Monday, May 13, 2013

Great Leaders ... Don't Need Experience !

Gautam Mukunda studied political, business, and military leaders, categorizing them into two groups: “filtered leaders,” insiders whose careers followed a normal progression; and “unfiltered leaders,” who either were outsiders with little experience or got their jobs through fluke circumstances. He then compared the groups’ effectiveness; for instance, with U.S. presidents, he looked at historians’ rankings from the past 60 years. He discovered that the unfiltered leaders were the most effective—and also the least effective—while highly filtered leaders landed in the middle of the pack.

Check out the video about this research and understand how how the best leaders tend to be outsiders who don’t have a great deal of experience:

http://hbr.org/2012/10/great-leaders-dont-need-experience/ar/1