Interesting Management Lessons

The best weekends for me are generally the ones that allow me to indulge in my passion; watching movies. This weekend I was truly refreshed to see a great movie that I would recommend to all those who manage people, are in situations where they have to think “out of the box” or have to make tough decisions with a lot of constraints. The movie 'moneyball' is a sports drama based on a real life event and takes place when Beane (played by Brad Pitt) who is the GM of Oakland’s Athletics seems to be running out of options on wanting to run a successful baseball team. He starts losing his star players Damon, Giambi & Isringhausen to competition and the owner of his team ( Stephen Schott) is not willing to lend additional funds to him to pick up fresh start talent from the market. As Beane is struggling to overcome this hopeless situation and work within the constraints he meets & decides to bring on board Peter Brand (played by Jonah Hill) who comes up with a statistic...

Having spent a short while in the army and also by the virtue of managing people as a line manager for over 15 years now, I do pride myself in understanding the concept of leading from the front. Leading from the front has often been described as 'to show the way or to guide or direct the course'. It also means never asking someone to do any thing that you cannot do better (or yourself) and also willingness to being in the thick of things and leading the team by example. Recently , my father, who was a 3 star general (Lieutenant General) in the army, and held many command & staff positions in the army as well as went on to join the board of multi-billion dollar companies during his service &   post his retirement , explained a very interesting concept to me. Since he is one of those rare personalities who have proved his prowess, in both the fields that need high leadership skills to rise to the top (military & business), I found his concept extremely thought ...