Leadership Skills for the Global Corporate Series - The Monk gets hit on the head - By Seema Anand

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10 Jul 2021

Leadership Skills for the Global Corporate Series - The Monk gets hit on the head - By Seema Anand Remixed - Myth and Management series Storyteller Researcher Seema Anand Seema Anand is an expert on Narrative Practices working with the uses and the implications of Oralness specialising in Story telling Seema specialises in global mythologies - comparing and retelling stories through different cultural nuances to give everyone ownership of the tales info seema anand gmail com Film Maker Creative Head Bineeta Mitra Videographer Shozeb Haider Management Consultant Smita Tharoor Blog a http 3A 2F 2Fwww tharoorassociates com 2F 3Fq 3Dblog a Copyright Bineeta Mitra and Seema Anand Production The learning Imitation is the root of all evil Create your own strategies for success Another s success is not your success This falls into the Self-Management competency Personal Credibility Demonstrated concern that one be perceived as responsible reliable and trustworthy Does what he she commits to doing Respects the confidentiality of information or concerns shared by others Is honest and forthright with people Carries his her fair share of the workload Takes responsibility for own mistakes does not blame others Conveys a command of the relevant facts and information Flexibility Openness to different and new ways of doing things willingness to modify one s preferred way of doing things Is able to see the merits of perspectives other than his her own Demonstrates openness to new organisational structures procedures and technology Switches to a different strategy when an initially selected one is unsuccessful Demonstrates willingness to modify a strongly held position in the face of contrary evidence For most people this story has a very straightforward learning Don t be a copy -cat Repeating what the other person is doing without understanding or knowledge will not do you any good Now actually pause and think what that sentence signifies It is quite common for us to use a tried and tested model to approach a similar issue After all look how many successful people write self- help books advising you on what they have done in order to achieve the same success Or how often you have said well it worked for them why not for me Most of us do it every day and often almost automatically without even thinking Let s face it if you had seen a monk turn into a pile of gold at the mere whack of a stick on the head would you not have been tempted to try it I can bet that there are many out there who would not even have waited to see it for themselves a second hand would have been enough to make them try it out It is human instinct This is why I want to you to really look at the story again carefully from a personal perspective As we listen to the story we automatically tend to focus on the last part of the story the barber and his actions We forget about the merchant and the sequence of events The merchant is aware of his goals and follows them through with the actions best suited to the completion of his goal he builds his business he goes through the ups and downs of business and finally when he understands what he has to do to reverse the down he puts his strategy in place and follows it carefully and reasonably His task is to strike one monk who will come to him at a specific time and he contains himself to that one monk He does not pre-empt the arrival of the monk by going to the temple he does not look for more monks The merchant understands his task and sticks to it and receives a large reward for his work The barber in contrast has no idea what were the circumstances that led to this reward was and he makes no attempt to find out if he has set everything in place to achieve the same result He invites several monks to his house if one monk equals one pile of gold then many monks must equal many piles of gold and proceeds to beat them all in an indiscriminate and unrestrained manner He displays a lack of thinking in his actions which eventually results in a great deal of misery for all concerned The barber has set himself up to fail from the very start It is important to understand that you can build a business not a business model It is not possible to set a universal business model that can work for everyone A successful business is the result of specific functions that lead to certain sequence of events and each function is unique to each set of circumstances