Fans of Ram Charan will like his newly published “Leadership in the era of Economic Uncertainty.” It’s a short synopsis of what he thinks each level of worker in a company needs to do in these times.
I was impressed that it went from him to bookstands in about a month. Perhaps that’s why it felt like a collection of obvious statements. Maybe the chief information officer doesn’t actually know that “you should assume the IT budget will be cut.” Perhaps management generally needs to hear that “as challenging as a downturn can be for a company, it also is a great opportunity to make sure the right people are in the right jobs.”
Charan says he wrote it because most of the business leaders he’d been talking with at the end of last year were either “deeply worried or frankly scared.” In other words, they were frozen and needed to be thawed out by Charan’s Six Essential Leadership Traits for Hard Times:
- Honesty and credibility
- The ability to inspire
- Real-time connection with reality
- Realism tempered with optimism
- Managing with intensity
- Boldness in building for the future
There you go. Now go the bookstore, spend 5 minutes flipping through the section that pertains to your job function (CEO is the longest of these, at 20 skimmable pages) and then find some other book to help you learn how to apply his advice.
Salespeople can get a head start thanks to this interview with Charan on BNET’s Sterling Performance.
