Henry V

On Feb 12th, we were headed for our Leadership Class to the Bahen Center for IT, a combined lecture hall large enough to house 250 odd Rotmanites from 4 sections. A coupla my class-mates and I were wondering what was in store for us. The class was titled "Henry V"... was it going to be role-play? Or was it going to be pure lecture? maybe it was set to be a Bollywood style video with song and dance sequences...we kept guessing...some of us were expecting fireworks..:D

Finally, without much delay, the lecture began by looking at historical chronicles (helped by the Bard) about Henry V and how he led an army of 12,000 tired and weary Englishmen to victory over a large French army of 60,000 men. Our prof. Tiziana Casciaro showed us a coupla clips from a flick to add a little melodrama. Point to note: Henry Vth showed leadership to win the war. What is leadership? is it the same as management? it used to be tied to management until the 60s, when thinkers and schools started seeing leadership separately from management. The key leadership pillars:

a) build a vision, one larger-than-the-mere-strategy vision

b) alignment with the vision

c) motivating people to act upon the vision, driven by the understanding of human nature.

Imo, the take-away from the whole exercise was to understand that leadership is a learnable skill- its science as much as art. To my mind, one of the crucial first steps is to understand underlying human nature and to answer questions like "how can you drive people to do stuff with fire in their belly?". In addition, what was striking was the fundamental difference between management and leadership-

Leadership is about subverting the natural tendency towards chaos and providing the right guidance. Management, on the other hand, deals with the nuts and bolts of getting execution right.

This thesis leaves me wondering - Why do we very often see very few leaders and a lot of managers around?