This article is written on the premise that we can’t know exactly what the future of leadership will be, but I’m going to share some ideas based on personal observations of trends in pshycology, technology and my experience with leadership to date.

Until now, leadership in business could be thought of as contributing to an organization by creating a vision, developing strategies and directing employees to move the organization forward by inventing, discovering, developing, creating and selling products and/or services used by it’s customers, ensuring the company’s on-going viability through financial management, and by creating shareholder value. From an inward looking view, this is a reasonable description.

On a macro scale, however, life is a little more complex. In the global perspective, we have to begin looking at things like, entrepreneurial aspirations (i.e. the wish for employees to lead themselves) and the increasing number of entrepreneurial companies, environmental considerations (i.e. we can no longer operate in ignorance of the impact we have on the earth and the impact the earth has on us and future generations), the need for agility (i.e. the ability of a company to rapidly adopt new ideas, methodologies and technologies) and a search by many, especially the underprivileged in the world and others on their behalf, for justice and freedom in the light of new technologies which are exposing the most egregious discrepancies in the world’s distribution of wealth and infrastructure, even in the most technologically deprived countries.

People everywhere are searching for new meaning and happiness in their lives. They are beginning to recognize that we are all working together on a relatively small planet and their place of employment is more often becoming either the place where they find meaning or the place they eventually abandon. More and more people are willing to work for NGO’s at lower salaries simply because they feel they are serving a greater purpose and, if you doubt this trend, read Blessed Unrest by Paul Hawkens which gives an indication of the massive growth in the numbers of non-profits in recent years. There are even new classes of organizations arising which are somewhere between “for-profit” and “not-for-profit”, which are for-profit but specifically focused on serving the greater good.

What is the Future of Leadership? » Continue reading “The Future of Leadership”

Have you ever noticed how world of business increasingly depends on concepts such as Business Clustering (geographically grouped businesses that work together to provide functions that one business alone can’t) as well as the growth of Global Innovation Networks (GIN – businesses that connect together globally to provide innovative products more efficiently by utilizing the local strengths and unique competative qualities of each country and market). Both trends continue in spite of the fact that, particularly from a GIN perspective and especially in weak economies, there is a continuous outcry to stop outsourcing and create jobs locally.

Have you ever noticed how much the structure of Business Clustering and Global Innovation Networks resemble the formation of neural nets in the brain? Just as there is a certain randomness in the brain’s learning process where dendrites create random spikes to other neural paths, some of which survive and other of which don’t, businesses create collaborative ventures and, likewise, some of these serve the needs of the market and others don’t. Just as the brain has compartmentalized functions and specific neurons that play different roles in the functioning of the brain, businesses have specific roles which they play and each cluster serves a different market segment.

So what does this similarity teach business leaders about the creation of Sustainable Businesses?

» Continue reading “Sustainable Business and Global Innovation Networks”