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March 2014

“Look For Raw Talent, Not For English Skills” – Management Guru Ram Charan

By Tarunkumar G. Singhal, Raman Jokhakar Chartered Accountants
Reading Time 2 mins
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“One lousy leader can change everything.” Coming from one of the world’s most influential consultants (named by Fortune magazine), this comment summed up the point Ram Charan was trying to make to a hall packed with Indian CEOs.

Speaking on the topic ‘Leadership in turbulent times’ at an event organised by Great Lakes Institute of Management, he said that China would emerge as the place where a lot of different industries would be anchored from. When someone from the audience asked how long he expected the China influence to last, he replied, “You can have a lousy leader (and everything can change). We are having such a situation here in India, aren’t we?”

Charan said putting a leadership pipeline in place was critical and firms should start identifying talent early. Talent must be spotted along two lines – those who are great individual contributors and those who can be future leaders. “Both are completely different skills. Potential leaders naturally link with people to get work done for them, have a nose for making money, are highly tuned to succeed in their next-in-line jobs and can work with highly diverse sets of data. Firms can use these as indicators to identify such talent,” said Charan.

(Source: Times of India, dated 24-01-2014)

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