Some Insightful Case Studies About Leadership in Challenging times

Great leaders are not accidentally born, but they reach to height step by step by facing a sizable amount of small and major crises situations and successful tackling them. In fact, most of the outstanding business leaders may say that sailing through the most difficult times in their business made them better. A great leader may ideally be born at difficult times when they make tough decisions and decisive actions they initiated made the entire her to get through the troubles and succeed.

To become a leader, it takes someone to have a clear vision and also an inexorable fortitude to get a business through the worse times, whether it is any financial trouble, public relation issues, or the worse nightmare of product or service failures. Here, in this article, we are trying to follow some case studies which demonstrate how a few great leaders are born by overcoming some serious difficulties.

Case 1: Southwest Airlines

The dreadful 9/11 had changed the fate of Southwest Airlines as the government ordered to ground their entire fleet and shut down the business for many days. Many if the US airlines faced the same crises after the incident. However, Southwest Airlines was one among those who effectively succeeded through that difficulty. The company was well known for its customer service.

The passengers, pilots, and crew everyone was stranded all around the placed after then 9/11 terrorist attacks. However, unlike many of their aviation competitors, the company management and thoughtful leadership took a leap ahead than simply waiting. They asked their employees to take out the Southwest fun approach to their business and help the stranded passengers to enjoy their time and local bowling allies and movies. When the uncertainty forced many airlines to cut down their staff, James Parker, Southwest's CEO, just three days after the terror attack, announced that the company would not fire any one of the employees as well as will issue the profit share payment.

This has evidently shown strong leadership characteristics in times of difficulties with effective crisis management, innovative problem solving, and a very strong belief in the vision of the company and trust on employees. The company successfully got through this troublesome situation. James Parker has proved himself to be star CEO who had taken Southwest Airlines to be a stronger brand.

Case 2: Toro

Toro is a known brand in lawn equipment, which had been once accustomed to plenty of lawsuits based on the inherent hazards naturally associated with any such machinery manufacturing. In the late 80s, Toro was also facing a severe financial crisis, and it was at that time, Ken Melrose took charge as the CEO. The major success he accomplished thereafter was to reduce the burden of the company by introducing a new mediation policy which helped reduce the cost of lawsuits. His major strength was empathy, which it ought to be an important leadership skill.

Before Melrose, Toro used to face on an average 50 lawsuits per year, which included serious injuries and casualty. He changed the mediation process to better address the liability claims of their products. This also included sending company officials to meet those who were injured with Toro products and also empathizing with their family members. The objective of this move was to see what goes wrong and to express the company’s concern towards them and attend to their needs. It produced an amazing result as this approach reduced the company’s claims by 95%, which was a huge cost saving for the organization.

As RemoteDBA.com points out, the right leaders can recognize the core problems and take measures to address them in the right manner. Melrose was not only empathetic but also open, and his values guided his actions which naturally reaped the best results.

Case 3: Starbucks

There may be little who haven't heard of this name. Starbucks is well recognized globally for its amazing approach to business and the way how they treat their employees and associates. This coffee giant also offers many stock options, insurance benefits, and retirement benefits of their loyal employees.

However, there was an event back in 1997 when the company faced a real crisis by three of their employees getting killed by falling prey to a robbery. The leadership, Howard Schultz, Starbucks CEO at that time demonstrated an amazing act of leadership by flying to Washington DC and spend a week with the families and co-workers of those employees.

While many of the leaders may tend to stay as far as possible for this kind of a tragic incident, Shultz's commendable leadership prevailed. By expression compassion and dedication to meet the partners' needs, what he did even change the fate of the brand as people started viewing Starbucks much more favorably?

As we can see from the above incidents, ideal business leaders can turn a disastrous situation into a better outcome for the organization. A good leader possesses all or many of the traits like Flexibility, Tenacity, Conflict Resolution, Empathy, Communication, Decisiveness, Compassion, Insightful Vision, Passion, Transparency, Understanding, Protection, Negotiation, and Problem-Solving skills.

Oracle’s proven market leadership

A product’s market leadership is quite different from that of market leaders who lead the brand. Similar to business leaders, people tend to choose brand leaders also from each category of products by finding them as a leader in performance, price, reliable, support, innovative, and service, just as the same as that of great leaders.

In such a brand leadership survey, Oracle was voted as the market leader in many of the core database management segments as SQL Database for Reliability, Performance, Innovation, and Service and Support.

In terms of in-memory databases, Oracle is not the market leader in almost all categories. Oracles latest SQL database go far beyond the primary offerings as:

• Activity Monitoring for SQL database.

• Centralized Configuration which is more secure.

• Sensitive / Privileged Data Discovery etc.

With the latest Data Management Cloud, Oracle offered services based on customer choices by leveraging the fullest potential of cloud flexibility and scalability.