Preface

Welcome to 21 Success Sutras for Leaders. You must be wondering at another book on leadership. In my previous books I wrote about the characteristics of leaders, leadership styles for building brands and soft leadership, which is a leadership style on which I have been doing intensive research. However, this leadership book is about learning precious lessons from the experiences of others, thus excelling as great leaders. It unveils 21 essential lessons to excel as great leaders.

Leaders become successful when they learn from their lives, as well as from the lives of others. The main intention behind authoring this book is to share with you the leadership lessons that minimize your leadership mistakes and maximize your leadership effectiveness and success.

This book is the product of lessons that I have observed during my 30 years of experience in various capacities. Its objective is to prevent you from making mistakes, as the intelligent person learns from the experiences of others, whereas the foolish person learns from his own experiences. I want you to be smarter and wiser so that you can grow as a successful leader and leave a legacy behind for others.

Apart from presenting 21 valuable lessons, the book highlights coaching at length, and in both breadth and depth. It outlines coaching types, methods, merits and strategy. It differentiates between coaching and mentoring. It emphasizes that coaching is key to leadership development.

It emphasizes investing in people, who are the real assets for organizations. It stresses the importance of leadership development programmes for grooming the talent in the leadership pipeline. It presents the pros and cons of home-growing the leadership talent within the companies and hiring from outside.

It substantiates the HR slogan, ‘hire for attitude and recruit for skill’. It reveals that you can learn leadership by reading books, through observation, training and grooming, and above all, from experience. It asserts that you cannot become a crack shot unless you lose some ammunition.

The concluding chapter underscores the importance of learning lessons from the experiences of others to excel as smart leaders. It also dwells at length on leadership education for learning the ropes of leadership. It highlights the reinvention of teaching methodologies in tandem with the changing times and technologies in the twenty-first century. In addition, it outlines the role of educators in shaping students as leaders. It compares teaching with cooking, where it is essential to blend all the ingredients effectively and proportionately to ensure meaningful takeaways for students.

It requires a lot of courage to become an educator, as not everybody can be one. If an educator makes a mistake, an entire generation gets ruined. It unfolds several teaching tools and techniques and emphasizes the importance of humour while teaching. It innovatively links Peter Senge’s fifth discipline with teaching. It creates the concept of the situational educator, who can mould teaching styles to suit the profile, moods and learning styles of the students. It makes use of storytelling as an art to impart leadership education.

I am sure the 21 lessons will help you to become a mature, better, smart and successful leader. And I pray that this resource will charge you up, challenge you, and help you to learn the essences of leadership lessons for becoming a successful leader.