Developing Leaders in Challenging Times with Dr. Jason Wingard
On December 4th 2018, Dr. Jason Wingard, Professor and Dean of School of Professional Studies – during his Nairobi tour held an event at Columbia Global Centers|Nairobi. The event centered around the topic; Developing Leaders in Changing Times. His focus was to challenge modern day leaders to adapt and embrace change in the market place. His discussion was pegged-on case studies from companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and Kodak. He highlighted on their strengths and weakness like for example how Apple has won over the years due to production of winning product but has been overtaken by Microsoft which has evolved over the years. Companies like Kodak have collapsed because of failure to evolve. Some major highlights during the presentation were;
- Leaders have to ask the “what if” question so as to be better prepared by thinking of what’s coming round the corner.
- Employees also have to be involved in the decision making process
- Leaders should use data to inform their decision making
- Companies have to be responsive to what is happening in the market
An interesting lesson was that job hoppers were not necessarily a poor hire. These are the group of people who change jobs every few months or years. These groups will always bring fresh ideas to the company and contribute the growth of a company even though it may be just for a short while. Dean Wingard’s book “Learning to Succeed – Rethinking corporate Education in a world of Unrelenting Change” was also available for distribution.
