World Class Leaders, World Class Teams

This was a special session conducted by Prof Andrew Kakabadse in which he shared his critical findings from the research work on leadership covering transformational, transactional and visionary leadership. Interestingly, this session was outside the scope of any core or elective course and was organised by three MBA students.
The session revolved around a case study written by Prof Kakabadse for a workshop that he conducted with a top tier financial services organisation. It was a true case study about a manufacturing company and the concoction of issues that it faced - ranging from internal politics to lobbying of factions, organizational structure and lexicon, what a consultant faces which can easily be termed as hostility, the paradoxes that exist in corporate and so on.
This was only the second time that our batch was experiencing the class of Prof Kakabadse, but like the first time, he overawed us all. With his suave class of teaching, he led us through the understanding of the case. The first half involved us breaking into groups to propose our thoughts on what the new organisation structure could be. After the few voluntary presentations of some groups, Prof Kakabadse then shared what happened in reality, who the real client was, what developments took place and where it stands today. The objective was not whether any group got it right; the idea was to explain to us what all dynamic are at play typically for an organisation and specially for the consultant.
Every time Prof Kakabadse comes to lecture us on a case, I have always had this uncanny feeling that the consultant in the case study was him. It is astonishing to note that his explanations come across as so powerful that it seems he knew every heartbeat of the consultant.
While we strive to become world class leaders and world class teams, it is sure that faculty such as Prof Kakabadse is definitely World Class.