Member of Parliament Kartikeya Sharma on Friday spoke about leadership and digital world at the South India Digital Summit. He made six brief points to cover his thoughts on both the digital landscape in South India and leadership in general.
South India Digital Summit was organized by Fourth Dimension. MP Kartikeya Sharma was joined by L.V. Krishnan, CEO, TAM Media Research Pvt. Ltd and Founders of Sakthi Masala, Duraisamy and Santhi Duraisamy.
Kartikeya Sharma said, “One works to put food on the table. You have to start with you. Your family. But as soon as you hire one other person, you are now working to put food on their table also. It’s symbiotic. Employees don’t work for you, you work for them. Your decisions, your passion, your credibility, your bearing and your ability to problem solve matter. Leadership is about bearing responsibility.”
“About understanding that responsibility is to skill up, motivate, guide, mentor and help path-find with clarity a group of human beings who’ve wilfully entrusted their care to you. Good leaders create followers, great leaders create other leaders. And that’s the first mantra or life lesson in leadership that’ll I’ll share with you. Are you the coach to an amazing, motivated, high delivery bunch of people surrounding you? Are you seeing leadership talent and ability flourish around? If you are, you’re doing fine,” he added.
Talking about empathising with others, he said, “All of us have the same amount of time in a day. All of us have varied talents and abilities. When as a leader you’re just stormed with just too many things, happenings, decisions, stress, tangents, just pause for the cause and think. There was a time when I just had to look after myself, today I have children, family and literally thousands in my team. Have I kept my ability to empathise as my stress and workload has increased? Empathise in the other direction also. Despite my stress and workload, do I have examples of people who seem to get a lot more done in a day? I’ve seen my father do it so effortlessly and naturally. Look after so many things for so long, I’m sure he would’ve faced pressure and stress. So that’s a good example. Every time I feel I’ve got too much on my plate, I think of our Prime Minister.”
Further on leadership, he said, “The next aspect of leadership is perhaps this. We keep getting wistful about leadership. Wistful in the sense of looking at the past from the Mahatmas and Mandelas of the world, whose leadership echoes through history. So that’s a thought worth considering. Are you doing something that would inspire people you’ve never met? Are you doing something that would inspire people long after you’ve gone? Not all of us will be able to answer such questions. But these are good questions to ask yourself.”
“Our national channel NewsX is actively looking at the digital media space in South India. You’re going to see a NewsX Tamil, a NewsX Telugu and the renewal of NewsX Kannada very soon. And of course we should be looking at the south, looking at southern languages. And of course we should be looking at the impressions, the page views, the metrics, the readership, the product and the service. It’s a no brainer,” he said while talking about digital presence in South India.
In his concluding remarks, he mentioned, “This is the thought I want to leave you with. We think of pages, apps, websites, handles and channels. Let’s think bigger, broader and deeper. The App works in an ecosystem from hardware to operating system. The website works in an internet ecosystem of programming languages. How are we pioneering and innovating ground up. Not just on the final interface. South India, where the Apple I-Phone is being manufactured already can become the home of India’s first mobile operating system. Google has just been fined in India for abusing its monopolies. The challenge is not of disciplining global giants alone, is about giving them better, smarter, more innovative, game changing competition from within. From dot coms to OTTs to websites, young engineers, coders, entrepreneurs out there listening to this. Some even working on Web3 solutions. Go out and create the Indian led tech ecosystems. Let a digital India…like UPI and RuPay successes, also be innovated in India and built in India. If we are truly change the world, we shall have change ourselves and as Gandhi would say, be the change we want to see.”