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 is not 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 do not 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 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 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 an optics point of view, it looks 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.
