WORKING in the 21st century demands winning people’s hearts and minds, but our bureaucrats and technocrats not concerned about doing so.

They keep themselves ‘cocooned’ in their cars by their personal and protocol staff; in office they are kept ‘cocooned’ by their stereotypically work-shy and pessimistic private secretaries and other staff members, who can’t see beyond their offices and homes.

In their palatial bungalows they are kept ‘cocooned’ by their shopping-crazy or short-tempered ‘begums’. They are pitiable.

These pitiable ‘cocooned’ officers are kept in oblivion, never knowing that organisations in the world today demand focus on the whole system to improve organisational effectiveness, because organisations are complex, not simple, entities; they are dynamic and ever changing.

Organisations need sustainable solutions for genuine results and impact – for improved operations and increased engagement.

Is there any well-wisher of the people and friend of the public sector willing to tell our ‘cocooned’ bureaucrats and technocrats to attempt to gain at least four kinds of knowledge?

Leaders who create problem-solving, self-renewing organisations posses the following skills: knowledge of how organisations work, how to diagnose and solve problems, how change occurs and how to create interventions that produce the desired impact.

Hashim Abro

Islamabad

Published in Dawn December 10th, 2016