Leaders and Managers

Leadership theories that are used in profit versus non-profit organizations are usually loosely structured compared to a corporate organization. There is more leadership emphasis within the organization of departments solely designated to raising funds for the group. The United Way, UNICEF and similar companies have a lot of their resources in the company directed solely to “spread the word” to get donations in. There are various charismatic theories of influences, processes fringing form personal identification, value internalization; social identification, social contagion, and enhanced self-efficacy have to be carefully used in a charity/non-profit corporate structure. The leader behaviors in such an environment may utilize one or more of the following involving; innovative visioning, unconventional behavior, impression management, enhancing team identity, analyzing the environment, and dealing with crisis or disenchantment when a non-profit company does not meet its quarterly goals. When you hear the difference between commercial free radio and commercial laden radio, you hear the immediate difference in quality. With public radio, they have to have pledge drives every quarter to bring money in, since they don’t receive funds from sponsors. The companies that are non-profit have to watch their budgets a lot closer than companies that have a product to produce or a source of consistent income.
In a leadership setting, there are a wide variety of leadership methodologies ranging from the charismatic leadership where personalities influence the people in the organizations with positive and negative results such as with Hitler utilizing paranoid aggression, and destruction. These various forms of leadership mold and shape the structure and functionality of the all the divisions and personal within those organizations. Good leadership yields a productive and successful company, whereby bad leadership can drive any corporation to bankruptcy.
Participative leadership can be utilized to invoke participation between all the groups and individuals in an organizational structure. There are situational variables, decision acceptance, and decision quality to consider when managing a group. The method of management by leadership can encompass an autocratic decision: whereby. the manager alone decides a particular situation, or consultation with others in a group, joint decision where a group decision is reached and a delegation of authority for decisions. These are different sub-sets of qualities of type of leadership models with its strengths and weaknesses. (Yuki, 2009, pg. 258)
Contemporary leadership models have different affects from the influence process, leader behaviors which facilitate conditions of change to the work environment. These are psychodynamic processes that involved the emotional state of the leader and how he projects these various attributes to his peers.
Transformational versus Charismatic leadership can have a significant change within organizations. I have seen new managers utilize a strong model of transformational leadership by restructuring entire organizations to let their presence be known. They apply their charismatic personality to sell these dramatic changes to the corporate levels and to those that this will affect. The manager or vice-president making these changes wants his division or department to reflect his methodology of how things should run and be structured. There negative impact to this approach to the fact that all change is not good. If the department ran well before his changes, it shall take time for the group to get used to the new structure of the organization.
When a company is sold to another company and the various divisions are merged there can be an impact on the corporate cultures, personal values, and globalization and performance changes to the two companies that are now one. The negative results: It shall take some time for the new groups that are from different philosophies to work well together and to adopt the new method of doing business. The transformational approach may help the new organization given time and communications between all those involved in mandating the changes. (Yuki, 2008, pg 271) The changes will involve the evaluation of how ethical the companies behaved before the merger.
Organizations at companies such as the United States government have a structure and hierarchy. They direct work but are not always leaders. Bush was considered a leader as president but was ruthless in his autocratic authority. He fired anyone that disagreed with him including Colin Powell. He violated over 35 areas of the constitution for illegal wiretapping. His inability to listen to his expert advisors and upper level managerial staff in the Whitehouse made him a liability. His actions and those of Cheney let this country to its current crisis.
Heads of national and international corporations followed the examples of leadership and ethics that the Whitehouse portrayed. Companies ranging from Enron, Ford, Chrysler, AIG, various banks, all had corrupt leaders, who only thought about short-term profit and outsourcing to increase the profits with no regard to the employees within the organizations. The power that these leaders and top level presidents of corporations had within their corporations corrupted them and effected their decision making process to benefit their constituents. They lived the “high life” with no regard to the long term future of their companies. The average salary of CEO’s has increased over the last decade from forty to one to three-hundred to one above that of most workers, with incredible bonuses each quarter; there response was to keep these employees with the company. (Mackey, HBR, 6/14/2009) Power at such levels led to corruption and scandal with the lack of trust by the corporations to their stockholders and employees when performance fell.
