GE Session On Leadership - Roshan Thiran - EYLN Malaysia

Leadership Session by Roshan Thiran : General Electric Malaysia :

It was definately the best session that you can start a conference on Entrepreneurship with. I mean without the essence of leadership, entrepreneurship of any form, would be without a soul, leadership drives every organisation, small, medium, huge, gigantic, start ups, MNCs, you name it and leadership is to the core of its success story. Roshan Thiran has been working in GE for a long time now, and he remphasised the importance of Expertising in Everything, according to him, a Leader cannot be a specialist, he has to be the guy who drives the marketing, finance, hr , it , etc functions in an organisation, and a good leader can only be made if he expertises in everything that he puts hand into !!.. he gave personal examples of how he turned around the aircraft reparing business of GE Malaysia and was then head of the team to solve the y2K bug ,inspite of having no experience in IT !!!

Leaders do change organisations and people, but the essence according to Roshan was to Change Yourself First... he gave one of the best examples of Jack Welch : How Leaders never stop Learning and Changing themselves....

Jack Welch had almost a year left for retirement, and he was never considered to be IT savvy at all, he hated the internet and computers and thats why at that point of time, GE didnt have any big time investments in IT. One day he saw his wife buying something on the internet, and he was thrilled, as the product arrived a day after to his house, all of a sudden he had the brainwave of learning everything about IT and the internet and wanted to transform GE to be very efficient in IT. Lot of people told him that it was just his last year of retirement and he could have left it to his successor to solve this problem, but Jack Welch put the onus on himself and at that age, learnt everything about IT and internet and now GE has a lot of investments in IT related areas.

This is a testimony of a true leader and how leaders first change themselves, always keep learning and then take active part in transforming others and their own organisations !!..

Roshan also spoke about the importance of thinking and business acumen as a very importance characteristic of a leader, a lea\der should be able to know the market and scan the environment before taking important descisions. Also the thought process and communication pattern is very very important in leadership... a leader should be the one who thinks clearly, who can crystallize his thoughts and dosent COMPLICATE things, lots of leaders use Authority to get their work done, but the real leader is the one who can INFLUENCE his colleagues and subordinates.

All of the above is so true, there were so many young budding entrepreneurs in the plen, and a short and clear lession on leadership would go a long way for them to lead their own organisations!!