I am a huge fan of the gandhi institute of technology and management. They are amazing. A lot of the work they do, like their focus on self-awareness, are the kind of things I would aspire to be in my life. I have also worked with many people in the financial industry, and I have learned a lot from them.
I would definitely not hesitate to recommend their work, because it is way, way better and way, way more fun than any other job I’ve been in, and I am not sure there is any company in the world that would. It’s also not a corporate bureaucracy, and there are some perks I wouldn’t be able to live without. Like getting a full year’s paid vacation to work at a company that offers it.
I can’t overstate how much I have learned from the gandhi institute. I do want to make clear that I am not suggesting that they are “in your face” managers. Their focus on business ethics and ethics in general is very different from what I would call “management” in the typical business sense. They are simply a resourceful and highly motivated group of people who have always had a sense of mission and a passion for making a difference.
I think that the gandhi institute offers something that is lacking in most companies: a clear focus on the goals of the organization and on the mission of the organization. It is all too common to see a corporate culture that encourages managers to be overly concerned with their individual goals and to become overly focused on the bottom line. The gandhi institute’s focus is entirely different from that.
I was talking with some people today and it just dawned on me how many people at the gandhi institute are actually doing something that they think is actually good for the organization, despite the fact that they feel they aren’t being good leaders. One of the people I was sharing the news with is the director of the institute, a very nice man named Dr. Viveka Gupta.
“I feel like I’m working for the company I’m at, but I’m not,” she said. She said she’s not only working for the institute, she’s also working for the company that she works for.
She is a leader and she believes in what she is doing. She believes in the institute, the way things are, the way people should be doing things. She is also, I would assume, a good leader. I just think there is a lot of potential in leaders that don’t have vision or leadership skills.
I think she is probably a good leader. But I think she’s also a leader that doesn’t have vision. She’s a leader who has a vision of what she wants the organization to look like. But the way the organization works, the way the people work and the way she wants the organization to function, its very hard for a leader to have vision or leadership skills.
I’m certainly not implying that Gandhi was a bad leader or leader in the abstract. She was, after all, a leader of a very successful movement. But she was also a woman, she was from India, and she was a leader who had a vision. So I don’t think there is a lot of room for ambiguity in her leadership skills. The fact that she felt the need to speak out about caste and patriarchy in India is telling.
What I see happening is a lot of people in leadership positions are very clear about what they want to do and why, and they just have a lot of self-awareness and an open mind, but their leadership skills are not at the same level that Gandhi’s were. And because they aren’t, they are often a lot less effective than she was.