They gave themselves and executive outrageous bonuses and raises even though their profits were decreasing and they were forced by stockholders to cut staff. This intensified their poor leadership and managerial skills with their corporation staff. They tried to rationalize by persuasion to their stockholders and employees that outsourcing would help the companies on the whole in manufacturing cost reduction. Over the last two decades, as manufacturing has been outsourced to China, many managers helped direct the overseas operations. They were good at managing the operations but did not have the persuasiveness to be the corporate leader. The followers of a corporation took direction from the CEO and upper management. Today is the best time in history for students to analyze the failures of many of yesterday’s stable corporations. Many CEO’s or leaders of these corporations failed to listen to the sub-ordinate managers that the companies were in trouble. Commercial corporations in the effort to reduce manufacturing costs outsourced to China without realizing the impact on the American economy. Managers of many corporations that outsourced to China to had products made at a lower cost often found their products stolen by China when the companies that supposedly had their goods made in China closed. Then a few weeks later a new Chinese company opened manufacturing exactly the same items the closed United States Company made. Corporations in their greed have lost billions of dollars in manufacturing potentials by outsourcing to China, to India, to Pakistan to Lebanon and to other lower cost countries, where people are treated like slave labor compared to the United States and where sex-based discrimination is prevalent. In Saudi Arabia and many middle-east countries, women have little or no rights at all; no right to vote, no education, can wear any clothing of choice; many of these countries are still treating women like the United States did in the 1700’s.
Today in The United State woman’s rights have made great strides over the last hundred years. Sex-based discrimination is making its way to court more now than ten years ago. Today, women are still paid less than men for the equivalent jobs. There is an increase of women in corporate positions and in the Supreme Court. This should help facilitate the removal of gender stereotypes and assumptions about appropriate behavior for men and women (Yuki, 2008 pg 427).
We have allowed the Gross National Product (GNP) of this country to shift to billions to China and India with the cutting or elimination of employee training further eroding the competitive edge. We have given away a great deal of our technology and business methodology away to foreign competition. It has had a long term negative effect on our ability to compete globally. Conformity with upper management has led us down that road along with greed for more short term profit.
Many of the upper managers in these companies and boards preferred to go along with whatever the CEO says and are afraid to speak in fear of job loss. They are afraid to tell the CEOs that many of the outsourcing decisions would have backlash effects. Rarely, do you have leaders that are good managers. I perceive good leaders are those that have visions of how things should be done. They have a flare for inspiration and innovation. Steve Jobs at Apple is an example of an exceptional leader. He has a brilliant insight for ideas to develop new products for Apple. Without Steve Jobs, Apple would not have been as profitable as it is today. We have many managers today who cannot “think outside the box”. They think very conservatively from Six Sigma training which I didn’t think was very inspirational. Excellent leaders are those that are risk takers and willing to try something new as an approach for a corporation.
The best company today that is incredibly innovated and treats its employees like people with ideas is Google. They have a unique work environment, where ideas and innovation are nurtured and allowed to blossom. Ideas for new products and ways of doing things are embraced and not condemned for being unique. Leaders and managers at defense contractors think the opposite.
Defense contractors, such as General Dynamics, Lockheed, and BAE do not want ideas outside of their design methodology to solve an engineering problem. Their managers minimize the lower engineers involved in any major decision making process unlike a commercial company. The management structure is ten tiers deep and decisions on such things as buying new software or hardware takes months or years based upon approval from corporate. They don’t produce a commercial product with their own money. They get government handouts from contracts and often have to ask for more money when they go over budget. I have found that the worst managers and CEO’s work at defense companies. The upper management gets very large salaries and bonuses. They often do not listen to their engineering managers when it comes to how long it will take for a project. They underbid how much and how long it will take, because they know they can ask for more money later; they are disorganized and provide poor communications to those along the corporate ladder.
