Table of Contents
Definition of a Leader
The leader comes from an Old Germanic word that refers to a man who fights arm battles of freedom against dragons and leads his tribe during migration to take them to a safer place with better food.
Arminius is recognized as the first leader, groomed by Rome, who destroyed a full legion of Augustus’s Roman army in the battle of Teutoburg in 9AD.
Inspired by Arminius’s heroics, “Leaden” gave rise to the Old Germanic fairy tale, which later was popularized by the Vikings.
What is Meant by a “Decision”?
A decision is defined as selecting a specific set of actions over another when multiple such sets are available and possible in a given situation in life, or as a solution to a problem.
Example of Decision Making
For example, you have reached this blog through Google while searching for the question. You have choices of:
- Glancing the blog quickly.
- Reading this blog slowly and multiple times.
- Taking a print of this blog and reading.
- Sitting with a pen and paper and making notes from the blog.
- Thinking deeply while reading.
- Whatever extra names or events that you see in this post, research them too.
- Just searching for the highlighted points that validate or invalidate your beliefs.
You would further select any of the above or multiple of the above choices based on the desired end outcome. For instance, if you were searching to read something new about leadership or decision-making to improve your knowledge, your brain will give low priority to the process, and you may select the least energy-consuming choice(or choices).
On the other hand, if you were searching for the question to take a decision on whether to invest $500 in a leadership workshop or not, then you might pay deeper attention. Furthermore, you might have come across several online articles such as this, and you do not yet know which ones are reliable, then your brain may try to resolve the reliability first. If you are a member of the Lyfas site and have been following our articles for a long time, then you would pay deeper weight to what you are learning on the topic on this site, than over another source that is new to you.
Hence, even for a simple decision such as reading an article, your brain has to solve multiple problems, take multiple sub-decisions,
Components of Decision
- A problem, and the cost of the problem.
- Available choices.
- Overall knowledge available on the problem, and the choices.
- Life experience and learning from life about the problem and the choices.
- Time available to take the decision.
- Resources available to execute the selected choices.
- Estimated time, energy, and resource investment requirement on the execution.
- Associated other individuals and entities with the decision(how many others your decision may affect or impact).
- Significance of the decision in your Personality, Profession, Family, Livelihood, Relationships, Current Mission in Life, and so on.
- Your confidence in making a decision.
- Your competence to execute the choices of a decision.
Why do most people suffer from Decision anxiety and indecisiveness?
From the above example, and the components of the decision, you might already have understood that the brain has to invest a significant amount of energy even to take small decisions like reading an article or drinking water. Other critical decisions such as marriage, and career, have significantly high costs and consequences on the overall life.
Therefore there is always an inherent fear in the brain of a decision going wrong. Therefore on average very few in a family, or a group develop the skills to take decisions.
Because taking decisions, executing them, and taking accountability is a really hard and long process, most people end up avoiding taking even the simplest of decisions in life. And this creates inner frustration and insecurity, which gives rise to passive-aggressiveness. Hence when they see others taking decisions and failing in them, they get happy for not taking the decision and jump into criticism.
Decision-Making in the Industry
Business is a bloody contact sports. Market today is more competative than ever. There is a peer pressure of profit and survivility. Machines are constantly replacing humans in every job.
Decisions in the industry are not only centered around products, market, sales, production, manufacturing, sourcing, manpower alone, but they also affect to a great degree the lives of customers, consumers, employees, shareholders and so on. There are large corporation lavel decisions, policy decisions, department decisions, and then there are day to day microdecisions within the teams and accross the teams.
We already know that even a seemingly not-so important decision such as drinking water needs tremendeous amount of brain energy. Therefore in the industries and businesses too, decision making is a hard skill. Very few over their career develop the ability to assess, plan, decide, and take accountibility of those decisions.
Decision making in the age of machines and AI
We already have understood that decision making is a process. Machines execute process better than humans. However, due to sheer number of unseen variables, possibilities, human, environmental, and other factors, machines are not as reliable in taking decisions as they are in churning and processing information.
Decision making is still one of the top rare, high-demand, and highly specialized human skills which will be hard to replace in any length of time sooner. Also, because business is by the humans, for the humans, to serve the humans and their needs, a large proportion of decision variables are human variables(whether they are seen or not).
Hence, even in the age of ever smart machines, fund managers, sales VPs, project managers, marketing heads are all humans and not AIs.
Association of Decision and Leadership
At the primal levels, nothing much have changed in the humans. Even after the exponential progress of the civilization, science and technology, we are still govered by envy, jealousy, hate, happiness, fear and such primal emotions. This is because our genetic makeup has remained the same for thousands of years.
Traditionally humans have lived in Hunter-gatherer tribes. Even after they started settling down as farmers, and societies, and even after societies kept getting more layered and complex, the inner dynamics of the humans have still remained that of hunter gatherer. Men in most societies have taken the responsibilities of production(from electricity, to buildings, to minings, to farmings) and women have played roles in management, HR, finance, and every aspect that needs gathering genes.
It is due to this inherent hunter-gatherer genetic dominance even in the modern times, individuals with leadership genes have been better(read “the only”) decision makers. These individuals accross industries carries the genes from leaders.
