THE HIDDEN POWERS OF VULNERABILITY AND HUMILITY

Abstract

AbstractThe author adapts lessons from her new book Leadership Lessons with The Beatles, drawing on what she’s learned from that iconic band, and how it can be applied by organizations and individual leaders. She writes from the perspective of an engineer who became a global software leader. The two Beatles song titles she writes about here are “Help!” for vulnerability, and “Within You and Without You,” for humility. She also writes about her own leadership journey, and discusses principles of mentorship and collaboration. She uses the example of a product manager, and how that person’s work fits into an organization. She writes that the “role of a product manager in a technical organization provides a great example of a vulnerable leader.” For humility, she writes about a leader she knows who embodies that term: Anand Deshpande, founder, chair, and managing director of the software firm Persistent Systems in India, a publicly traded global technology service provider. The characteristics of humility that she further describes are self‐awareness, gratitude, integrity, learning, and listening. Within learning, she writes: “Read voraciously. Reflect on what you read and then write. Your thoughts are clarified, and you can make sense of what you read when you do. Influential leaders are lifelong learners.”