Culture and the difference between leadership and management
David Morrison retired from his post as Australia’s Chief of Army in June 2015. In his time at the helm he took a strong public stance promoting gender equality and cultural change within the army, and still champions the idea that transformation must start with people. No stranger to leadership challenges, and public and media scrutiny, he often shares his experiences and lessons learned.
On 11 April, at Microsoft’s Business Forward Melbourne event, he was introduced and later interviewed by Microsoft Australia’s COO (chief operating officer) Rachel Bondi. After acknowledging the stories of Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, and the victims and survivors of domestic violence – which he believes to be Australia’s greatest social issue – he began.
“Leaders who lose sight of what society expects of them and their organisations, actually run the risk of dooming the organisations they lead to irrelevance.”
Leadership is an enormous subject. It’s one that receives enormous amounts of introspection and analysis. People write about it and talk about it almost without cease now. And I wonder if in part that’s because, as we look at our complex and sometimes troubled world, we discern a lack of leadership at various levels in our global society and indeed in our nation. I’m not going to give you a Leadership 101 synopsis, I can promise you that. I’ve exercised my leadership, after all, in a male-dominated, very hierarchical, military organisation for over three and a half decades. And I know that some of the challenges that you face in your world are different to the ones that I