We already know that leaders are traditionally the greatest warriors in their tribes who stood for the tribe, and guided the tribe during migration. Hence one with warrior genes, and with a family history that had war generals are more likely to become leaders.
Leaders are born, with genes from past war heros in the family, they are neither mentored, nor created.
The genetic traits of a leader is seen even at an early childhood.
Some of the early childhood signs of a leader
- Not accepting what is said on the face value.
- Curiosity.
- Risk-taking. (Not jumping off the cliff, but doing things that are considered risky for a child-like asking too many questions in the classroom)
- Self-sufficiency and esteem.
- Patience.
- Extreme hard work.
- Practice.
- Patience.
- Focus and Concentration.
- A degree of fearlessness.
- Taking stands.
- Rebel in nature.
- Fighting for others(like for siblings)
- A degree of high moral values.
- Not accepting forced rules
- Growingup in harsh environments.
- Having to find their livelihood at an early age.
Anyone who has been recognized as a leader in their respective fields can traceback many of the above traits in their childhood.
Correlation of Innovation With War and Leadership
Careful observation of history will show that most sustainable innovations have happened during wars, and by men with war experience.
Pericles(495 BCE) who built Athens was a general, a war hero. This is simply because several key skills and neural patterns in the brain are developed during the war. It is noteworthy that almost 80% of the novel laureates in science have been Jews, who carries a bloodline of those who suffered in Holocaust.
The skills and neural patterns that are developed during the war
- Fear of losing the family.
- Hard livelihood and unavailability of food.
- Experiencing and hearing news about death.
- Urge and need to safely take the family to a safer environment.
- The necessity to forget humanity and kill those whom one doesn’t even know and has no personal animosity with.
- Uncertainty, chaos, life and death needs one to take life and death decisions every moment.
It is exactly the same reason, a geographic area see significant technological advancement after suffering and war.
Athens prospered after the end of Peloponsian war. Singapore, China, Japan prospered after the second world war. India attained unimaginable growth in last 50 years due to its prolonged fight for freedom. Long back, Florance became the hub of Italian renesance after the end of black death and mini ice age that nearly depopulated the Europe.
It is not necessarily a given fact that any population that has been engaged in war for a significant amount of time will lead technological advancements, but most of the technological advancements have happened during and after war by the warriors and their successors.
The Circus of Leadership Training, Books, Conferences and Frameworks
We so far know that leadership is genetic and not institutional. No institution can overpower, or unlock the patterns that a specific genetic profile create in a humans. Leaders are born, and their genes drive them to take decision and help their people irrespective of the domain they pursue.
As a leader pursue his goals, more and more dragons are faced and fights get bigger and bigger with more people and lives at stake. It is these fights that unlocks the leadership genes. Leadership itself is developed in a chaotic environment where life and death hangs by a thin thread.
So if industry must look for leaders, it has to find them in the genes, in the behavioral pattern of a man, in the family history, in the war history, and not in the resume. You can never create a leader, or mentor one if one doesn’t have the genes.
A distant but a powerful parallel is the fact that a lot of Sillicon Valley Unicorn companies are created by rebels who discontinued their academics. Great students are hired by these leaders, and rebels to drive the companies. Even the poster boy of Sillicon Valley, Steve Jobs was born in a war-destroyed Syrian parents.
No one becomes a leader by attending conferences, doing courses, reading books, using frameworks, and taking salaries.
No one knows even the meaning of the word decision unless seeing the man beside them fall, life hanging by bullets, their humanity tested with arms, family dying in hunger.
And therefore if you want to know whether you have the leadership gene, you must look into your family tree and genome, rather than wasting time in studying leadership courses, brushing off your fortune and hard-earned money.
Understand, by definition a leader challenges the obvious and the conviction, the accepted rules and laws, and it is this irritation against the systems that makes a leader. Institutions, training, are all structured entities. Statis turn off leadership genes, chaos turn them on.
Research about your family history of 14 generation, find what your forefathers did, find out their migrations, trace your bloodline, check your childhood qualities. Ask yourself how many times you did not do something because you saw everyone else doing it. Ask your core how likely can you kill for your family and get shot for your family.
Leadership and decision making is all about blood, death, war, fight, rebel. Strategies and plans are outcome of the these situations and are not primary situations or metrices. Armanious outstrategised Romans in the war, but he did not become a leader because he could write better war plans in paper.
Conclusion
If gyaan, intellectuality, models, studies, and frameworks produced leaders then the Presidency College would be a leader’s mecca.
Leader fights for freedom, salary buys freedom. Stupidity buys leadership with salary.
Whether you own a business, or drive a business, or part of the industry, if you do not know what is your salary, and you arrange for your and team’s meat, then you are the one. You don’t need any salaried guruji to tell you how to become a leader.
If you carry the leadership genes, you will always be a decision maker, whether you like it, know it, are aware of it or not. People around you will always do their job, duties, and responsibilities, whereas you will always take the accountibility. That’s the way it was 12,000 years back when our ancestors migrated from mountains to the plane after the ice age and that is the way it will remain till the last human walks on this planet.
