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ForeignPolicy.com May 30, 2012 By Cara Parks and Joshua E. Keating As summer blockbuster season kicks into high gear, big-budget action movies like The Avengers, Battleship, and Prometheus remind us that there’s one thing that unites Americans: Our shared fear … Continue reading
Taking a team from ordinary to extraordinary means understanding and embracing the difference between management and leadership. According to writer and consultant Peter Drucker, “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”
Manager and leader are two completely different roles, although we often use the terms interchangeably. Managers are facilitators of their team members’ success. They ensure that their people have everything they need to be productive and successful; that they’re well trained, happy and have minimal roadblocks in their path; that they’re being groomed for the next level; that they are recognized for great performance and coached through their challenges.
If you are a Star Trek fan, you will know that it’s a franchise borne from Gene Roddenberry’s 1960s vision of an utopian society. It was based on his a coherent set of idealistic principles the background to which; were the emerging political tensions within American Society during a phase of economic expansion, the Cold war and the Civil Rights movement. It encapsulates a progressive and optimistic take on the future that had great faith in technology.
If you are no fan at all, this article will partly explain why it has such a large fan base and captured the imagination of many. Either way, read on to discover how the principles and tenets behind this episodic scifi franchise present some useful lessons in both leadership and management.
There’s something about the culture of business that tends toward excess — in financial markets, to be sure, but also in the “market” for new ideas and management techniques. The dynamic is always the same, whether the idea in question is reengineering, six-sigma quality, or lean production systems: A genuinely original strategy is born in one company or industry, consultants discover the practice and turn it into a marketable commodity, executives in all sorts of other companies race to “buy” the product — and then they wonder why the technique didn’t work nearly as well in their organization as it did in the place that created it in the first place.
I fear that very dynamic is unfolding today with respect to a piece of language and a leadership aspiration that has become the Holy Grail for business thinkers like me.
That piece of language, that aspiration, is innovation.
