Leadership with a Twist

Naked Leader Week – 126 (w/c Monday 17th October 2005)

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Leadership from a different perspective – By Dominique Lion

Leadership with a Twist

Dominique is an expert of cultural diversity, taking organisations into new countries and advising leaders on new markets that are sometimes on their own doorsteps or just next door.

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With love and best wishes to you all

David

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Leadership comes in many forms – it relates to individuals, to working groups and to a whole company and its work ethos. Sometimes, it’s about the way you set the agenda for your business. In all its forms, I believe leadership is the defining challenge for a business, and the single most significant differentiator for success, in every sector.  Today modern organisations of all sizes need to cope with the challenges of the wider, wired world.

The global marketplace is now a reality-(two billion new potential customers have joined us on-line, China, India and Eastern Europe, just in the last 18 months alone) – for your products, for your competitors, for your people and your customers, and for the way you run your business.  I believe that opening up an organisation to the reality of its culture – the need to embrace diversity – is one of the key enablers for success in any modern business.

Do we have the courage to ask ourselves:

Are we a magnet for people from different cultures?

Are the right people, in sufficient numbers, constantly knocking on our door?

Are we not only attracting the right people from different cultures, but are we also retaining these people for the right reasons and for the right length of time?

My belief is that by understanding the strength that diversity brings a company you will be able to achieve more and get there first before the competition.

New wealth, and therefore future value, will come from the innovative and creative way of thinking from our people.  We must be free of denial, nostalgia and arrogance to truly understand this.  If we want to be the true leaders of tomorrow, our flexibility and adaptation to our world’s constant changes will only come through our ability to understand and use our cultural diversities.  The challenge for leaders will be to fuse these opposites, not to select one extreme at the expense of the other.

Then, we will open to the opportunities that our amazing world, with all of our wonderful cultural differences, has to offer us.