My take from this course is it honestly was not what I really
anticipated it would be when I had signed up for it. This is not
necessarily in a good way. This isn't a critique of Dr. Parikh as he has
been great and responsive but I largely felt the course was just a
bunch of buzzwords which from my own experience in the real world
has been. What I mean by this is this course is all about ideas on how
to be a better leader, lots of focus on including various ideas but I
hold true the belief that leaders are natural not taught. Maybe that is
my own bias, but I look at stories from people such as Bill Gates, Jeff
Bezos, Elon Musk and countless other wildly successful leaders that
founded companies and for lack of a better word everyone who
worked for them said they were hard asses and ruthless leaders. I
almost felt like the things in this course really don't always work in
real life for companies to be super successful. As far as intention on
how to participate in future courses, I guess just keep an open mind.
My biggest challenges were feeling like Toolkits are really worth it, I
got my Bachelors from SNHU but I did feel as this course was not
nearly as organized or clear. Hard to explain but I definitely felt more
lost than other courses. I think acronyms such as VUCA make a lot of
sense as the world is becoming more fast paced and those adjectives
are super necessary skills to adapt in leadership.
Summing up how the Fourth Industrial Revolution will affect
leadership styles could require a whole course. My gut instinct is that
this is going to create a lot of friction between employees and
leadership. Jobs are going to be replaced and people will need to be
trained in a more specialize way. This is going to require leadership to
have skills around training and compassion for other individuals that
may struggle more.
I think what I need to learn the most is having compassion. One of
the things in the news recently is the company Better.com laying off
900 via Zoom meetings. From a optics point of view, it looks really
bad especially before the holidays. I feel bad for everyone that loses
their jobs, I have a couple times in the past. I find myself having lack
of compassion for these workers because its 900 going into a hot job
market while they kept jobs during 2020 when nearly 25 million
were laid off in 8 weeks. My work in the future of this MBA
hopefully allows me to be a little more compassionate towards others
from a leader perspective.
