Advanced Leadership Programme

Human spaces speak to us. Articulated for a particular function or purpose, spaces communicate what is worthwhile, meaningful and acceptable within their boundaries. Spaces are structured to welcome certain patterns of action and response, but not others.

Human spaces can also control us, although it is not what we design them to do. Spaces are meant to focus, not to imprison, our thoughts, actions and feelings. All too easily, however, our spaces become our boxes.

But we also need to be comfortable with abstract space. All manifest spaces have form and structure, but space itself does not. Like plasticine, waiting to be shaped by human hands, its possibilities are limitless.

Vision, Structure & the Manager:

Globalization places special demands on companies. Whether companies face an economic slowdown or a buoyant market, they are called upon to reinvent themselves, to innovate in ways for which their prior corporate experience does not prepare them. Never before has the past been a less reliable guide for steering companies into an assured future.

How can companies re-envision themselves in response to a radically altered market place? How can managers, who perceive their corporate role in terms of specific tasks and responsibilities, become capable of inspiring, promoting and managing change? 

The best companies embed a vision and adopt structures and processes to realize it. Companies need vision – to motivate thought and action. They need structure too – to direct thought and action. But what do they need to change habits of thought and action?

 Companies create conditions for managers to develop and hone the competencies they need for current assignments or new responsibilities. Managers are enabled to give their best within an established frame of reference, not to become competent at questioning it. But often this is precisely what they must do in times of market turbulence, reversal or crisis.

Altering a company’s terms of engagement with the market calls for managers to experience and enlarge their inner resources to face the challenge of the unknown. Companies specialize in training managers for better performance, not in creating space for self-exploration and inner discovery. They must seek that space elsewhere. This is what we  endeavor to do in this unique program by providing that space.

Vision, Structure & the Artist:

Art is fidelity to failure – a poet once wrote. His point was not just that to risk failure is the calling of artists, but that to be dissatisfied is fundamental to their temperament. Artists strive to reach what they cannot grasp, and they look upon what they achieve as ever falling short of what they imagine. As the result, artists rarely allow the ghost of past ‘success’ to haunt their capacity to innovate into the future.  

Artists value structure, but they are also inclined to challenge it, treating the stability and certainty that it offers with necessary suspicion. They are acutely aware of how double-edged structure can be – how it can channelize creativity in one moment but block it in the next.

Art is an activity as organized as management. The difference is that artists constantly strive to create a fresh vision and another order. Impatient with the tried, tested and trodden, they unravel established idioms to create anew. Even more fundamentally, they empty themselves to listen anew, to make room for the unique presence of things to take root in them once again. Only then, they know, does the genuinely new emerge.

Companies must question their structures of work in a rapidly changing business environment. But unlearning entrenched patterns of thought and action might take too long, or come about too late – unless what routinely transpires in the arts becomes commonplace in management.

Managers need not become artists, but they can experience their own world with an artist’s outlook, learning how to absorb it without judgment and explore it without fear. In this program we aspire to make that happen. 

The Challenge of Leadership

What is the nature of the challenge confronting Indian leaders today? How we do we understand our roles in this rapidly changing yet baffling world we live in? Can we develop a plan of action to accomplish our professed objectives? As India modernizes and joins the international mainstream, it is essential that we retain, develop and sustain our unique identity fostered by a cultural and spiritual inheritance that extends several thousand years. “The point,” wrote Rabindranath Tagore many years ago, “is not how to eliminate all differences but how to unite by keeping differences intact.”  Penned many years ago in a different context, it is easily one of the best definitions of globalization from one of India’s finest minds.

Indian civilization has exhibited an astonishing and exceptional diversity that has helped to foster values as tolerance, compassion and respecting differences. It would not be an exaggeration to state that it is respect for diversity that helped India survive as a cultural entity. As our country makes its forays on the global arena, Indian business will need to equip itself to the challenge of successfully competing in the global marketplace. For this to happen, our leaders will have to learn to be proactive and not passive recipients as was the case in the past. “It is not the strongest of the species that survive”, wrote Charles Darwin, “not even the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”  Are we responsive? 

This program is designed for leaders of corporate or social or political bodies or entities to equip them to deal with the challenges stemming from an increasingly multi-lateralized global context at three levels of response including that of (a) the firm, (b) the individual self and (c) the context or the environment.