Three ingredients of Charimsatic leadership and Anna Hazare

Anna Hazare, a grass root activist from a small village flashed suddenly on India's national canvas with his anti-corruption campaign.

In spite of his old age, humble background & simple life style he had huge followers, that too including youths. Clearly his Charisma was in action.


Events that unfolded during his anti-corruption campaign highlights three important ingredients of Charismatic leadership.

1. Integrated Personality: Charismatic leader shows integrated personality. Often the roots of such personality is found in their spiritual practices and simple living. Vivekananda's influence on Anna Hazare and his Gandhian way of living contributed to his charismatic influence.
   
2. Crisis and Public Hope: Chain of high profile corruption scandals in 2010 were not less than any crisis in India . Though Indians are not new to corruption ,still the sheer scale & frequency of these scandals shattered national image.It upset every Indian mind. Anna's call of "anti-corruption" was perfect in time for the crisis. It addressed the need & hope of billions.
3. Radical Solution: Demand of Lokpal bill and its aggressive timeline was absolutely radical in the snail-paced policy world of India. Though the demand is heavily criticized by policy-makers , it fulfilled expectations and hope of followers. This further bridged the link between followers and Charismatic leader.
   

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Smile - There are so many reasons ...

Interesting talk by Ron Gutman smile - A curve that straightens cranky things ...

(Speech is supported by strong research findings from range of publications, and worth watching . All the studies that he is referring are available here .).

Changing the sleeping Blog ..

Currently this blog has infrequent updates, And this is about to change.

Basically this blog is a reflective personal journal started as a learning tool. One can see that early topics were scattered all around. Because when I started blogging , I was "exploring" different areas. As time passed , I could narrow down this search to Organization Behavior (OB). Though the blog is titled hr-universe, it is about OB. In practice HR and OB don't have water tight compartments, but still they differ. (Surely in the academic world !).

HR has excellent presence on blogosphere ,but not so for OB. So aim is to connect with these few like minded bloggers. This is also attempt to understand puzzling behaviors at and outside the workplace, There are so many ways to look at behavior that stretches limit of our potential and limits our potential too. It's interesting.

Lastly as I am switching over to academic world from corporate , I guess both will be visible in these learning steps.

Stay tuned !

(Image source : http://www.flickr.com/photos/spursfan_ace/2328879637/ )