21st Century Leaders Yogesh Pathak, 25.12.14 What kind of business and social enterprise leadership is needed for the 21st century? Here’s my take on some of the desirable characteristics of leaders. The objective is to detach from traditional organizational and leadership theory and think afresh. (Note: he/him/his should also be read to include she/her). The 21st century leader will attempt to solve one or more big problems, at least once in his life. A cognizance of big problems, whether they are at the local, national, or global level, would be an important ingredient of leadership. We see those not hesitating to take on these problems emerging as leaders. Traditional paths to leadership like private enterprises, public service, NGOs, social enterprise, etc will matter less to these leaders than the ability to focus on these problems and devising tangible ways to solve them. Creativity, ability to reflect, and original thinking will matter a lot. In fact, we will see leaders “aligning” in three groups, just on this dimension. The first type of leaders will be those who focus on big problems only, as an aspiration for their contribution to the world. They will build organizations around solving these problems, raise resources, and collaborate with the business, government and social ecosystems as needed. This leadership will draw as needed from science, technology, creativity, design, and social and behavioral sciences. More importantly, it will try not to create new problems while solving the old ones. Traditional economics, finance, and the importance of capital as a resource may even be ignored by these leaders as they had a hand in creating several of the old problems. The second type of leader will be equally creative and reflective and will lead his organization to success via various innovations, but solving society’s problems may not be on his agenda. His mission may be about creating new products and services that society consumes. Personally, wealth accumulation will matter less to the above two types of leaders than the fulfillment and recognition of solving big problems or creating great products. The last type of leader will be “very 20th century” – one aspiring to take a typical profit-making operation from success to success. He will measure his professional success by traditional metrics like revenues, profits, and shareholders returns, and his personal success by the wealth he accumulates. There may not be much original learning to be done from this type of leader as technology, processes, and management techniques get commoditized globally and quickly. This kind of leader risks eventually fading into the corporate equivalent of career bureaucrats. To the extent leaders of type 2 and 3 get involved in problem-solving utilizing the products or capital they create (e.g. philanthropy), they have some role to play. The 21st century leader will know the importance of history. A deep curiosity of humanity’s fascinating history, and how it affects our present and future will be a key characteristic of the leader. He won’t exactly “live in the past” as he knows his mission is to build the future, but he will know that there is a lot that can be learned from history. He will be particularly interested in learning history along it’s non-traditional dimensions: social and behavioral theories, migration, economics and exchange of assets, utilization of natural resources, and so on. The 21st century leader will show a tendency to “dig deeper”. 20th century leaders believed in abstracting information that came to them, simplifying it for stakeholders (e.g. boards, shareholders or employees). Waves of technology came one after the other, allowing them to consume and connect more and more information. Often this led to insights that were tactical and aided in corporate profit-making objectives. But this did not necessarily lead to insights that allow us to solve global problems on a long-term basis. The 21st century leader will be almost religious about questioning assumptions, long-held theories, and clichéd management ideas. He will constantly assess whether the information he is working with helps solve problems or create opportunities in ways not imagined so far. As an example, take the highly clichéd corporate value “respect for the individual”. Leaders will try and think how such values relate to the changing context of the modern world. Going beyond respect for the individual, how about respecting an individual’s independence in terms of freedom of choosing the work she wants to does, organize her schedule, and the career path she wants to take. A good leader will dig deeper on the most common aspects of organization-building and show a remarkable ability to innovate. The 21st century leader will know that there is a lot to unlearn from the 20th century. The 20th century looks like a huge leap in terms of ideas, technology, innovation, globalization, and social change. To me, the first half of the 20th century was far more remarkable than it’s second half. Battles on principles and beliefs were fought in the first half, some violent, some non-violent. Boundaries of scientific thinking were pushed, even though technology to support it did not even exist as yet. By the end of the first half, many countries had become free from the shackles of imperialism. Building blocks of modern technology (think of space, computers, aviation, fossil fuels), finance, and globalization were in place. Compared to the progress achieved in the first fifty years, the second half looked unremarkable. The very innovations that impressed us had also created some major traps. Frontiers like the environment, social equity, human rights, and transparency were neglected or paid lip service to. Corporations, societies, and governments alike succumbed to greed and complacency and stopped caring for the very principles that had made them great. The population bomb became a reality, and the green revolution and modern irrigation barely saved us, but not before sowing the seeds of environmental and health destruction. The leader who wants to innovate in the 21st century will have to throw away the ‘leadership DNA’ from the 20th century’s second half. We will have to unlearn tenets like unabashed exploitation of natural resources, finding loopholes in regulations in order to succeed, labour arbitrage to maximize profits, corruption to win approvals, short-term thinking, wealth creation at any cost, and so on. Many of these were considered pathways to guaranteed success in the 20th century. Fulfillment for the 21st century leader will be different than how we perceive it now. Today, a leader’s fulfillment is driven by outcomes, scale, wealth, and major societal recognition. Often they use marketing and self-promotion to their advantage to achieve these goals. Every successful innovation, framework, or working model is debated to see if it will scale and what outcomes it produces. Leaders whose models scale receive recognition. All of this falls well in line with the hero-worshipping trait that is classic among humans. The 21st century leader will truly believe that everyone can be a hero. Constant experimentation, lifelong curiosity, and interdisciplinary learning will be cornerstones of their work. They will know that inherently some of their experiments will fail and this will be OK. For some, a majority of their experiments may fail, but they would still be valued for the learning. Fulfillment will be about finding principles along your unique journey, customizing your own learning and work experience to suit your passions and constraints, designing and executing experiments that implement your principles and help solve problems. Outcomes will anyway follow the well-thought out and well-executed experiments. Some experiments will find scale, some will not. However this will not take away from the democratic, “thousand light bulbs” innovation that will be a hallmark of this type of leadership. Entrepreneurship will be a subset of this phenomenon and is already displaying these patterns.
Posted on: Wed, 21 Jan 2015 05:33:10 +0000
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