Tomorrow starts today...
Globalization and the speed at which ideas, products and money (including debt) circulate from one place and one market to another, and the successive bubbles and crashes have created new types of pressures on the Marketplace. These pressures are illustrated at the business operational level by shortened product lifecycles and hyper commoditization with related erosion of margins, by increasing rates of workforce disengagement and decreasing customer loyalty, by failure of a significant proportion of strategies, M&As and change initiatives to achieve their objectives.
The old industrial era model is broken.
To succeed and thrive in the 21st century requires agility, and agility means to be able to deal with situations as they arise, new ways of connecting, collaborating, innovating, and perpetually evolving at every level of an organization to adapt to complexity and ever changing circumstances. It also requires courage: courage to remain calm and positive in any circumstance, courage to challenge the status quo and do things in different ways. Leadership cannot in this context remain some kind of power held by a number of happy few individuals at the top of the pyramid, expected to know all the answers and recipes for success, to generate a merry followship or channel stress top down, to fuel the treadmill of maximized consumption, income and expectations, with the goal to enrich themselves and another group of happy fews.
New ways of interacting
Rather leadership must be understood as a collective endeavor of steering a business collaboratively and responsibly. Responsible leadership is therefore a distributed capacity to collectively mobilize and catalyze human creativity and intelligence for the creation of long term value for the benefit of all stakeholders of an organization, and of society as a whole. Each and every person in an organization can demonstrate responsible leadership at his/her own level. It belongs to today's leaders to foster the development of responsible leadership.
Reconnect with humanity
Responsible leadership characterizes individuals and organizations that collectively demonstrate:
- A reconnect with "humanity" in all its dimensions, where the human being is able to think and take charge (not an automaton), to understand what is at stake, to interact meaningfully, to relate to his community and preserve his environment and resources.
- A capacity to see things globally; to understand the interactions between the various internal and external components of an organization, and anticipate the impacts of decisions; with the explicit intention of limiting unintended consequences.
- An ethical compass based on the virtues of integrity and wisdom such as empathy, trust, respect etc... the lens through which to make the right decisions and arbitrages, because there are no black white responses, and responsible decisions do require to handle ambiguity and solve dilemmas.
In this respect a voluntary pledge for graduating and current MBAs to “create value responsibly and ethically”, the MBA oath, started at Thunderbird, Columbia and Harvard in 2009, which does not go as far as what is listed above is a good start.
Accelerate Evolution
The major challenge is to make their organizations fit for the challenges of the 21st century listed above. Agility and adaptability to change, connection, collaboration, and improvisation require shifting from command and control organizations to flatter organizations where energy flows and where people are empowered to take charge, to explore the unknown, to learn and readjust by mistake, to co-create, co-construct their future. This is not just a matter of “conquering” more power. It is an absolute necessity. Otherwise, you remain on the banks of the flow… change or die… The challenges involve:
- A change of mindset in relation to what is effective in terms purpose/ethics, structure/governance, systems/business models, adoption of new values.
- More autonomy for more people –and the potential corollary stress-, so the (re-)acquisition of maturity and autonomy through adapted forms of education and learning, including exploration and mentorship
- The actual and practical transition from a current state to a fitness state… where to start, how to get there…
Get the ball rolling!
Responsible leadership is emerging. Each of us who believes that this is the way to go for a better tomorrow has the power to diffuse these ideas and to help put them into practice. Each of us can lead and mentor others to become responsible leaders.
The Management Innovation Exchange is a platform dedicated to spreading these types of ideals and practical ideas provided by its members, anyone can join.
Major organizations are undoubtedly taking the lead to get messages through:
McKinsey have been working in this direction for the past few years and are now coming out quite assertively. Since the beginning of November, McKinsey quarterly is a free resource. I bookmarked the following:
* How centered leaders achieve extraordinary results through Meaning, Managing Energy, Positive framing, Connecting, Engaging...
* An interactive tutorial on value creation that attempts to show how excessive leverage, financial engineering, the "treadmill" of high market expectations... can destroy rather than create value.
IBM recently published a report on Managing Complexity based on responses of 1500 CEOs on the challenges of the rapid escalation of complexity, identifying creativity as the single most important competency for enterprises seeking a path through this complexity.
More needs to come from the grassroots. Peer to peer, employee to employee. I welcome other examples and ideas to get the ball rolling...
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