Thursday, March 8, 2012

Leadership

Mr. Greg Chappell at his pontificating best


Chappell then spoke about what was wrong with the Indian culture. "The culture is very different, it's not a team culture," Chappell said. "They lack leaders in the team because they are not trained to be leaders. From an early age, their parents make all the decisions, their schoolteachers make their decisions, their cricket coaches make the decisions. The culture of India is such that, if you put your head above the parapet someone will shoot it. Knock your head off. So they learn to keep their head down and not take responsibility. The Poms (British) taught them really well to keep their head down. For if someone was deemed to be responsible, they'd get punished. So the Indians have learned to avoid responsibility. So before taking responsibility for any decisions, they prefer not to."

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

you are opening up pandora's box by opening up a post for this, just wait :)

However, I think he does have a point.

Anonymous said...

Anon above:
- While a few of his points may be somewhat true, his one-sided bashing of Indian way of life is stupid.
-HS

Anonymous said...

can the CNR Rao story be dragged into this?

i think not as prof Giridhar Madras wouldn't allow it lol :)

Anonymous said...

It is generally true about Indians. We are too much dependent on elders (including teachers, guides). This is the very reason why we don't have leaders in most of the fields including research. We are consumers of the goods manufacture the west. One more big negative is that we don't want to accept dark side and always keep boasting about past. Just wait for some time, many will make hue and cry on many lines like on Chappell, on our "good" family values, Australian Cricket etc etc.

Pardon me, I am not saying anything about the family culture in India. It is good (if not very good) and keep the members together. I am talking about independence we have in our decision makings specially decisions related to the career. This is what, I believe, Greg wants to say. Rather than boasting about past, we need to respect those who are performing better than us and need to learn from them.

Anonymous said...

Last post was by an ex-IISc student.

Anonymous said...

Anonymous @March 8, 2012 10:38 PM

I largely agree with Greg and you about "lack of leadership".

But the accompanied statement about "Poms (British) taught them well" is very condescending and have tones of racism.

Probably Greg forgot his "leadership skills" when he asked his brother Trevor to bowl underarm to deny New Zealand a victory.

Prof. TA

Anonymous said...

@Prof. TA

Agreed with you. What else you can expect from him. Greg is (in)famous for these kind of statements. He was a big failure as coach of our team. At the name of culture, one can't hide his incompetence as a leader. Those who performed superbly (Gery and John Wright) also faced same issues but never complained like him. Till today, he never admitted that he was not able to handle team properly and he was wrong.

I tried to take the bigger message from his statement which seems true. (his intention may be something else).

Ex-IISc Student

Ankur Kulkarni said...

Greg is trying to sell his book. You guys are advertising it for free! Don't respond; let him go door to door selling his book and he will humble down.

Desi Babu said...

The culture of India is such that, if you put your head above the parapet someone will shoot it. Knock your head off. So they learn to keep their head down and not take responsibility.

Good one! I heard an Indian lady, who used to be Italian once, speaking on television about why her party lost an election recently. Big Time.

She did not take any responsibility, whatsoever. Look at what Indian culture does, even to Romans, who once produced people like Brutus the ambitious, who publicly took responsibility for stabbing Caeser. We all know, that he was an honorable man.

AGB said...

Gee.. I can't wait for your h-index to drop into the discussion!