Most managers and corporate CEO’s would not survive working in the commercial sector due to the different work environment. Companies, such as Lockheed, tried to change their corporate structure to adapt to commercial products in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s and almost went bankrupt. They were too top heavy and had managers that were followers and couldn’t think inspirationally like their commercial sector counterparts.
For the managers and leaders of tomorrow to be more effective, they have to listen to the needs of the consumers. Change and adaptation is essential for the survival of any corporation. We need effective leaders, such as those at Google and Apple, to draw upon the creativity of their people to develop more collaboration amongst all the employees to compete with the global market of tomorrow. CEOs and the board of companies need technology experts to guide their decisions today.
Corporations today don’t listen to their scientific advisors. I have spent forty years studying all areas of Astro-Physics, Chemistry, and Engineering to Zoology. Scientific American magazine and Nature magazine has most of the world’s problems with solutions in these magazines the book “Leadership in Organization” is flawed in its narrow minded vision of how to run corporations. It overwhelms the student with too many methods of management style and theorems. It is like a book on quantum mechanics for management. There is a shocking lack of integration of scientific process and application to the management style. All corporate CEO’s should have a blend of management and scientific background such as Benjamin Franklin. He, along with others, put together a constitution with the future of technology in mind.
Ethics in society should have been expanded to include the writing of the great philosophers of the world and why ethics are important. Without ethics, corruption will destroy a company from within and affect all of the stockholders and personnel in the company. This is the greatest time in history where more corporations have had financial greed and corruption; companies ranging from Enron, AIG, and all the motor companies have sold out America to China and India. Outsourcing has almost destroyed our competitive edge. Over forty million jobs have been outsourced to other countries over the last twenty years which should have been illustrated in the book. The book is politically correct, when it should have condemned the greed and avarice of the endless list of large corporations that spend the 401K plans of their employees. AIG was bailed out first by the Bush Administration because the “pink slips” for most of their investments is by foreign interests like China, who demanded they be bailed out so their investments would go “belly up.” India, Germany and Switzerland had a great deal of influence in demanding what corporations would receive bailout money. This money is essentially transferred to those countries as a good faith gesture. By outsourcing so much to China, they have assets of over $1.2 trillion dollars. They are now currently buying all the foreclosed real estate in the United States, such as million dollar condos in New York, as I watched on MSN Video last night. My house loan along with millions of others was sold to foreign governments last year before the collapse of the market. My home, I found out after extensive research, is owned by a finance company in Switzerland. The lack of proper leadership has affected the corporate culture, personal values and globalization by these results. We have sold America to foreign interests without understanding the implications of doing so. China is having an increasing say as to how we conduct business because of the vested ownership in so many corporation and properties around the world.
Corporations wanted to demonstrate effective personal leadership perspective by Nixon opening the door to China and corporate CEOs telling the people that they wanted to give the poor Chinese jobs to help their economy and lowering the cost of goods to Americans. Over the course of the last few decades most manufacturing jobs have moved to China and Far East countries. The world economy expands along with its power and world influences.
