Why do leaders derail? It is tragic to see the downslide of leaders who were once successful.

Such cases include business tycoons, industry captains, professional managers, social entrepreneurs and sports personalities. In the last 5 years we have seen all the spheres of life mentioned feature cases of leaders who have sped downhill. There is thus no need to quote specific cases at this time. With passage of time it would be useful to construct case studies carefully. Airlines, Dairy Development, IT industry, Cricket and Business Families offer a number of such case studies. Something happens when a sports captain loses his so-called Midas touch. You see him lead the team from one defeat to another. A business leader seems out of depth when new challenges destabilise him from the peak of success. A political patriarch is deserted by his faithful flock when a younger leader challenges his authority. Arrogance or hubris is an easy explanation. Behind it is a complex process of losing touch with reality. My hypothesis is that leadership derails when realism is replaced by wishful thinking. This realism has two aspects in the self and with the world. Realism in self is bound up with realism of the world. It is difficult to be realistic unto oneself while being unrealistic about the world, though the converse may not be true. A. Realism in Self is made of Self-awareness and Leveraging the capability. Self awareness is shaped by groundedness, and aspiration. A successful leader is in danger of losing both groundedness and aspiration. Success can blind him to the fact that he is after all human with hopes, fears, feelings and tendencies. These give him strengths but also place him under limitations. One can easily make incorrect assessment and end up making errors. It is human to err. So, one cannot take success for granted. Even an expert has to be careful in thinking and action, just as the expert driver cannot substitute alertness and caution by expertise. Aspiration could also get blocked if success makes her believe that she has done it all and now is the time to enjoy fruits of labour. Sports personalities can go crazy with the money earned on endorsements and give less attention to preparations. Successful entrepreneurs can indulge in their fancies and roll in comforts neglecting their business. In both cases you can see how success has swept the person off his feet. Capabilities are leveraged when there is respect toward the past but not dependency or blind adherence. There is learning that opens up possibilities, rather than rigid reliance on past success. Claiming infallibility from past successes makes you inattentive to the present situation that stares you in the eye. You start using templates of the past for making current choices. While learning is important for the insights it gives you, templates could prove unreliable as they may not fit at all. Connecting the past and the present is of crucial importance. It calls for distilling the wisdom from experience and

connecting it to the demand of the present. If one is not perceptive, one can mistake track record for judgement and template for insight. Judgement helps you recognise demands of the present and challenges of the situation and think through the way of using your capabilities. That is called leveraging. B. Realism of the world is developed when one connects with the dynamic realities and creates spaces for collaboration. Connectedness with reality arises when one is alive to the changes, but at the same time is discerning enough to recognize the enduring aspects. If one connects only with change, the high and low tides will leave you stranded. You try to keep up with the Joneses but you may miss out on the essentials. This is most visible in fields where technology advances rapidly. New features are not everything, new foundational platforms outperform others. If one connects only with the continuity, there is a risk of becoming irrelevant. Discontinuities in technology, markets and models can overwhelm you completely. Leaders in mobile handsets have found this out to their utter disbelief. Collaborative spaces call for developmental orientation and acknowledgement of others. Collaboration is a sure way to widen and deepen ones contact with the world by creating a network of such contacts through others. It helps one steer clear of a lop-sided view of the world by presenting multiple versions of reality. But collaboration does not happen automatically; such spaces are to be nurtured carefully and held astutely. They arise from a basic position of I matter and so do others. Developmental orientation enables one to create growth opportunities to colleagues allowing a margin of error in the learning process. Nelson Mandela is an outstanding example of this kind of orientation. On the contrary we see in India a strong tendency to keep all reins of power with the self or within a small coterie. This inevitably creates rifts and people with ambitions move away. Acknowledgement of others means accepting their contribution to the overall process of achievement. This is a feature of realism with the world. No achievement can truly be called an individual achievement. There are individuals who make stellar contributions to success but it does not make it an individual achievement. Others contribute in big or small measures. Realism bids you to acknowledge their contributions. This strengthens possibilities of collaboration. Appropriation of credit to oneself creates distance with associates and can dissipate collaborative tendencies. This helps the leader in many ways to continue receiving collaboration. Concern for others interests wealth, power, culture and community Ability to accept and compose differences Security of ones own capacity and acceptance of its limits.

C. Case Studies 1.

Sourav Ganguly

Rise
Ganguly became the captain of the team in 2000, when it was in a deep crisis. Over the next few years, with the help of Coach John Wright, he soon turned the team into a combative unit. His team building skills, impartiality and guts displayed in supporting his team members through thick and thin, endeared him to the team. Experts credited him with instilling a sense of aggression in the team. Ganguly soon became the most successful captain in the history of Indian cricket. In 2000, when Ganguly took over as captain, Indian cricket was at its nadir. The match fixing scandal had taken its toll with some senior players including former captain Mohammed Azharuddin and cricketer Ajay Jadeja being banned from the game. The morale of the team was at an all-time low. Ganguly brought an optimistic vision to Indian cricket a vision which could set goals and inspire his team-mates, and eventually emerged a leader. He led Team India to the Final of the world Cup in 2003 after a gap of 20 years. Although, the team lost, people could see an emergence of a force which can standup to the mighty Australians. (Source: http://theviewspaper.net/the-leader/)

Decline
Gangulys fortunes turned with the appointment of Greg Chappell as the India coach. Ganguly was a star and so was Greg Chappell, a star coach. Greg wanted to establish his authority and wanted to encourage young talent, as a long term policy. He was not inclined to defer to the wishes of the senior players nor was he willing to give them concessions in training and practice. Sourav found it difficult to build an equation with Chappell and when he missed a few training sessions, Chappell got the handle he was looking for. That affected Gangulys performance as a batsman and the team was in disarray. Many star players like Warne, Flintoff and Symonds have fallen out with their coaches and Ganguly was certainly not the first. But he could not control himself, being the undisputed captain of the team. That was the major reason for his slide down.

