|
Executive Interviews: Interview with John P Kotter on Leadership
October 2006
-
By Dr. Nagendra V Chowdary
John P Kotter Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership, Emeritus at Harvard Business School. 
What is the difference between leaders
and managers or leadership and
management?
First, management basically runs existing systems of people and technology. It does so with processes we associate with planning andbudgeting, organizing and staffing,controlling and problem solving.Leadership is very different.
Leadership creates those systems that managers manage and it helps them to adapt to new opportunities that emerge and to avoid hazards that can hurt an organization. So, the heart of leadership is all associated with change, and not incremental changes but significant
|
|
change.Second, leadership tends to be involved more with disrupting the status quo by helping people develop some vision of a new future, a vision that has a market-oriented logic to it,and a strategy for actually achieving that vision.It involves communicating that information to relevant people so that they actually believe it and want to make it a reality. Third, it involves motivating and inspiring, empowering and helping people actually make the vision a reality, despite the obstacles.
In a stable world, management is much more important than leadership. As the rate of change goes up, or as our aspirations go up
in ways that demand change, leadership becomes increasingly important.
-
Should leadership be looked at as a
science or an art? If it is a science, what
are the universal principles of
leadership? If it is to be believed as an
art, what does it take to nurture and
develop leadership?
At this point it's hard to either study
or to teach leadership as a science. It
is an art form—a complex set of
behaviors that don't easily reduce
themselves to something that can be
studied with scientific methods or
taught in the same way as you can
teach management. Now, having
said that, you can help people in
formal educational settings, and by
mentoring, books, etc., to see the
growing importance of leadership.
You can help people understand
what leadership is and how it is
different from management. You can
help people see the relationship of
leadership to change, and how
technology and globalization will
only bring us more and more
change. There are universal
principles that can be taught: about
vision and strategy, about
communication for buy-in, about
empowerment and inspiration. I
have written much about this in
four books, and I have another
coming out soon. The new book is
called Our Iceberg is Melting. You
can also help people assess their
own behavior against what
leadership is, and you can help
motivate them to want to find
opportunities to develop whatever
potential they have. -
Are leadership styles influenced by
national cultures?
If one defines styles as some of the
more very specific ways in which
people act—how they dress,
structure some aspects of their days,
have lunch—those areas are clearly
influenced by national culture. If a
leader simply ignores them, if you
drop a Canadian into India, for
example, and she acts exactly as she
does in Canada, you can have
difficulties. The Canadian style
could get in the way of that person's
actually helping others to create the
right vision, getting people to work
together to create the right strategy,
etc. So the answer to your question
is ‘yes', national culture is
important. But there are those who
believe that leadership is entirely
dependent on the local culture and
that is not true. From all the work I
have done the evidence is
overwhelming on this point. For
years now I have been dealing with
executives in our senior executive
program at Harvard who come from
dozens and dozens of countries, a
program which now has about 320
people in it every year. Seventy
percent of these executives are non
US. I have told them about effective
leaders in the US, the UK, South
Africa, Japan, China, etc. I have
shown them the critical similarities.
What is interest ing is that before I
talk, before I spend a day with these
executives, many ask me if I am only
going to talk about American
leadership—the implication being
that American leaders are not
relevant or have marginal relevance
to them back in Russia (or wherever
they are from). Yet, at the end of the
day with me, no one raises the
question again. They conclude that
core aspects of leadership are not
culture-specific. And I have seen
this for 12 years or more with that
executive group at Harvard, at least
that long with more junior executive
groups at Harvard, as well as when
talking to top management at
international corporations which
have a third of their executives from
outside the US.
1.
Leadership and Entrepreneurship Case Studies
2. ICMR
Case Collection
3.
Case Study Volumes
|