Power and influence of leadership around the world has created a world economy where certain goods are made in specific countries and slavery is a hundred times worse than two thousand years ago when Egyptians paid the Jews a very low wage to exist while building the pyramids. Today clothes for Wal-Mart are made in Lebanon by workers making twenty cents an hour, due to the trade difference as shown at www.xe.com, the Indian rupee. As of today one U.S. dollar is worth over forty-eight Rupees. It is almost impossible for a design engineer to compete with engineers in India for wages. My job has been outsourced more than once so a company could save a few dollars in wages. But, by doing so, it alienated and violated the trust of the employees and corporate culture. When have made such strides in gender issues, but women still do not get the same pay as their male counterparts. There has been a lot of legislature regarding sexual harassment, but not enough enforcement of equal pay for equal job in the United States. Women in the United States have the right to vote and are in areas of government more than ever. Women in other countries, that we outsource to have not been addressed by the United Nations are treated poorly, Sanitation and manufacturing waste deposal at these outsourced companies has not been addressed and resolved. The management of toxic wastes from the four thousand manufacturing plants in China is horrible, employees exposed to toxic levels of carcinogenic compounds and high air pollution levels. They shall eventually have to have a super fund cleanup sometime in the future once democracy takes hold in China; it is just a matter of time. In our country after twenty plus years our own super fund clean-up projects in the United States Military bases is horribly behind schedule. The leadership in the Pentagon is a one way scenario with the Generals telling everyone below them what to do and with no feedback from the troops or military organizations. We have gone into wars like a new business venture, milking the conflict for as long as possible. After seeing the movie “The Hurt Locker” last weekend I was reminded of how our troops are psychologically affected by long tours of duty over there. Many of the troops were poisoned by drinking water that wasn’t chlorinated by outsourcing food and water to such companies as Halliburton. Former Vice-President Cheney as advisor and ex-CEO was more interested in securing all the government contracts for the war than the well being of the troops. There has not been enough accountability of the actions of all the corporations that have defrauded the employee 401K plans. People have to speak up to demand change.
There is an incredible weakness in contemporary leadership models by CEOs not listening to the experts in various fields that were hired. There is too much autocratic leadership in America with many of those on the board of directors not willing to change their management approach or spending enough money on research and development. Japan has beaten us in the areas of electronics and cars production. We take too long to make decisions on new products and corporations are reluctant to take risks for greater potential gains. The example is the hundred year old management philosophy of the “Big Three” automakers who thought people would always want big gas guzzlers and cars that did not run on alternative fuels. A fundamental reason they haven’t adopted these alternatives is due to their lack of scientific knowledge on such fuels.
We have to have a third branch of Congress attached to the U.S. Constitution that will govern all scientific, medical and technology bills for the nation. This branch should be comprised of exclusively experts in various scientific disciplines to create and pass bills for the welfare of the country. The flaw in our current government is that most congressmen and senators do not have the scientific background to fully understand the complexity and scientific backgrounds of global climate change, energy creation and conservation, food production and entropy of the thousands of building and bridges in the United States. Scientists and engineers have been telling Congress to pay attention to the deteriorating bridges and building in this country, it is due to entropy, everything eventually turns to dust with time. When the scientists have power as a branch of Congress, that have the engineering and scientific training and background to deal with today’s technology issues; our reactionary Congress will have bridges replaced after enough of them collapse, and the people complain loud enough to mandate action. Congress doesn’t plan for disasters, but reacts to them after they occur due to partisan, party politics and special interest groups.
A prime example of the failure of the leadership of government is due to the lack of speedy action after Hurricane Katrina. Even after four plus years, there are thousands of 900 square foot trailers that never got to people who lost their homes. There were high levels of formaldehyde in all the trailers that were dangerous to people. Even today, hundreds of homes in New Orleans have not been torn down and rebuild. There was not a comprehensive organizational plan of action implemented. There should be severe punitive measures taken against the Insurance companies for not resolving the claims of the thousands who lost their homes. There are thousands still in other states that never returned to New Orleans due to unethical government. Large corporations want to go in and build large resorts and hotels in the areas of devastation, buying the land at a fraction of the cost. When people tried to cross the bridge from New Orleans to an adjoining town they were barred from entering by the sheriffs and police of that town. Ethics in corporations extend into legal and political circles. Functional and cross-functional teams should have to be set in place to deal with such disasters. The failure of FEMA to act quickly shows the lack of decisive leadership at the highest level. Self-managed teams would have been effective in taking decisive action to minimize the damage. The Army Corp of Engineers should have stayed on schedule in reinforcing the levees to prevent this disaster from happening. Freedom to automatically act in a disaster was not given to these organizations due to the tight reign of control at the executive levels of government. Plans of disaster relief should have already been in place. There are a lot of good ideas in “Leadership in Organizations; but unless some of them are adopted, nothing will change. We need to implement change in society to create leadership and vision. Have everyone who gets an MBA take have one year of science fiction literature, basic science and technology classes to expose them to various stories of how technologies can have possible impacts on the future.
