Organizational Behavior and Leadership
October 14, 2015
Mr. Omer Malik, General Manager Snacks, PepsiCo Pakistan, visited the Lahore School of Economics on October 9, 2015 to deliver a talk on Organizational Behavior and Leadership to the MBA participants and to answer their questions.
At the outset, he recalled his own MBA course of Organizational Behavior and noted that the most important determinant of success in an organization was management of relationships and human behavior. Referring to the ongoing scandal in Germany, he noted that a few people at Volkswagen had led to one of the biggest ethical catastrophe in German business.
Going back to his career, he opined that an MBA graduate might start with expectations of a high salary, and then might covet promotion, but eventually the need to make a difference for others and to enjoy work prevailed. Parallel to these needs, one started with working hard, but one needed to manage networks of relationships and help others in the process. Omer admitted he felt elated when someone mentioned to him one of his direct reports was a director now and was flourishing.
At a senior level, the ability to deal with people became even more important, because functional competence could be hired:, one could hire operational managers who could run machines. Also at a senior level, a leader must try to break silos within organizations. For this, channels of communications needed to be opened. And to unleash creativity, an organization must be prepared to allow its employees to make mistakes.
Omer was proud of PepsiCo’s ethical values, and as an example, cited the case of an employee who actually pointed out that due to inadvertent mis-categorization, a higher import duty was payable to the Government – not only was duty paid but the employee was awarded a prize.
The MBA participants asked many questions with enthusiasm over more than one hour and Mr. Omer Malik responded with patience, poise and wit.
Labels: Guest Speaker
posted by S A J Shirazi @ 10/14/2015 12:57:00 PM,
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