What I really liked about the Randy Haykin case study is how Haykin became a leader. He didn’t think he was just out of business school. He followed the advice from trusted individuals and started at the bottom in a sense. He worked at many different jobs and developed many different skills. He valued his personal relationships and what he learned from those, and put them towards becoming a leader. He talks about his relationship with his wife, and how he has learned that some of the best partnerships are developed in which people really don’t have a huge amount professionally in common. By understanding how that relationship worked so well, he was able to discover what the skills were that he needed to complement himself, and knew that he would be most frustrated in running his own business for 2 years. He then looked for a partner who could alleviate those frustrations.
A little later in the article, he reflects on what Leadership means to him. He says, “A leader is someone who sets the creative direction for a concept and can then harness the human resources to turn that concept into a reality, a product, a market, or a company. In essence, a leader is someone who creates something from nothing. First, they focus on a concept, and then they must persuade people to join that concept. I believe leadership evolves as you go through different stages in the life cycle of a company.” (Randy Haykin: The making of an Entrepreneur (A). Harvard Business School 9-498-044)
This really resonated with me because I tend to lead in the same way. I love how he ties being a leader to being creative and then making it a reality. He reminds us that great leaders are just humans like the rest of us. He breaks it down a little more, focusing on phrases and words that you don’t normally think accompany leadership. He says, “I think there is an emotional element to leadership – Charisma. It happens when someone successful in a number of things develops a following; the person has sort of gathered momentum. To a large extent, it is about people just naturally having fun in what they are doing. There are too many people in the business world who are disillusioned because their actions and their day-to-day routines do not match their values.”
~Elisa~
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