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Leadership: The Key to Strong Management Essay

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Leadership: The Key to Strong Management We live in an era of communication challenges. It is an age of increasingly scarce management and education to the markets of tomorrow. To solve this problem, to improve and restore the competitive edge of business, I recommend teaching leadership as well as organization. We need to move beyond the simplistic and boring, everyday organizational skills commonly taught in core courses in business schools. Important as these skills are, we need to redirect our foci towards the essential ingredient required to put these skills to work – leadership. As Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus have expressed it, “The problem with many organizations…is that they tend to be over managed and under led. There is a …show more content…

Businesses fail frequently. For example, a recent study funded by the Small Business Administration indicates that 37.3 percent of businesses survive the first six years after start-up. In this fiercely competitive age, we cannot afford a Thirty-seven percent success rate. We know action is called for, but is leadership education a top priority? Research on reasons for business failure hints at inept leadership, but usually cites poor management as a prime reason for failure. Research on what it takes to be a successful business owner also suffers from a lack a clear distinction between management and leadership. Fortunately, there is one big difference. Everyone seems eager to talk to the successful and try to learn the secrets of their success; similarly, the successful enjoy talking about how they became successful. As a result, the popular press is full of success stories. What do the highly successful stories tell us? Their message is that effective communication is critical to success. Bennis and Naus argue that business schools are focusing on the wrong thing. They feel that, schools and businesses should be teaching the principles of effective leadership rather than simply management skills.

Teachers should be helping their students begin the lifelong process of internalizing these principles. “The major problem is that what management education does do moderately well is to train good journeymen / women managers; that

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