Chapter 8
Mash-up: Borrow Brilliance
If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
—Isaac Newton
In conversations in 2011 and early 2013, Venkatesh Valluri, president of Ingersoll-Rand India, talked to me about successful emerging leaders as possessing three distinct qualities:1
- the ability to scan a constantly moving stream of technologies and information and pick out the meaningful trends in their businesses to create new markets
- the ability to conceptualize and converge these identified new technologies and capabilities into innovations and solutions that are right for your market
- the strength and capability to lead a team to execution
As he described it:
Today if you asked me, “What would be an appropriate leadership development model at Ingersoll-Rand in India?” it would be a unique model which must address the needs of an emerging economy. My first question would be if the potential leader has a mindset that demonstrates conceptual flexibility and the strength to scan the environment in a manner that seeks out the problem which the customer has not been able to articulate, and build a solution through multiple interventions and convergence approaches of technologies, innovations, and processes.
Now once having defined that, then I guess the next piece which really comes is, would he be able to execute on that? And once you talk about execution, then, at the same time, is he able to rally the entire team behind that concept by suggesting, “This is ...
