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Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Perspective # 12 - Unreasonable Leaders matter!

Unreasonable Leaders matter! : In the book 'The Power of Unreasonable People - How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets That Change the World' authors Elkington and Hartigan starts with a quote from George Bernard Shaw: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." History has proved many times that ‘unreasonable leaders’ are ‘unreasonable innovators’.

Being unreasonable is different from mere ‘dreaming’ or ‘demanding’. The latest example is the 1 lakh car project of Ratan Tata the ‘unreasonable leader’.

When Kennedy made his famous 1961 speech "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth”, many called him a lunatic but he persisted and convinced the congress to sink more than $9 billion in 1960s dollars and won. It would also help if the vision is a compelling one like Grameen bank , One Laptop per Child (www.laptop.org/) or a car for one lakh.