Tibetan quest for a manager-leader of 21st century

Friday, 16 March 2007, 2:48 p.m.

A group photo of the Tibetan officers, along with the heads of the Himachal Pradesh Institute of Public Administration, Shimla. (Photo: Jigme Tsultrim)

Shimla: Does the 21 st century needs a manager or leader? They say, a manager is copy, a leader is original; a manager administers and plans, a leader innovates and gives direction; a manager asks how and why, a leader asks what and why; a manager does the things right, a leader does the right things. Today, however, is the age of a manager-leader, one who can do the right things right.

Close on the heels of this issue, are some 23 senior Tibetan civil servants here at an intensive two-week management training program, organized by the Public Service Commission (PSC) of the exile Tibetan Administration, at the Government of Himachal Pradesh Institute of Public Administration.

The program that began Monday, 12 March, will expose the Tibetan officers to a whole gamut of concepts, theories and practices of (administrative) management systems across the globe, and down the ages, said Nangsa Choedon, the secretary of the PSC, who is coordinating this training.

From the western tradition of “individualism” to the Japanese “group-ism”; from “theory x” to “theory y” of motivation; from the subtleties of political marketing (through media) to the hard and crude aspects of disaster management–the daily six sessions of an hour each are, for your correspondent, a virtual blitzkrieg of concepts and theories. The feisty interactive sessions at times rambles on nonstop for a mind-benumbing hours an end. The solace comes when any given theory is reinforced with the citations from the teachings of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, like those in the Paradox of Our Times.

So much so that one is often at a loss to see how the eastern religious mantras–like the world is inter-dependent, everything is subject to change; the only thing that is constant is change, etc.–today constitute the “pith instructions” of many of the world best-selling management theories. In fact, as one lecturer pointed out, the western remixes of eastern values are being marketed right back in their original source, with great success.