Communications and planning for the future are the most important aspects to any successful business or government entity. The application of science and technology to the world’s problems can today solve world hunger, pollution, energy problems, etc.
As long as corporate and international greed by governments and corporation exist in countries where dictatorships and theocracies exist, change will take great deal longer. We are in such an interconnected world today that what effects one country has a ripple effect to all of the other countries. Power and influence is a constant struggle on the Earth. Many feel that today there are not countries but corporations that rule the populace. Eventually when capitalism fails, we can then direct all our energies into solving the world’s problems.
For the future, we need visionary leaders that has an extensive background on science, technology, and with the understanding of management leadership in corporate America. In time, corporations will learn the value of blending science and technology into their managerial decisions at the supervisory, executive and worker levels. An international United Nations for scientists and technology experts are better equipped to manage the worlds problems. But, there has to be a blend of the current government check and balances in such a system to reduce corruption and power struggles even in the scientific sectors. Compliance to international guidelines by corporations is necessary, since we are now in a global community.
Power in the form of reward, coercive, legitimate, expert and refernet power have to be carefully balanced in governments and corporations to balance the needs of various aspects of the world governments and corporations. Ecological power is one of the most important powers for the 21st century. Situtional engineering and ecological control. (Yuki, 2008, pg 156) are of paramount importance to the planets survival. Politics, management are all irrelevant if we live on a dead planet. The members of Congress and many corporation managers and CEOs do not understand the complexity and intricacies of the complex interactions of water, earth, and air pollution and how it affects the delicate balances on this planet, due to their lack of scientific background and learning. They can’t agree with these experts on the Earth because they never took classes on meteorology and other earth science related classes.
I believe that a primary flaw is the overspecialization in today’s society by the academic community. This has given many CEOs and managers insufficient tools to properly manage the complex interactions in our world today. Every graduate of high school should graduate with an Associate’s Degree. We should have bailed out our schools by changing their primary source of funding which were property taxes. That formula has failed. Universities have to develop better curriculums with a wider range of subjects for all students including; finance management and planning, medicine, and in science and technology in core classes for all majors to provide a broader base of learned understanding in the world today. Tomorrow’s generation of leaders and managers are faced with global problems that I believe it is now the time to permanently solve. Only the collective effort of every world business pooling their resources in global cooperation can we hope to solve these international issues. Harvard’s and John Hopkins executive MBA program is the start in parallel of my changes to create a better leadership and managerial environment for the 21st Century. (See 7 & 8.)
References
1.Yukl, G. (2006). Leadership in Organizations Pearson Education LTD.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Powell
2. Mackey, J Why Sky-High CEO Pay Is Bad Business, Harvard Business Review, June 17, 2009
http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/hbr/how-to-fix-executive-pay/2009/06/why-high-ceo-pay-is-bad-business.html
3. Anonymous. Telegram & Gazette. Worcester, Mass.:Apr 27, 2009. pg. A.5
4. Glaser, J. E., & Jones, C. (2008, March). Meeting People's needs. Leadership Excellence , 25 (3), pp. 13-14.
5. Jones, G. R., & George, J. M. (2007). Essentials of Contemporary Management (2nd ed.). Boston: McGraw-Hill Learning Solutions.
6. Rosen, K. (2008, June 12). The seven types of managers-where do you stand? Retrieved March 1, 2009, from All Business: www.allbusiness.com/company-activities-management/sales-selling-sales/10207093.html
7. Harvard, Executive MBA Programs: http://www.exed.hbs.edu/programs/mbse/
8. John Hopkins University, Biotechnology: Science for Managers http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/academic/biotech/execed/managers.htm