Whether you say you can...

Was writing on David Maister's blog about whether 'being interested in people' is a necessary managerial trait and can it be acquired. The dominant opinion seems to be that either you have the attitude or don't, and acquiring it is nearly impossible.

i had an opinion to the contrary and wrote an elaborate one on that but while writing it opened up to me that Ratan Tata is probably the best example we have of a manager/leader who is a recluse and yet extremely effective.

My mind boggles at what he has achieved in terms of turning around a group whose complexity and diversity is unimaginable and he has done it by adhereing to a rigidly ethical value system in an environment in which everything is up for grabs and norms are anything that can be bent. And he has done all that after the age of 55, till which time he was more or less written off as a leader within and outside the group. Can there be a more vivid example of someone learning the skills, developing the attitudes when the situation mattered. Won't we do the same when a situation leaves us with no escape route.

Which brings you to another basic inquiry - are we born with certain fixed wiring or do we develop attitudes and preferences as life goes along which are capable of being challenged if the context changes. Also, if we are born with them, how do we discover them. IS it just a function of being good at those things or of enjoying doing certain things?

HAven't we seen that we can be good at a lot of things that we do not particularly enjoy doing and similarly there are things which become boring the moment certain accountability is introduced into it. If you enjoy movies does that necessarily make you a good critic or a movie maker?

So what does that mean for corporations and the conversations they have about themselves- we cannot beat the multinationals? We cannot do top end stuff? Our competence is only in commodities? By saying this they have started blieving it, and behaving in line with it, and obviously the results are reinforcing it.

I am reminded of a beautiful Zen conversation- when a Zen master was asked whether he knew how to play a violin, he replied- I don't know. I have never tried.