Strategic Thinking and Great Leaders

I attended the ICLIF Breakfast Talk this morning in Kuala Lumpur. The speaker was Professor Moshe F. Rubinstein from UCLA. The topic that he delivered was "Bring the Future to the Present". It was in fact a very fruitful session even though it was only 2 hours.

What the session is all about? Imagine this... what we normally do in planning is to bring best practices from the past to present time for strategizing and planning for the future. Sounds good! But the problem is we are not sure whether what had worked in the past will work in the future, right?

What he suggested is bring the future to the present i.e. visualizing the ideal end state and working backwards. How that can be done? "Strategic thinking", he said. Not, strategic planning. "Too much planning and we forgot how to think and we don't think", he said. What he propogates is being creative, innovative and think the unthinkable!

For those who want to explore more (in-depth) on this, Moshe and his colleague, Iris wrote a book entitled "The Minding Organisations: Bring the Future to the Present and Turn Creative Ideas to Business Solutions". Below is the link that will bring you to the title in Amazon Books.

http://www.amazon.com/Minding-Organization-Creative-Business-Solutions/dp/0471347817/ref=pd_sim_b_2/181-9441849-4474818

In his 2 hours session, Moshe did also mention the characteristics of Great Leaders. They are: (1) authentic, (2) humble/humility, (3) honest/trustworthiness, (4) future focus, (5) inspire, and (6) competence people (as leaders need to get things done, not to do by themselves). He stressed on humility in great length. From good to being Great, leaders need to be mindful not to fall into a trap of being arrogant! It is important that leaders have sense of humility i.e. open to mistakes, feedback from others and always learn to be better and better.