#Management#Leadership

With human mind tendency to seek conformity, we live in an increasingly converging world of platforms, problems and management schools being alike. We all are trained to think and decide alike.

Best practices, playbooks, culture fit etc are suggestive of treating success as a return on doing standard things well. In certain areas it may hold true but not in all. For eg Baking chocolate chip cookie VS winning a war.

Managers are hired with an aspiration to carve out distinctive approaches at the risk of being wrong by taking a chance to experiment and outperform. But in reality, it pays for managers to be risk averse which leads many companies to being mediocre.

Compared to shareholders, managers have much more stake in the success of firm that employs them. If things go wrong by taking risk of being entrepreneurial, they stand to loose credibility / job and part of financial security. Whereas Shareholders may loose some value in equities. This leads to significant mis alignment in management and most managers stick to playing it safe.

In my experience success lies in resisting the obvious, popular fads and steering ones own course by taking calculated risks of being wrong. Strategy is a matter of being different, managers need to be intrepid explorers and organizations hopefully will spur more explorations. In my VUCA world increasingly management is becoming one of the most demanding jobs around.