Leadership development has been an area of focus for countries and for corporates around the world and will continue to do so for years to come. The lack of quality leadership has been felt by most organisations. Aristotle, one of the first thinkers who articulated the virtues of leaders, talked about the qualities required in a True Leader, namely courage, temperance, liberality, munificence, high-mindedness, right ambition, good temper, friendly civility, sincerity, wittiness, modesty and just resentment. Humility or modesty is an important virtue for a leader. Modesty from a learning context is the person’s ability to accept that “he does not know”. Only from ignorance does knowledge get generated. In other words, it is the ability and the willingness to learn so as to stay competitive in the modern business scenario.
Mr JRD Tata in his guiding principles stated the behavioural expectations he will have from such leadership. The Guiding Principles he laid down state:
• Nothing worthwhile is ever achieved without deep thought and hard work
• One must think for oneself and never accept at their face value slogans and catch phrases to which, unfortunately, our people are too easily susceptible
• One must forever strive for excellence, or even perfection, in any task however small, and never be satisfied with the second best
• No success or achievement in material terms is worthwhile unless it serves the needs or interests of the country and its people and is achieved by fair and honest means
• Good human relations not only bring great personal rewards but also are essential to the success of any enterprise.
In order to further the cause of developing matured leadership for the corporate world, JRD in his inimitable visionary manner set up the Tata Management Training Centre. This was more than four decades ago when no corporate in India was investing in such ventures. His dream was to enable development of genuine leaders for India. The Centre has since then been continuously striving to become a seat of learning for different kinds of organisations. We have constantly tried to anticipate the needs of organisations and provide a world-class learning opportunity in the most appropriate ambience. For the past forty years, TMTC has been involved in training leaders and leading in training.
Education is a continuous process. The need for executive education, especially in the times of globalisation is immense. The pressure to perform will always be there and executives have to learn to meet the challenges posed by competition across the globe without becoming paranoid about the future.
Our Group Chairman has been coaxing us not to be followers, but to strive for leadership in every field. TMTC wishes to continue in its unique leadership position of offering its support to all organisations in their effort in Leadership Development.
This year, we have placed the programmes under six broad categories. They have been identified based on our understanding of business needs and ideas that have come from our close interactions with the leaders of the industry. The broad categories cover the following:
• Business Strategy
• Customer Focus
• Leadership Development
• Managing Finance
• Managing Human Resources
• Managing Innovation
Our offerings are continuously updated and have a balanced blend of concepts and practices. We are also using a wide variety of pedagogy to make the learning experiential. All of these programmes are highly interactive in nature with a high emphasis on real life case studies.
As always, we strive to bring the best faculty from across the globe to provide our participants the best possible knowledge available anywhere in the world. For this, we are grateful to the academic as well as the training cum research community for supporting us in this endeavour.
We are also grateful to the organisations, both within as well as outside of Tatas, who support us and trust us to provide their leaders with most appropriate inputs.
