Leadership is About a New Perspective. The human sciences as a source of innovation in business and management 
Autor: Valéria Brandini | Publicado: 2013-01-04T09:02:00-08:00


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Dorie Clark
said in her article on Forbes yesterday&nbsp;that the usual characteristics
needed for a leader, such as integrity, leadership, vision (according to her
reading about Annmarie Neal’s
released book, ‘The Forthcoming&nbsp;Leading from the&nbsp;Edge’ -&nbsp;ASTD
Press, 2013), are not enough to face the challenging environment of corporate
world, so the new leaders need two essential qualities – one is ‘a record of
failure’, so they will have the experience of hit rock bottom and get up on
their feet when facing big challenges, what we can assume, constitutes the
resilience as the power to absorb emotionally and intellectually the
frustration of mistake and lost, and start again (specially learning from their
mistakes.&nbsp;http://www.forbes.com/sites/dorieclark/2013/01/03/why-failure-is-good-for-leaders/




The other
quality is ‘a liberal arts perspective’, an interdisciplinary point of view
(beyond the STEM&nbsp;skills – i.e.,
science, technology, engineering, and math, valorized as ‘the essential skills’
by business world), the perspective derived from humanistic disciplines,
usually seemed as “vague” or “ethereal” to build a solid leadership which needs
to the centered to make difficult decisions everyday, is now being discovered
and valorized in business world, specially by innovation markets. According to
Clark:&nbsp; “Leadership today is not about industry depth only,” she says.
“It’s about making connections across disciplines.” The ability to innovate –
like Steve Jobs, who famously toured India and studied calligraphy – “requires
the ability to see the world. You need to be a sociologist, a cultural
anthropologist, a political scientist, an economist. It’s back to the liberal
arts.”

As an
anthropologist and working with innovation for many kinds of business, I’ve
been noticing that what makes a difference that can enhance the market share
for my clients, is ‘to see what others cannot see’, I mean, the leaders, CEO’s,
and professionals that among these clients have delivered best results for
their companies, are the ones who can have a broader view of their market,
beyond the ‘market vision itself’ of their company situation, and of their own
area, or field of work, and looked deep down the surface everyone else (and
specially the concurrence) are looking at. And what makes this possible are the
skills they have (or hire from suppliers, as they hire my company) to see what
we call ‘reality’ as a different scenario where shadow zones are enlightened,
opportunities are discovered and solutions arise as hidden possibilities not
seeing before.

Disciplines
as anthropology, ‘deconstruct’ myths, patterns and common sense vision of what
we call reality in order to understand what lies deep down the surface and
expose the real reasons, values, and cultural drivers that creates this
‘reality’ (the consumer behavior, the criteria of choice, the use of products,
the relationship with the brand), so deep answers and reasons are bring to
surface, reasons not perceived before which leads to a plethora of new
possibilities and orientations for business decisions and strategies
development – that, the real path of innovation. Recognizing the drivers that
generates emotional influence and determine actions and reactions, these leaders
are more able, also, to inspire, motivate and solve conflicts among their work
teams.

These
leaders develop, in appropriation of the mentioned disciplines and their use on
business and industries, the real skills to develop what is expected of a
successful leader – the possibility of create real differentiation as the
essence of strategy – and they have been well succeed with that.




Valeria
Brandini, PhD.

Business
Anthropologist , Writer, Lecturer and Co-founder of

Nucleo
Xamã (Consumer Science Applied to Business)

http://www.nucleoxama.com.br/en/ciencia-do-consumo/
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