Brand Leadership and building great Leaders – Part 2
Glimpse of the backdrop
Kashif Ahmed, Business Strategist, Author, and Speaker
In the first article, I've discussed the basic and advanced traits of leadership that I've considered as inseverable leadership qualities. In this second article, Kashif Ahmed (Business Strategist, Author, and Speaker) shares his insights into the historical changes that have resulted in current perspectives in leadership and company culture and what we should change about it to create more balanced leadership."
The natural concept of following and leading
We like to lead, and we also want to follow our seniors and those ahead in our journey. Before the Industrial Revolution, we were in the agriculture age 300 years ago, and it was hard to find followers, workers, employees, or slaves. Then the industrial era began, and they needed factory workers and a lot of them. So they created an environment and made it look attractive to join in and become a factory worker.
Worker colonies were developed similar to settlements in underdeveloped countries to bring riches home. According to the industry owner and imperial lord's requirements, workers and slaves needed to be educated and trained. Workers with a specific mindset to follow orders with strict timings and uniforms made it easy to calculate wages and salaries. Workers were educated out of their inborn creativeness of a particular syllabus that supported industrial needs.
It was the birth of the modern education system that was made to distort original concepts of an infinite mindset and human values like humility, generosity, courtesy, and core values like authenticity, achievement, adventure and love.
Every human value was confined into a smaller meaning for employees and servants in worker producing factories called educational institutes with print and electronic media gradually transforming original and natural concepts and intentions with a constant bombardment of news, movies, dramas, and every other talk show and program, supporting the new ideas to create a limited mindset that makes a good factory worker and great consumer always unsure, scared to take risks and follow their original desires and interests to be genuinely enthusiastic, eager and zestful to build create and help everyone to grow and develop like a genuine, authentic leader because a natural leader knows that his growth is actually in the development of his people.
The quest and real insight
From the very beginning, I was unable to go with the flow of the education system. I was a lousy student. I failed to follow school timings, studies, lessons, and lectures, and it always felt unrealistic making me feel insensitive about life as I have always been taking time out from life to do my everyday chores, not like most of the people who take time out to live their lives from their everyday chores like a picnic or hanging out with friends and their loved ones.
Then I discovered that many people suffer from insecurities, frustrations, and instability of mind. Almost every human struggling to sustain and keep his original creative, caring, and sensitive self, faces these hardships in today's so-called modern educated society that constantly pushes him or her to be part of the crowd with limited and confined concepts.
Finally, when I watched interviews of the famous futurist Alvin Toffler about The Third Wave and then the great education revolutionist Sir Ken Robinson in his world-famous TED Talk "Do schools kill creativity?"
I realized that almost every great leader had been a bad student and a freak going against the wave.
The actual concept of leadership starts from going against the tide. Learning to fly with wings nature has provided them.
You were born with wings; why prefer to crawl through life?" - Rumi.
