"Dev Pragad On Being a Scholar Leader Practitioner, at King's College London"

From the Interview of Dev Pragad by Professor 'Funmi Olonisakin of Kings College London. Professor 'Funmi Olonisakin is Vice President and Professor of Security, Leadership and Development at King’s College London. A founding member of the African Leadership Centre, which aims to build the next generation of African scholars generating cutting edge knowledge for security and development in Africa. Prior to this, she worked in the Office of the United Nations Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Children and Armed Conflict.

Dev Pragad is a proud graduate of Harvard Business School and King's College London. He is a fellow of King's College London and completed the prestigious Owner/President Management program at HBS. Prior to Newsweek, Dev ran the UK edition of IBT Media. Dev retains a strong desire to continuously improve his skills and abilities and believes that the first step to being a true leader is to inspire others to lead with you.

On the subject of leadership, the audience at King's, the classroom in multidimensional ways eventually engages the subject of leadership from a conceptual and practical perspective. And so, the question of whether we have someone who's a leader scholar, a scholar leader, a scholar leader practitioner is something we engage with from time to time. Dev was asked how he considers himself along this spectrum. Whether he engaged much with leadership literature itself in the act of doing leadership, if you like, and how has this affected his leadership style. Following are Dr. Dev Pragad’s responses to how he fits along this topic.

My academic background at King's gave me a deep interest in understanding the theory behind things. I've had the privilege of meeting a lot of world leaders, prime ministers, presidents, and also CEOs of some of the top companies in the world. One of the key questions I often keep asking myself and reminding myself is that quality leadership matters, and has real genuine consequence for quality leadership and there is genuine consequence for bad leadership.

And this is something that at Newsweek I had to face: the consequence of a history of bad leadership. When I came into the company, we had to go through a huge salvage operation to rebuild Newsweek into this digital powerhouse it is today with over 100 million readers and a very profitable venture and enterprise. On the flip side, one of the great successes of quality leadership is, at Harvard, where I'm wrapping up an executive course, I spent a lot of time mingling with top leaders and studying about leadership. I had the privilege of spending an hour with Stéphane Bancel who is the CEO of Moderna, the vaccine manufacturer. You can almost say he probably is one of the man of the hour, coming out with vaccines that are vaccinating millions and millions of people, if not billions. And I had the privilege of going through the evolution that Moderna went through. All throughout, Moderna had struggled to be a company of significance until the pandemic hit. It was the sheer quality of Stéphane's leadership that brought Moderna at that point of time where it was able to step in, produce vaccines in a matter of two months and transform the world in terms of providing an end to the pandemic. Often the question I had in my head was, what would have happened if Stéphane had failed in his leadership journey? What would have been the real world consequence if Stéphane and BioNTech (the two leading vaccine manufacturers) the leadership team had failed? That would have had a material impact on the world and all of us. So this obviously is an extreme case, but every leader in whatever position they are – big, small, leading a country, leading a department, leading a company – whatever they are, their leadership matters. If they fail, there are consequences that will follow. If they succeed, there are positive consequences that will follow. I think it's extremely important anyone who is studying leadership embraces this very deeply: that being a leader may sound very fancy and very glamorous, but it comes with huge amounts of responsibilities; and it's something that is worth spending a lot of time studying because when you go through a variety of theoretical scenarios and conceptual scenarios, and you step into the real world – and leadership is often about navigating challenges and problems and finding solutions – you feel confident and you feel well-equipped to have a framework in your mind that allows you to come up with solutions and solve problems and take the company, take your organisation forward. So it is something I'm extremely passionate about and something I feel you can never say, 'I've learnt enough about leadership'.

There's always so much you can learn from literature, so much you can learn from your peers, and also so much you can learn from your leaders around you, who work for you. There's constantly- you got to keep an open mind and keep learning.