Ranu's Cafe...

When I first heard about Multipliers,many things popped up in my head, from economics, math to my prolific neighbor from India with 4 brats and pregnant wife in tow! Fortunately, none of that turned out to be the subject of Liz Wiseman and Greg McKeowan’s recently launched first book, “Multipliers: How the best leaders make everyone smarter”, already a bestseller on Amazon. For me the book's main message emerged as 2 fold: 1)While there are many smart leaders in the world, the smartest are the ones that make everyone around them feel smarter 2)The leaders #1 job, above everything else is to unleash employee potential. While our history is littered with examples of great leaders, the leadership models we know appear to have surprisingly (atleast to me!), evolved primarily over the last century. From McGregor’s work on Motivation Theory X and Y and Blake and Mouton’s Task and People Grid, to the more recently evolved work around Situational and Transformatmive Leadership. Es

S/he is, as in Cameron’s masterpiece, connected and in tune with every aspect and nuance of her organization’s existence, and able to tap into every part, however remote to create a better whole. In this case, I guess it isn’t World peace or Harmony of nature s/he is after, but in our crass world of business, I guess s/he will settle for a Q on Q Shareholder Return of 15%! This is indeed the new Avatar of our often debated and currently much beleaguered Leader. And as in the movie, I wouldn’t be too far off if I said, “s/he is blue in color and is only found on the remote Planet of Pandora!” In his best selling book, “The World is Flat” and its “3.0” Sequel, Thomas L. Friedman describes the unplanned cascade of technological and social shifts that effectively leveled the economic world and “accidentally made Beijing, Bangalore and Bethesda next door neighbors”. Today (he contends from 3 years back), “Individuals and small groups of every color of the rainbow are able to plug, play,