MBA 745 Module 6 Reflections

What are the key leadership characteristics needed to sustain a business initiative?
There are various characteristics that are needed to sustain businesses. Based on research and knowledge of a few successful leaders in a mature industry is the financial leadership. Several companies, including one we bought some intellectual property from, went bankrupt due to incompetence in financial leadership. Making all the wrong decisions for the wrong cash reasons and all due to ego and past history destroyed SHV of many refractory companies. To sustain a business, a leader must understand that increasing sales at a losing margin is destructive to the business as a whole.

The other issue is to stop being autocratic in the management style and empowering the employees to become leaders at every level. Top management and management "want to bees" beg and enjoy being coached and mentored to greater and better decision making. This is an industrial wave mentality. As the leader enters the judgement wave, one needs to put ones ego and self interest aside and think about developing employees at the lowest level. Point being, what these "managers" or future leaders of companies need to realize that they need to be servant to the needs of the employees and not the oppressive "boss" of the "taskmaster" of the undereducated, etc employees.

To sustain with ease, the leader must capture the experience of each and every employee, digest this into useful information, and fully exploit all of this into powerful knowledge that aligns to the company's objectives.

How will your focus of study (Assignment 6-1: Capstone Experience Paper) impact your professional development plan (PDP)?

I would say that it would impact my PDP slightly. Leadership is leadership and a strength in finances would help me to develop more in depth company goals and measurements. My goal is to train and empower the current workforce by working back wards within the planer workforce. This workforce is defined as hourly and using my skills to proactively exact and exploit their cumulative experiences into a powerful inter community knowledge base. Granted this will take time but it will work with my energy.

My point being that greater financial insight will allow me to become aligned better to the company's objectives and develop "better" goals for my responsibilities as a manager. These are all goal of my PDP.