Presentations Day 1

 I found all of them a quite fascinating. Atsuko and Shiori (Asakura) talked about the global leader which is very practical. I used to think that the Global standards are American standards, since they have so much share in the Global business. However, it turns out that it is not that way. we need to be social, create shared value, be logical and ownership which is universally applicable. Shiori had done great job, bringing images to visualize those elements which made listener easy to understand.  Moe talked about the negative thinking is not always inferior and keeping them in appropriate ratio is important to the success. With clear wording and images, I surely thumbs up to her presentation. Kenta showed us three types of leadership styles. Especially the last one, Servant Type is very new to me. Recognizing these styles, I think it is much easier for leaders to see the benefit & problem of their

style and they can keep such problems in mind. Sayaka talks about Starbucks which, I was always wondering why the people working there seems so happy all the time. The answer is, it seems, this company actually treasure it's employee and created an environments that they likes to belong.

Mao mentioned the populism, in which too strong leadership will not always eventually lead to preferable outcomes. I agree with his view since, I think, it is true that populism sometimes become stronger than their contents of proposal which make public to become irrational at their decision making. Sumire talks very confidently about the modern leadership.  The new thing for me, was the "Flex Time Schedule." She showed us a graph showing that the more we take time on somethings, we pay for their work, the effectiveness will eventually fall at one points. I think this study can be used in various parts of our living. It is set time to your work, if you want it to have effective. Overall I think I had learned a lot things from today's presenters. Again thank you!

The fate of big companies

In all over the globe, we see companies that used to dominate the market has shrunken and merged by other companies or declared bankruptcy. It seems that there is a trend that the bigger they become, the more likely to fail.

In recent example, a major technology company "Kodak" which had more than 80% share of camera and film sales in 90s, applied bankruptcy and end the 130 years of camera and film production. After this happened many people says that they fail to keeping up to the digital world, however, people engaging in management and leadership research claims that the structure is the point to argue for that failure.
John Kotter ,who is a professor at Harvard Business School, argues that an over going complacency or self-satisfaction have became the barriers to shifting organization. They overlooked minor problems and had little urgency to the situation when their rival companies begins to appear and with the hierarchy created by development of companies and let them to cause tragic.


So, what I learned from this example. I think there will be two things. One is to take problems into opportunity and do not ignore them only because they are minor one.We should not also have complacency to ourselves. As we already learned in Chapter 3 “Optimism and Reality” quotes from Nicolich saying “we need to look at adversity and see opportunity”, we should not escape from those problems or situation of disaster.

The other one is the importance of communication between people and less hierarchical relationship between people. As the example shows, the solid hierarchy relations prevent the delivery of ideas, solutions, we need to have employee to have place to voice up or ,if possible, to have less hierarchy inside organization. The latter one is very unique to big companies, because the bigger companies it grows, the more manager will be remote in nature.

Chapter 4 Stamina

Stamina is, I think, people usually overlooked. However, leader is the person that comes with great pressure, responsible and stress that caused by it.  

As in chapter 2 "Symbolism and Personal Example" shows, leader especially at the edge need to be an innovator or role-model to overcome the harsh situation. Since being innovative or role-model are, in the most of the case, need to work harder than other members and do things that otherwise no one will do, leader is the first person to feel anxiety, pressure and responsible.

So then, why leader cannot loose stamina even they are in such harsh situation?

The author showed us two reasons for this.

1. "Fail to maintain your own stamina, and then you will be unable to summon the energy needed to reach The Edge."

2. "Others in your team will take their cues from your behavior"

I was persuaded by these two ideas. Especially the second one shows that leader should care themselves in order to manage the team or group.

At the latter part of this book, I found “summit fever” to be an interesting topic. I really love the part that talks about "summit fever". 

He said leader should take their team and one's stamina in to consideration and build safeguards to ensure the team to keep their perspective and recognize when to rest, back up and dive. 

The example of Scott that we learned in our class, I think, is the one that caught in summit fever. They could rest or back up to maintain their stamina, but they choose to proceed to the trip which eventually meets a great loss. 

This chapter reminds us to be calm when engaging on task or near the goal which is crucially important to achieve task successfully.  

 

Be careful at "summit fever"

My Research Proposal

Research Proposal (RW class)

Xiaotian Zhao

"Leaders face the most difficulty not when they follow the trend that they had or try to keep situation as it is, but only when they try to change something or making transformation. This is called change management.

