The three pillars of leadership

Good business leadership involves three categories: vision, operations and innovation.

The visionary leader manages the concept and makes sure that all parties keep looking beyond the horizon.

The operational leader needs to make certain that the organisation delivers results that are consistent with internationally recognised standards of good practice. The innovative leader must recognise that you won't get everything right first time and continue to find ways to overcome imperfections.

It is incredibly rare that all these three skills reside in any one person, not least because you need different skills at different stages of your personal career development. Instead, a combination of leaders can be the effective way to drive growth forward.

Common academic knowledge suggests that you cannot teach someone to be a good leader - some of it is natural ability - but there are skills within leadership that can be taught. Equally, there are skills within entrepreneurship that can be taught. What educational institutions and management schools need to focus on are things like project management; how to solve a problem, not simply what the answer is.

But regardless of whether you are looking to one person or a set of people, employees need to consistently know where to look for the leadership resource that they need.  A clear organisational structure is imperative.

Nor does leadership need to come from the top. Though vision traditionally comes from one figurehead, neither this nor innovation or operational excellence should be limited to a lofty few. Staff throughout the organisation should be encouraged to innovate, think of ways to improve systems and contribute to the vision and its implementation.

Qatar Science & Technology Park is an example of leadership in action. In my opinion, Qatar is a step ahead of the competition because of the clear view of the future that the leadership boasts.

Not only is this thinking visionary, it is also joined up and long-term - important for durable strategising. The implication however is that you have to do a number of things immediately - you can't just sit back and wait for them to happen.

There is a very clear outline of the delivery steps that need to be taken to reach the specified outcome, which in this case is developing the knowledge and research economy in the country. The leaders have an integrated vision that covers everything from schools through to higher education. At the higher education stage, that links to research and to applied research in particular.

This is an innovative project so we are learning as we go along but trying to put down in one go, a pretty big jigsaw. An important characteristic of a good leader is the ability to manage failure and develop a healthy culture in that respect.

To use the metaphor of a big jigsaw, you must recognise, in a project like ours, that some of the pieces will be missing and some we put down are probably going to be the wrong shape, but that's no excuse for not trying to start with the joined up picture.

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