Malaysia Corporate Career - MentorShip Finding

MALAYSIA CORPORATE MANAGEMENT

CAREER BUILDING, MENTOR SHIP

HOW TO ACHIEVE GREATER HEIGHT YOUR CAREER ? MENTORSHIP

Innovators are often perceived as individual who work alone and have created breakthrough product or services our of spark of genius.

 While the latter is true, the former is not. They do have mentors who have pushed them to greatness in one way or another. What if I told you that the great innovators Steve Job, bill Gates and Jack Dorsey all have had mentors behind them ?

This is an actual fact but while we look at the mentors behind these great innovators, there are some key learning principles which innovators today can learn from finding a mentor for themselves. If you are an innovator, here is what you need to do ;

1.FIND A MENTOR WHO WILL PUSH YOU OUT OF YOUR COMFORT ZONE

Jobs met Robert Friedland when he wanted when he wanted to sell Friedland a type writer and they become friends long enough to effect a serious change of Jobs’ attitude and working methods. According to Jobs “ he turn me on to a different level of consciousness”. Jobs was an introvert and Friedland was a charismatic and forceful person who could bend people and situations to his will. Friedland pulled Jobs out of his shell and turned him into a more open and extroverted personality.

According to Mentorpolis.com, Jobs was essentially an open minded thinker and thus this trust with Friedland allowed him to express his brilliant ideas openly and without hesitation. The world is now thankful for the fact that Jobs became what he was, thus underlining the importance of a mentor who can push you out of your comfort zone.

2.FIND A MENTOR WHO CAN HELP YOU REALIZE YOUR DREAM

According to Stamford history, Frederick Terman, a Stanford professor, encourage Bill Hewlet and David Packard to establish a little electronics company in Palo Alto Garage in 1939, which was later dubbed “the birthplace of Silicon Valley”. Terman brought in a list of 25 potential customers for Hewlet and Packard’s first creation, an audio oscillator. The fact that Hewlet and Packard were able to channel the brilliance of Terman to create one of the largest consumer PC makers in the world shows the importance of mentorship in realizing dreams.

Speaking of computers, even Gates has a mentor. Dr Ed Roberts was the creator of a kit computer called Altair 8800, which Gates call the first personal computer even before Apple 1 or any other personal computer. Gates and his partner Paul Allen found a way to load BASIC on the computer in 1975, which help computer hobbyists program and operate Altair. The encouragement and mental stimulation achieved by this mentorship confirm Microsoft would become a company that would be capable of developing new bridges in the world of technology.

3.FIND A MENTOR WHO WILL CHALLENGE YOU TO BE GREATER

Dorsey is known for creating Twitter and Square (a mobile payment system). However Dorsey had a mentor who challenged him constantly to think big. For six months, Ray Chamber had consistently met with and mentored Dorsey. From Chambers, Dorsey learned to think bigger and better. “At the core of his being, he really wants to make the world a better place”, chambers had said about Dorsey.

Chambers made his fortune via a private equity firm that he co-founded and currently serveds as United Nations secretary-general’s special envoy for financing the Health Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and for Malaria, but he comments that his greatest success is Dorsey.

In conclusion, if you are an aspiring innovator, take heart and know that you don’t have to be alone, you can and must have a mentor, because event the “great” had one.

So start looking for a mentor using the above principles and start innovating to make the world a better place because that is what any mentor would want in the first place.    

Malaysia Corporate Management Control - Transformation

MALAYSIA CORPORATE MANAGEMENT CONTROL MONITORING TO SUCCEED

4 Vantage Point | Malaysia Corporate Management | Change | Succeed |

MANAGEMENT VANTAGE POINT – 

CHANGE IS THE KEY WORDS TO BE AHEAD

One thing is inevitable and that is “change”. There are no magic hand not magic words, when one realized that we simply have to innovate in order to being submerge by competitors. Industry structure shift and those who fail to see the changes early and fail to innovate are those who will be hurt the most.

Leaders need a better vantage point to see what is going on. Change management gurus have have headed up the boardrooms to develop breakthrough strategies and introduce game changing strategies to steer the company in new directions. Some have been more successful than others and some attributes to successful changes to leaders who had the ability to see the big picture and determine industry shifts that were going to change the rules of the game.

The likes of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were able to usher in the era of personal computing in the 80s through their forward thinking perspectives. For  another example, the airlines industry is close to 100 years old and the industry is still continues to shift on both extremes from the highly differentiated Virgin Atlantic to the reconstruction caused by the budget airline segment led by the likes of Malindo Air and Air Asia.

The ability to see the big picture and go beyond what everyone else is thinking has been the determining talent that has led to the prosperity of innovative companies, many of which were able to thrive in periods of volatility and challenge. The role of leaders in having to identify changes that will affect their organization and industry for better or for worse cannot be understated. The ability to see the big pictures is key talent of any strategic leader.

The importance of having a vantage point is that it allows the leader to step back and look at the bigger picture. It allows the management to see what is happening in the world outside the organization and its impending effects to the current strategy. It allows the leader to get out of their own processes and go deeper into the employee and customer experience. This is an ability that we would like to call “seeing the forest and the trees”.

The former notion is that a leader does either-or. Either he focuses only on the big picture (forest) or he sees them for the trees (internal processes). There is a danger of being too much of either. When you only see the bigger picture, you might find yourself in a position where you believe you have motivated people on the new strategy, only to find months later that nothing seems to be moving.

On the other hand, if a leader is too caught up with the details, processes and procedures, there is a great danger that the organization might not respond quickly enough to changes in the industry and customer demands.

1. SITUATIONAL APPRAISAL AND SCENARIO ANALYSIS

Use big picture perspective and engage your team in looking at the facts together and have a shared appreciation to determine a broad strategy. Develop a broad sense of vision and direction amidst the sea of competition. See the future through a telescope and build a navigational roadmap.

2.SHARED PERSPECTIVE & VISUALIZATION FOR EXECUTION & STRATEGY

In this case you are not using your own lens but that of your Cross Function Team (CFT). These give a leader a chiastic perspective across the organization. This helps the leaders anticipate barriers to execution.

3. HAVE A DIAGNOSTIC MINDSET

Sometime a leader needs to take a “deep-dive” into their organization to identify constraints to execution. These constraints could be motivational or systemic. They could also be source based.

At this point a leader needs a lens similar to microscope to get to the root causes of problems and deploy measures for corrective measure.

4.CONTROL DASHBOARD

Have a dashboard for navigating the strategy. Build a system for measuring progress and milestones. Have the necessary indicators for strategic traction that measure finances, learning and growth, customer perspectives and internal processes. Use a balanced scorecard perspective.

The good news for the leader is that he does not have to be omnipresent to see the forest and the trees. He needs only to have the right perspective at the right given time and if he chooses to specialize in certain aspects, the true leader recognizes the need for the other perspective and give way to empower others to formulate and execute strategy. Gone are the days that one leader does all. New age leadership demand more collaboration and broader cross-sectional perspective to make things work. This demands a certain level of leadership from all of us and we cannot have a zero sum perspective of power and influence.

Having a leadership vantage point makes us realize that strategy goes beyond the self or the leader. And while it may take a visionary to cast direction, it takes a whole crew to navigate a ship to its destination especially through trouble waters. Use the right lenses and get the right perspective.

Contributed by : The Star Newspaper - recorded for self reading as News Paper comes and Go. Once capture in my blog, whenever reading back, this is refresh one mind.