Analysis
In terms of our model, Sourav seems to have ignored two aspects. One, he was beginning the phase of past his prime as a batsman in 2005. This meant that he had to take extra efforts to remain in top gear as a batsman. Secondly, he would have to build rapport with the new coach and especially one who enjoyed a high profile both with the Board and in the media. Sourav could not have continued the way he did with Wright. Greg Chappell was a different personality. You can leverage your past, but you cannot use the same template of the past. To resist the pressure and assert yourself by missing a few training sessions was a statement of irresponsibility in the larger context. Assertion could have taken a different form if only Sourav had thought of the larger situation. Somewhere success had dimmed his aspirations and instead ignited his ambitions of reigning as Indias most successful captain. He was known to be passionate, aggressive and stylish as a captain. These very qualities needed to be kept in check as the situation had changed in the five years of his captaincy. 2. Rajat Gupta

Achievements
Born in Kolkata, India, he moved to Delhi when he was young. His father was a freedom fighter against the British in the era of Gandhi, and later a journalist. His mother was a Montessori teacher. Both died by the time he was in his teens, a point his lawyer pointed out at his trial. "Despite being orphaned and despite having to watch out for his younger siblings, he worked his way through university in India with honors and his academic achievements earned him a scholarshipa scholarship to study at Harvard Business School," Gary Naftalis said at the opening of the trial in May. Mr. Gupta attended the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi for college. He met his wife, Anita there, and moved to the U.S. to attend Harvard in 1971. Two years later, he broke into McKinsey, a top-tier, largely white consulting firm for America's most powerful corporations. In 1994, at age 45, he was elected head of the firm as managing director, winning reelection twice and serving in that role until 2003. Mr. Gupta lived in Chicago for some of that time, and eventually moved to Connecticut, where he now lives in Westport, on the Long Island Sound. He has four daughters, who sat behind him during the trial.

With the ear of corporate chieftains, Mr. Gupta became active in philanthropic and academic endeavors, serving in advisory roles at Harvard and the Kellogg School of Management in Chicago. Mr. Gupta worked with former President Bill Clinton in leadership roles at the American India Foundation and as chairman of the Global Fund for HIV/AIDS. It was through the creation of the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad in the late 1990s that Mr. Gupta met the man who would help bring about his downfall. A mutual friend asked for donations from Raj Rajaratnam, the founder of the Galleon Group hedge fund, who pledged $1 million, according to testimony at Mr. Gupta's trial. Mr. Rajaratnam was convicted of insider trading last year. (Source : Wall Street Journal, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303734204577468951006739424.html)

Decline
Guptas slide began when he chose to associate with Rajaratnam. Through a million dollar donation to ISB, Rajaratnam had helped Gupta realise his dream of setting up ISB on the model of an American Business School. Gupta got associated with all the big names in US business and politics, such as Bill Gates and Bill Clinton. As Gupta got closer to Rajaratnam, he thought their secret partnership would never come out in the open. His motive in helping Rajaratnam could be layered. But he was also helping himself in becoming bigger and bigger. Both Gates and Clinton had paid the price for their drive toward bigness, the former paying out for Anti-Trust suits against him and the latter getting away by the skin of his teeth from impeachment proceedings.

Analysis
Our theory states as follows:
Leadership derails when realism is replaced by wishful thinking. Realism in self is bound up with realism of the world. Wishful thinking takes several forms. The most common is to think of one as larger than life and of others as dwarfs. The other is to luxuriate and indulge oneself thinking that one has worked hard through life and now is the time to enjoy.

Wishful thinking replaces realism in self when a person loses track of Self Awareness. In terms of the conceptual framework, there are two dimensions of Self Awareness which are important here. The first is of aspiration, which is a clear understanding of ones potential as different from an exaggerated conception of the self. The second is groundedness, which is a clear understanding of ones situation in life. The latter understanding encompasses all existential dimensions of ones situation, such as health, age, family and higher things in life.

It appears that an unbroken and enviable record of success led Gupta to think of himself as an influential person in the US. From Harvard to McKinsey to Goldman Sachs, Gupta had always associated with big names and influential institutions and personalities. He was seeking to enlarge the circle of his influence. Sometimes, there is a deep self doubt in such fairytale successes. Did I deserve all this? Did I achieve all this by myself? It is a no-brainer to say that efforts and circumstances combine to produce such successes. People like Gupta are uncomfortable in acknowledging the role of circumstances. Hence they quote childhood difficulties to show that efforts played a larger role even as circumstances were unfavourable. Gupta had arrived, but Gupta was not content with it. He wanted to expand his influence further. Rajaratnam had become his great support in this endeavour. Helping Rajaratnam with a few tips wasnt a big deal for Gupta. His aspiration got pushed under the great weight of his ambition. That could perhaps explain how Gupta let his guard fall. He never thought his phone conversations with Rajaratnam would ever come to surface. Conclusion It is possible for mentors to prevent the derailment before it occurs. They need an early warning system of the impending derailment, which is an ever present possibility for every successful leader. The framework outlined in this paper can serve that purpose by pointing out the factors that need to be watched carefully. Leaders need to maintain a live contact with their inner and outer worlds. To do so they must cultivate selfawareness, learn to leverage capabilities and create and nurture collaborative spaces if they want to sustain their success.