacons that the others look to guide the ship through any storm; they will hold their heads high in recognition of success and have the courage to admit when outcomes are not what they had planned. Tomorrow’s leaders of change rise to the occasion and take the others with them.
In his early twenties, Josephus was called away to Rome to negotiate the release of some priests being held hostage by Emperor Nero. Upon his return, he found that his nation had begun a revolution with the Romans. He was then drafted into becoming commander of the revolutionary forces of Galilee. He spent more time trying to work out internal problems than fighting the Roman Army. When Jotapata, the city he was defending, was taken over by Roman General Vespasian, he and h...
... of power and they also felt as though they needed to help smaller nations like if it was their burden, which Europeans called it the “white man’s burden”. Mother countries were destroying ethnic groups and causing civil wars between smaller nations.
Throughout history, many powerful nations interfered with nations that were weaker than they were. This form of sabotaging a nation is economic, political or cultural life is called as imperialism. Imperialism is often separated into two sects. The first one is old imperialism, which was the period from the 1500s to the 1800s, where European nation started to colonize many areas such as the Americas, and parts of Southeast Asia. On the other hand, the new imperialism was the period between the years “1870-1914”, where Europe became more focused on expanding their land into Asia and Africa. Imperialism had many pros and cons. In addition, it also had many causes led by the feeling of nationalism.
Imperialism is the practice by which powerful nations or peoples seek to extend and maintain control or influence over weaker nations or peoples. By the 1800’s, the Western powers had advantages in this process. They led the world in technological advances, giving them a dominance when conquering other countries. The European Imperialists made attempts to conquer China and Japan. In this process, they succeeded by influencing Japan greatly. However, they were not as successful with China.
The symbolic Interactionism theory believes that the media is one of the four major agents of gender role socialization, which is the lifelong process that teaches individuals to be masculine or feminine. Rules that are reinforced in our daily lives mainly through media for example magazines. They carry numerous aspects that transmit to people how a woman or man must behave in order to be accepted by society, this is not just inside their pages but also on the covers. There are specific magazines for each gender, for example Women’s Health and Men’s Health magazines, eve though they carry the same message of health they are extremely different since they are intended for a particular audience. So next we will analyze the covers of these two magazines.
Imperialism shaped the world we have today. There were many reasons behind global expansion. Anything from building an empire, like the British, to helping inferior races, had an impact. The extent the Europeans went to for national defence was a major motivator. Furthermore, the “civilizing mission” had a lot of supporters because of the belief it was their duty. Some arguments for imperialism had more influence than others.
Organizations need strong leadership and strong management to challenge the status quo, create visions of the future and inspire/motivate members.
Imperialism is a policy based on the ideas of conquering less industrialized countries in order to gain more power, wealth and to increase a nation’s cultural influence. Imperialism took a tight hold on the modernized world after the industrial revolution, as more developed countries through military force started to conquer surrounding countries, and quickly became a global policy. Imperialism left a lasting affecting on the whole world and the result of the idea was not always for the best. An example of such a case was seen in South Africa where due to British rule, apartheid and segregation grew rampant.
Since there were many nations involved, there were many attributes that led up to imperialism. Firstly, the Europeans wanted economic expansion. Since the industrial revolution had taken place, the Europeans were in need of more natural resources. They also wanted new markets for the sake of selling industrial products. To achieve this they had to look for more places outside of Europe and colonize it.
Change is something that is necessary for the survival of a company, but can sometimes be difficult to instate. That is what is discussed in the book A Sense of Urgency by John Kotter. The central theme of this book is leadership, and how it is required to initiate change.
As many people know, Imperialism has shaped the culture and customs all over the world. Imperialism is the dominance of one country over another politically, economically or socially. Western culture can be seen in all parts of the world; from Asia to Africa, to the Indies and the Americans. The downside of having the bits of western culture all over the world, is how it got there. Western influence was forced upon places in Asia, specifically India, Indonesia with a hellacious price; lives and poverty.
Leaders are the individuals who help to create options and opportunities. They help in identifying the choices and solve the problems. They build commitment and coalitions. Leaders do this by inspiring others and working along with them to construct the shared vision of the possibilities and commitments of a better group, organization or community. They engage the followers in such a way that most of the followers become leaders in their own right. The variety of demands of an increasingly complex world very often require that leadership be shared by most of the members of an organization, in appropriate ways for different situations. A leader is the on...
“Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail” is an article written by John P. Kotter in the Harvard Business Review, which outlines eight critical factors to help leaders successfully transform a business. Since leading requires the ability to influence other people to reach a goal, the leadership needs to take steps to cope with a new, more challenging global market environment. Kotter emphasizes the mistakes corporations make when implementing change and why those efforts create failure; therefore, it is essential that leaders learn to apply change effectively in order for it to be beneficial in the long-term (Kotter).
Leaders of the future will be faced with many challenges. As the world changes, we must adapt the ways in which we face these challenges, and in turn grow as leaders. A leader is not merely someone which commands a group or organization. A good leader exhibits the ability to take an average team of individuals and achieve greatness. Leadership is not supervision or leading. It is the ability to inspire or influence others towards the end goal. As Barendsen and Gardner stated (2006), “the best leaders are individuals who, in their work, exhibit three distinct meanings of good: (1) an excellent technical and professional quality and competence, (2) an ethical orientation, and (3) a completely engaged sense of fulfillment and meaningfulness” (p. 266). Good leaders must utilize all of these traits in order to meet the challenges of the future. A few emerging challenges that future
More often organizations are getting into bigger risks in the market with their leaders in nowadays economy. The resistance to change is a reason why organizations trying harder to keep earlier recognized reputation within clients and community. The theme of leadership is relevant for each person as it occurs almost to everyone during the lifetime or to those who at least were a part of a team.