Session 4

Date: 8 September 2014

1200H

TWC session 4 started with a brief summary on how the past sessions help to answer the questions on why some countries are more advanced than the others and how can we solve this problems.

The first part of the session was about driving forces. Some examples of forces of changes discussed during the session were globalization, demographic issues, competitions and etc. Change is the only constant. Change is inevitable. Next we discuss how changes occur. Changes primarily occur in 2 ways - reactive change and the foresight to change. Reactive change is changes that occur when something happens. Lastly, there is this term called disruptive change. Disruptive change is changes that makes past changes totally pointless. A revolutionary change does not necessary means a disruptive change.

So how does that answer our questions? Studying the driving force of change allow us to understand what countries did to adapt themselves to the ever-changing world. The understanding of disruptive change means that developing countries does not have go through what the developed countries do in the past so as to be advance. Personally, I felt that the developing countries' leaders also need to adapt the mentality of having the foresight to change. If they do not take the initiative to learn and improve, they will always be trapped in their current position.(Reference from session 2 on global dominance and human development)

1400H

The second part of session 4 was about change leadership and management. How is leadership and management related to TWC? Leaders gives the idea and the management executes it. Quoted by Edward Deming, change is not compulsory since no one cares whether you survive or not.Leaders and the management decisions affect the progress of an organization.Its up to them to decide what type of changes they want to embrace. I felt that this part is closely link to the first part of the session. In order to initiate the change in them, the less fortunate countries need a good leader and its' team of management. A person with ideas is just a visionary while and a poor management team will not deliver the idea. Dr Shahi then shows a video of a boy dancing. I think the video is very effective in delivering the idea of what leadership and management is. A good leader provides great idea but success comes from the management - they executes and get people to follow the idea.

Lesson went significantly beyond 1500H and not everyone presented yet. Somehow I felt that the benchmark for individual presentation was raised every session. Session starts to get more boring for me as it continues but it grabs my attention again when Dr Shahi shows us the boy dancing video. Overall rating 6/10