This paper will analyze why change management is the most difficult while indispensable for management, how to successfully accomplish changes with minimum conflicts by introducing several tactics, and finally bring you some example of leaders who successfully accomplish the change and make their company the first runner in the age of high competition. Changing management is difficult simply because you have to make people agree before you take action. Which means you have to persuade people into buying your plan. However, transformation or change is not the thing that people will be willing to take, this connects to the nature of human being to stay them as it is. In the most of cases, changes require great amount of work and also need to take responsibility when they failed. However even considering the difficulty we have to face when taking transformation, we still need to take changes. Customer demand are constantly changing; Not taking changes or taking risks will lose the good chance to success or even fail as company since they didn’t follow the trend. Konosuke Matsushita will be the good example of this. Then the question goes, how can we achieve successful changes. John Kotter says we need 12 steps to do so.His book”Leading changes”. However Carolyn Aiken and Scott Keller have the different view on this. They points out that changing or transformation is not always good to the company but will also make employee confused which lead to failure of management. These sources indicates that whether making changes is still debatable and need to be find out more in my research. "

Overall I love my topic change management, because that is the one, I think, which stays the core part of management and connects to all the things we learned in class. If you also have the same topic as mine, leave a comment and I would love to share information and cooperate.

Chapter 3 Optimism & Reality

This chapter mainly talks about how to acquire optimistic thoughts even when one is facing adversity. He talks about that talking to oneself, sharing the optimistic view, creating optimistic environment. However the most important thing to notice, I think, is after you get the optimistic perspective: how you apply them to find solution to the problem. In this post I would like to focus on what specific optimism style is required as leader.

   Optimism that we might come up in our daily life are quite different form what is required in the leadership. In our daily life, the word "optimistic or optimism" is used to represent a person who take every thing  as good, only care about the bright side, thoughtless or someone like him(see the figure below).

   However, the one that is required in leadership is "Optimism that Stay Grounded in Reality": who have optimistic view and bring optimistic idea or proposals, but they are based on reality as well. Now the questions goes to "Why they have to stay in the ground?"
   That is simply because, being "super optimists",happiest when he/she is facing the most hardship, won't bring any solution to change the situation on fix the problem. Even such people have a plan, if that is out of reality, then it won't be shared by others and more over fail to collaborate, because their idea or perspective is exceeded most people's understanding and value. As the authors says "Optimism is important leadership quality, but denial is deadly", Optimism with exceeded reality is only harm to the organization.

To the conclusion, although as the author says the duality of Optimism and reality is difficult, we need to use this "optimism" carefully and wisely to fight back even the disastrous situation.
　　　　　　

After reading chapter 2 "Symbolism and Personal Example"

"mobilizing energy through personal example and with clear, concrete images and symbols."

-Dennis N.T.Perkins

   Before I write this post, one thing stuck in my head and kept me from understanding this chapter. I understood that if a leader are seen as symbol or role model, then his/her action will motivate workers, but the question is “Should a leader be a person to show off their power to make him/her visible or special?”  I had a sense of objection to this showing off actions, since that action is opposite to my admirable one who wish to cooperate and choose to stay equal. However, after some reading and discussion. I find myself misinterpret the message of being symbol from this chapter. I would like to share this little finding here.
   The biggest fault of my interpretation was the case that this chapter is discussing.  It bases on situation that people are at the edge which means an urgent situation. However what I thought is much mild one, in which every workers are energetic and have high motivation to their work. In such occasion, leaders are not very needed to be symbolized. Going back to the urgent case that the book is discussing, leaders should act strongly and take the job as role model. That is because people are afraid of failing, especially when it is at the edge in which one misstep will be a crucial to their outcome, less people will willingly to voluntary take such risk. In such time, the only hope to change people's mind is only left to someone who can motivate people by making "right speech", dramatize the challenge with action, visible so that people can learn. It is the leader who can do all these things and in this way, people can move forward.

    After these things in considerations, giving the right speech, using vivid symbols, being visible as leader comes meaningful to me. I hope this finding will also help other readers agree on the idea of leader as "Symbolism and Personal Examples."

Hi, everyone!
I've found a very useful website that may become useful for getting the concepts of leadership. For example, you can go to "Leadership Skills", then you will find many article explaining what is leadership about and also topics such as power, emotional intelligence, facing crisis.
I hope this website will also help you find your essay topic.
Link: Mind Tools (Management training and leadership training, online)

website screen shot