A leader
who thinks and brings his thoughts to reality impacting several people to
learn, inspire, create with his innovative ideas, while demonstrating change
and replicating success, at a larger scale comes under Thought Leadership. Such
people bring about a radical shift in innovation[1],
design and vision by affecting industries and also entire ecosystems. They
revolutionize their surroundings to such a large extent, simply by what they
do, that they automatically enroll more and more people to join in their efforts.
Thought Leaders are learned and informed people, sometimes with years of
research and knowledge under their belt as well as experts in their domain. Their
stories are covered widely, contributing to the success they are today.
By de facto
standards, one looks-up to successful people. It is but natural for human
beings to ‘Follow the Leader’ but more so, as it is ingrained in our psyche
through several systems such as education, psychology, business modalities, seminars,
speeches, etc. In retrograde, this term of a ‘Thought Leader’ is overly used,
to the extent of being misused and so much so, that it was termed as the “most
annoying business slang” in 2013 by Forbes, although it had resumed vigor in
the 20s[2].
Let us
talk about the achievers who have created a big name for themselves, the likes
of Sachin Tendulkar, Narayan Murthy, or Sachin Bansal. People get so inspired
and enamored by their lives, struggles, efforts, and challenges, that they want
to have the same. There is absolutely nothing belittling with this approach. But
this is a short-handed and impractical advent to living substantially, wholly,
or in reality. That is because, if we see, the success ratio of the rest of the
herd trying to ape the accomplished, is minimal.
Whereas,
if you consider for a moment, the ‘failed-people’ who have not been able to
make it because of an impediment and have been left behind in the rat-race,
technically will be able to throw much brighter light on the top reasons to avoid, to become a ‘Success
Story’. There might be several genuine and plausible reasons for such
attempters to have not been able to attain their desired outcome: lack of
finances, dearth of opportunities, foul-play, bureaucracy, red-tapism... this
list can go on. Once we start acknowledging the failure personalities, we will
get huge takeaways as learnings from them. They are the right ones to show the
actual mirror and pinpoint the pitfalls in the road to eclat.
Speaking
of facts, there are several such start-up companies that were set-up by
brilliant minds just to be taken over by bigger industry giants and made into
overnight success stories. Let us talk about a real-world scenario - many of us
think we know that the current big names of taxi on-demand services in India are
flourishing since their set-up but the underlying fact is that the first
private start-up of on-demand cab service venture was actually by a founder who
is considered as a non-celebrated business hero. As another instance, we have
Gary Kirsten who was not a very successful name as a cricketer but became a
valuable and popular coach for the Indian Cricket Team, leading it to creating
successful records. So, who once was not a great cricketer, adds value and
learnings to the team, enabling it to win the World Cup.
We need
to have more such non-recognized personas onboard to ensure we do not repeat
the same mistakes they did, open up new doorways for a new break and to season
our ground with their invaluable experience. The world chooses to ignore the
calibre of such field-markers as it is not brought to attention and covered
widely by the media, newspapers, social media, etc. If they and their
near-achievements are landscaped vividly, it is sure to reveal the fine-tuning
pointers and fail-proof steps one can learn to overcome and achieve.
To conclude, an IIT / IIM / Oxford degree doesn’t necessarily mean
guaranteed success. There are a lot of professionals without IIT degree who are
successful CEOs even today and will continue to be, for years to come, as
‘Brilliance and worth, come in all sizes and shapes’.
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