I read this statement from Mr NR Narayana Murthy’s interview in TOI (
Q: How would you describe a great leader?
A: A great leader is one who is not only good in creating a vision, creating the big picture, but also ensuring that he goes into the nitty gritty, into the details of making sure that the vision actually translated into reality through excellence of execution. In other words, great leaders have great vision, great imagination, great ideas, but they also implement those ideas through hard work, commitment and flawless execution. In doing so, they motivate thousands of people.
I think the need for “excellence of execution” (EoE) couldn’t have been stressed better. The private sector in
Unfortunately, our governments and our politicians are never measured by a similar yardstick that lays emphasis on EoE. Victory is hailed when annual budget allocations are made or new schemes announced. There is little focus or talk on how a particular scheme or project is going to achieve EoE and thereby its intended outcome. In most cases, the outcomes themselves are never defined!
Take the case of recent spurt in metro rail projects for eg. the one in
The flip side to this is that we fail to recognize instances of exemplary public leadership that still exist today. These are the individuals (politicians and bureaucrats) who know that the battle has only begun when a project is launched, and that much of the hard work lies in achieving EoE.
The only figure that stands out here as an exception is E Sreedharan of Delhi Metro. Off late, also Mr. Madhavan Nair of ISRO but only thanks to our ability to define outcomes clearly – the rocket launch finally did yield some path breaking findings on lunar surface. But for every ‘x’ number of such examples that we do recognize, we miss perhaps ‘10x’ others – big and small.
One such example I feel is Project Arrow of the Department of Post. A Google search will reveal a lot of information on its vision and the wonderful work that is already under way, but public awareness on this mammoth project is extremely poor! What is largely unknown therefore is the name of individual (s) who displayed leadership in envisioning and implementing this initiative. One of them, I have learnt, is Jyotiraditya Scindia who played a key role in launching this initiative when he was the Union Minister of State for IT & Communications in 2004 UPA government.
One only hopes that we come across more and more visible examples of great public leadership characterized by “excellence of execution”!
4 comments:
Project Arrow - Would say it depends on the kind of impact the spending of money makes. If it is merely a facelift, then in that case its not very impressive. If it is a modernization and computerization of the postal backend that would be brilliant. Especially if we keep in mind that post offices can become the one stop shop for government services across the country.
It is very much "modernization and computerization of the postal backend" with a high stress on better customer service. Two phases of the project are over (covering 500 post offices) and the third has just begun. The impact should be visible from this year onwards I believe. Lets see...
But completely agree that post offices are ideal hot-spots for accessing all government services. They hold such prime real estate!
I think EoE is extremely important for us to produce any world class projects. But, as far as leadership is concerned, a leader needs to go into the details, the nitty gritty, sometimes, but the potential pitfall there is of micro managing.
A leader doesn't exist in vacuum. There are gonna be people he/she is leading. In the name of nitty-gritty, if one starts overly managing folks, it will repel people away from the leader. What comes across in such cases is a lack of trust in one's people, and that's extremely dangerous for successfully executing a project and achieving the EoE.
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