The Leader’s Purpose -- The Leader's Way, Chapter 4

A leader needs to have wisdom (right view) and faith (support from followers). He must establish clear purposes for the company, and set the value that should be observed by all. He should act as an example to convince his follows to follow the principles.

Leaders' Roles
The leader's responsibilities include

• Set the values and purposes of the organization,
• Create faith, attract competent people, and encourage them to put great effort into the organization,
• Provide communication systems for people inside the organization, and
• Plan, organize, set priority, and make decisions.

A good leader should have technical knowledge and skill, determination, endeavor, and courage. The leader should understand the problem and know the solution. He or she should understand the organization and its people, culture and characteristics.


Organization Purposes
An organization should have purposes or mission statement. Main characteristics of good mission statements include

• Clear and understandable,
• Appeal to people in the organization,
• Help people in the organization make decisions, and
• Meaningful in different culture (in case of global organizations).

Google's mission statement: "To organize the world information and make it universally accessible and useful."

The eight worldly concerns

Leaders tend to see ups and downs very frequently. So, they should learn to be calm and collected when facing problems. When facing a problem, four pairs of worldly concerns usually arises. These concerns should be avoided, as they induce negative energy. Rather than focusing on these concerns, leaders should develop their mind by asking the following questions:

1. Being distressed when belittled and elated when praised -> What is the purpose of the person who belittles or praised me?
2. Being depressed and happy when facing failure and success, respectively ->  What can I learn from the failure/success?
3. Being Disspirited and joyful when being poor and wealthy, respectively -> What can I do to better our status?
4. Being upset under the lack of recognition and pleased when being famous -> Am I getting arrogant?

Dealing with problems
Hard problems are difficult to deal with. It is better to break the problems down into the following questions:

• What is the problem?
• What is the cause of the problem?
• What can I do to solve the problem?
• How do I arrive the goals?

Source: THE Leader's Way: Business, Buddhism and happiness in an interconnected world by His Holyiness The Dalai Lama and Laurens Van Den Muyzenberg, Chapter 4 [Read the Book Review] [Read the Next Part].
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Book or Audiobooks?

Personally, I prefer audiobooks. It's fun, and I can listen when I'm doing something else. It also makes other activities (e.g., jogging) a lot more fun. For more detail about audiobooks, please read [this post].

There is one more reason that may encourage you to go for the audiobook version. You can get it now for FREE. Audible offers you a free trial for 14 days. Even if you get the book and cancel the subscription right away (so that you don't have to pay), you can keep the book. And, don't worry if you lost the audiobook file. Just log into audible.com. You can keep downloading the over and over again.


About the summary: It takes time to finish up a book. And, when you do, sometimes, you want to review what you learn from the book. If you do not make notes as you read, you might have to go through the book once again. This can be time-consuming when you are dealing with a book. But you can still flip through the book and locate what you are looking for

However, when the material is an audiobook, it is extremely hard to locate a specific part of content. Most likely you will have to listen to the entire audiobook once again.

This book summary will help solve the pain of having to go through the book all over again.

I am leaving out the details of the books. Most books have interesting examples and case studies, not included here. Reading the original book would be much more entertaining and enlightening. If you like the summary, you may want to get the original from the source below.