siliconindia | | July 20137have someone in the team who understands technology and the direction that the world is moving in. The next thing you need is the ability to harness where technology is going; you need product sensibility. When groups of people come together business acumen and thought sensibility are the absolute tools necessary to get things done to take that technology and actually motivate and inspire teams of people. The next quality of leadership is to inspire people, but resourcefulness is the most important of them all which is needed to get things done. You are going to run into walls where you will need people in your team who can go over those walls, go around those walls or just knock them down and go straight through. This is resourcefulness. It is very rare to find such people. If you find people with multiple skills, then those are even better. However, if you find people with all five; those are the people that make the pantheon of business - the `Steve Jobs', the `Bill Gates', the `Jeff Bezos' and others. Are Leaders Born?We are all born with the resources - words, deeds and ideals that can inspire people. Words are powerful, but there is nothing like talking the talk and walking the talk. There are some born with the ability to communicate more effectively to channel things that they are passionate about, and there are others who just know how to get things done as opposed to other people who lead by example. We all watch and get inspired by looking at the way in which they do the things. The later can be coached to cultivate that skill set, even if it is not instinctive or something that was inherent. To begin with, they can practice it and improve it over time. The same stand for leading by your actions in terms of getting things done, understanding the culture of the organization and living up to that culture, and aspiring to excel to do better. Organizational CultureImagine you are in a rocket and going to launch it. If you are off by inches at the launch, then you can be out by miles; when you are out there because of the sheer speed at which you are moving at. It is very important to go from situations to build from foundation. What will ultimately trigger growth are innovations and breakthroughs along with the workforce flowing into the company. One can easily predict the success or failure of the company looking at its team, process, and physical infrastructure. Without these elements, it is quite challenging to be a scalable and sustainable one within the industry. According to me, culture is collective personality in the conversation, and not just who you are but who you inspire to be. What is critical for us in LinkedIn are the operating principals we use to make decisions and as sub-set of our cultures. I would say LinkedIn culture has four dimensions ­ transformation, collaboration, team work and results, and the most important for us is transformation of individual employees of LinkedIn to renovate the trajectory of their career. Passion, Skill and MarketFew questions that I ask while recruiting students, interns, folks looking for career advice are what should I be thinking about, what is the most important dimension that I should be contemplating on a career path and what I am passionate about? It is quite amazing to see how in-frequently people ask these questions to themselves. It is understood that students who are just out of school and have not experienced much do not know what they want to do. But for people who have been in the industry for a long time, they fall prey to a whole stream of opportunities and when they wake up after 5-10 years, they do not find the same passion igniting within themselves. I would advise the truly passionate entrepreneurs to not just optimize for passion, but to optimize both passion and skill along with market. If you find the convergence and nexus of these three elements, you have got the right timing and can make anything possible. (The article is based on the keynote speech delivered at TiEcon, 2013 hosted at Santa Clara)
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