- [Narrator] Remember, many of the videos in our course
have discussion prompts and exercise output handouts.
Be sure to download these before watching the videos,
since you might want to take some notes on them
and refer to them,
or the solutions we'll cover as you go through the course
and in later videos.
Let's think though about the roles
that people have in organizations.
As you see in this chart, at the top,
there's the individual contributor, or professional.
Here, success is achieved by being able to do the work
and to have the skills necessary
to make one a successful individual contributor.
While a team member demonstrates
solid individual task success,
they'll eventually be promoted to manager.
In this role, the individual has authority
based on their position in the organization.
This transition can sometimes be difficult
because a manager moves from managing tasks
to managing people.
Micromanagement is a common mistake
that first time managers will make,
as well as not delegating effectively
or trying to take on too much of the workload
that the team should be handling.
Eventually, though,
if a manager is successful managing a team
or multiple teams, they might be promoted to being a leader
in the organization.
This, again, is a very different role
because power comes not from task expertise,
like professionals, or from positional authority,
like managers, but from a leader's ability to create
and to manage relationships with diverse individuals, teams,
and other managers and leaders.
In this way, leaders are more likely to be followed
based on their relationships with others.
Their power actually comes less from positions
and skills than from their abilities
to maintain relationships across teams and organizations
and to extract value from those relationships.
Regardless of level in an organization though,
the key strategic challenges that you face
can be summarized as follows.
You need to take your big ideas here, in the upper left,
combine them with the capabilities
that you have, in the upper right,
and then put them together inside your context
or your ecosystem in order to achieve results.
This combination of idea, or concept,
capabilities that you have or need
and the context in which you're trying to execute
your big idea will hopefully lead to results.
But you need to find pathways to get to those results
that best utilize your skills,
realizing that others are out there trying
to do possibly the same thing.
Jim Collins, one of the co-authors
of a classic business text called "Built to Last,"
suggested in a 2001 Harvard Business Review article
called "Level 5 Leadership," that the greatest firms
are led by so-called Level 5 leaders,
leaders who lead not by authority or position,
but by being personally humble
and getting others to follow them
through their professional will.
If you look at this chart of five levels,
notice that Collins says that everybody is a leader
in some way, even the Level 1 professionals,
as they become contributing team members,
eventually promoted to managers,
leaders who help achieve other people's visions,
and then those personally humble
and willful leaders that establish the vision for a company
or for a team's future.
So as a data scientist,
where are you on this leadership spectrum?
Where is your boss?
Where does your team think about you,
in terms of what level they think you are?
How likely are you to move to the next level?
And, quite frankly,
who are the Level 5 leaders in your view?
Who do you look up to as the epitome of leadership?
Pause the video here and write down some of your answers
to these questions in the Notes area of our course.
But why do you,
or why does your firm, even need strategy, per se?
Let's dive into this question
of, "Why strategy?" in our next video.