Risk of Paradigm

You talk of vertical integration, horizontal expansion, outsourcing or engaging in merger & acquisitions, forming business alliance or developing new business line, as a leader if you are able to change the paradigm, you are better positioned to succeed.

Stepping back and looking at a crisis from a different perspective yields new opportunities. When you restrict yourself to a perspective, all other possibilities disappear. With every choice you make as a leader in the business world, you create newer realities, and you make the best choice when you explore all the options.

Let us take example of recent sub prime crisis affecting the biggest economies of the world. How to manage risk and respond to such a crisis? How to see new paradigms or for that matter understand the existing ones?

Commonly accepted paradigm makes chance for a change almost impossible. These stubborn paradigms become the filter through which we see our reality. It is natural that unseen possibilities create fear, but unknown becomes a possibility for change. Conscious choice can only take place when you challenge what you believe to be true, you paradigms.

Our paradigms are filter through which we perceive, interpret, and understand our reality and our options. Bunch of rules, mind sets, regulations, or procedures create limitations and tell us how to conduct our behaviour and make our choices within those set limitations in order to carryout our business pursuit. To bring forth newer options and possibilities that seemed never to have existed is indeed magic.

Instead of thinking in terms of zero sum game start thinking towards identifying win- win options. Challenge you paradigms. Take any area - corporate governance, risk management, sustainable business, social responsibilities of business, legal framework within a country; approach each problem not to find what you hope you will, but to get the entire truth that must be grappled with.

You may not like what you find. But try and be consistent with it. Once Mahatma Gandhi Said it is important not that I be consistent with what I have said but be consistent with the truth as it reveals itself to me.

Leaders be ready; time has come to change the existing business paradigms. You like it or not, just one year down the line, you will be forced to change the way you think.