Wrote the email about leaders in australia. Here is the copy
Hi Yasas, while i've been listening your speech, i really wanted to talk to you about one idea, but unfortunately you didn't have time. It's was couple of weeks ago at UQ, Brisbane.
I don't know why, but i had question for every speaker that night, and also one for you. I interested in your opinion. If you will get bored somewhere in the middle, just tell me so, truth is better, than just answer. By background im full time international student from Russia, been in australia for 3 years, currently on my 3rd year. You need to know that, to understand what i see.
Everybody says, leaders, leaders, leaders the best, everybody needs leaders. But nobody doing much for looking for new leaders. So seems everybody is just sitting in his own building and waiting until they are come. I don't know, maybe it's just my point of view, which is wrong, but its good to get right one. So instead of waiting for new leaders, maybe companies should start look for them.
I've been on software engineers conference a month ago, and really enjoyed the speech of John Smith. Seems everything that he said was right. At the end of his speech, i've asked him about filtering leaders from the crowd. And he couldn't answer such an important question. He was representing the company for leadership training, however later on i've realised that it's focused only on profit but not on leaders. That is disappointing.
Anyway, to find a good leader, takes a lot of effort, however the results will be astonishing. So the idea is to look for leaders, and then 'sell' them to the companies. If it is true that the companies always need good leaders, so it is reasonable to offer that.
Alright, you maybe thinking, it's all true, but where are you going to find them? And the answer is around yourself. I will explain. Based on my own experience, there are about 1-2% of really good leaders, and up to 10% of average leaders(2% included). So what everybody need it just to find that 10%. You need a lot of people to filter to find them. Where will you get them? There are thousands and thousands people currently studying in universities. And nobody interested in them.
More than that, international students are suppose to be smarter than domestic in general. The reason for that, is completely different background, usually knowledge of two languages, and all that effort to get to study in university. And by saying knowledge of languages i mean, it's quite hard to learn new language, and requires a lot of hard work. I don't know whats your knowledge of leaders and leadership, and probably it is different from mine, but the rule is: the harder the life, the better leaders come out of it.
And what i see after that, the internationals are the second best. The reason is they are not safe. However, there is another life rule: the higher the risk, the greater the results. (Just for the reference, such things have been told by many smart people, just can't remember all of them, but they are always true, and applicable to any part of life) So the percentage of leaders in such group is suppose to be higher.
And even for domestic students it's not that great ether.
At high school and university, you already can see who have abilities of leaders. They are not complete and might disappear in the future, but it is much more likely that they develop their leadership skills further. Every group of friends have couple of leaders in it. What is leadership? it is life attitude, which really difficult to change and requires a lot of effort to do that. However it is much easier to get right attitude since your childhood, as you don't have anything to change, you just learn.
So, my idea is to look for leaders earlier before they come to an employer. I have couple of ideas to complete the whole idea, how do the search, etc, but probably i will leave it for further discussions. Don't like writing :)
Finally, and once more again, im interested in your opinion and any feedback if you have any.
Cheers,
Anton