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August 01 The Leader In YouKeep your mind open to change all the time. Welcome it. Court it. It is only by examing and reexaming your opinions and ideas that you can progress. ---- DALE CARNEGIE
As now is 21st Century, the world is undergoing enormous change, a process of great up-heaval and great possibility. In just a few short years, we have witnessed the dawn of postindustrial society, the advent of the information age, the rush to computerization, the birth of biotechnology, and not the least of these changes, the human-relations revolution.
Most important of all, this cultural change will require a whole new breed of leader, a leader quite unlike the bosses most of us have worked for and some of us have perhaps become. The day has long since passed when a company could be run with a bullwhip and a chair. The new leaders will have to mine every ounce of talent and creativity that their organizations possess - from the shop floor to the executive suite.
For the people caught in the middle, all these changes seemed to arrive at white-knuckle speed. If companies weren't undergoing a corporate merger or acquisition, they were restructuring or taking a dip in the chilly waters of bankruptcy court. There were firings. There were layoffs. The change was brutal. It was swift. And it wasn't just blue-collar anymore. Professionals and executives all across the white-collar ranks were coming face to face with a narrowing future, and they were not quite sure what to do.
Predictably, change of this magnitude and speed has very much affected how people feel about themselves and their careers. From one end of the economy to the other, it has produced unprecedented waves of dissatisfation and fear.
Some people have placed their faith in technology, figuring the world can simply invent its way out of this current state of affairs. And there is no denying the contribution that technology can make.
However, technology alone is never good enough in difficult times. Just because the means of communication are readily available doesn't mean that people have learned to communicate well. Far too often today, we haven't. This is one of the ironies of modern times: the great capacity to communicate, the great failure to do so. What good is all this information if people don't know how to share it? Today bright young people can crunch numbers, analyze markets, and devise business plans, but when it comes to human-relations skills, we need to step up our efforts.
Sure, technological sophistication will still be important as the world races ahead, but that is just the price of admission to the new business arena. As they say, good human-relations skill have the ability to change people from managing others to leading others. People can learn to move 'from directing to guiding, fron competing to collaborating, from operating under a syatem of veiled secrecy to one of sharing information as it's needed, from a mode of passivity to a mode of risk taking, from one of viewing people as an expense to one of viewing people as an asset.' We can learn how to change lives from resent to contentment, from apathy to involvement, from failure to success - inside the organization and out.
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