Music & Leadership

Part One:

The Music industry baffles me. Record labels bemoan the fact that CD sales are suffering because of pirated internet downloads. The proliferation of CD writers and the MP3 format (/players) has made it too easy for the consumer to get their hands on the music they want, when they want for little effort and minimal cost.

It seems obvious to me that the reason why people don't buy CD's any more is because it is easier to copy music. I believe people justify this by the low value they place on mainstream music. From memory, there are about 100 new singles a week, most are will be average and forgettable. The reality is that as long as record labels churn out mediocre music to make a quick buck, consumers will circumvent the old process of having to buy the music they want in favour of getting this disposable music for free.

Now what does this have to do with leadership? Well a couple of things. One of which I will touch on now. I had a conversation yesterday about developing the leadership skill sets and capacity of a company's senior leadership team. Sadly, there is no plan on the horizon to begin the search, investment and development in the people who could be the future leaders of the company.

I think that people are instinctively cynical about programmes design to boost leadership ability. And like the music industry, employees learn and adopt the ways which circumvent anything that seems to be of superficial value. The question I proposed to the people planning to implement this leadership programme is what gains do they expected from these people who are, in all probably, not placed in their current position because of their leadership prowess but because of their ability to manage people and teams to impact bottom-line results.

Now managing for bottom-line results in necessarily bad, but it isn’t leadership. Corporate leadership - in fact leadership full stop - in New Zealand is suffering because organisations don't make it a priority to focus on the people who have the greatest potential, the great greatest capacity, and the natural gifting and strengths to be level 4 and 5 leaders…