How To Turn Executives Into Wizards

PART I Abstract:   There are a large number of leadership development programmes all over the world. An article in the prestigious Forbes magazine cites a ‘Training Industry’ finding that “leadership development is a $366 billion global industry”. But the tragedy is that “most development programmes do not work”. Add to this the losses from (anticipated) benefits; Dr Ed Holton in his piece "America's Trillion-Dollar Training Problem" thinks 8:1 is quite reasonable. The total losses then go beyond a trillion dollars. The Harvard Business School’s Professor Michael Beer calls this loss “the great training robbery.” The crisis has reached such monumental proportions because of the basic and fundamental conceptual blunders of ‘wise and expert thinkers’. They ignored the radical change in the environment and the fact that futuristic, visionary, charismatic and transformational types of leaders cannot be trained, developed, made, created, shaped, moulded or ‘minted’. It is true...

  “Imitation is degradation of self,” says King James. How very true! In the Oxford dictionary, the synonyms of ‘imitation’ are sham, fake, counterfeit, bogus, spurious, phoney. It is, in fact, an offence and a lot of court cases deal with violations of copyrights, trademarks and plagiarism as well as stealing of secret data. There is no wonder then that almost all agree with King James in their hearts. But still, there is all-round conscious or subconscious imitation going on, though no one will admit it.  Against this background, one wonders how the imitation of others’ behaviours and qualities, that goes under the 'exalted' idea of ‘Role Modeling’, is highly commended and widely practised.  The term ‘Role Modeling’ was introduced by sociologist Robert Merton and further developed by Albert Bandura. Bandura found that "individuals tend to be active observers of their environments. During these observations, people make note of the behaviours exhibited by others and imit...