What unifies the major tech trends/discontinuities is that they demand a sea change in leadership. When Napster happened - the record/CD industry tried to stomp it out with old world thinking. The recording industry lost a large chunk of its value in the bargain. They didn't understand what was happening, so they were destined to respond in the only way they knew how. I am still not sure, if someone were to sit them down & explain it to them, if even then they'd of been able to respond. It was indeed a paralyzing development. When I first stared at the Napster screen I sat in disbelief - that it could even work that way. The idea was mind blowing...
If we take this singular example and roll the tape forward, we are them but we know the general parameters of what's happening. It's different for us because we see the megatrends but don't know what all the impacts will be. The record/CD industry was staring at impact, too close to the crash scene to pull themselves out of it. Too invested to change course.
We only know the general outlines of what is happening, but we know this for sure: Command & Control reactions, which attempt to marshal these new forces, will fail. They will fail not because C&C is bad. They will fail because it doesn't work that way anymore.
Leadership in this new age, at minimum, accepts the shearing forces without applying generationally-based value judgements. The dislocations are too abrupt to know context. Without context we can not, and should not, judge. When I looked at the Napster screen, with my music on it, I thought, I already own most of this stuff. If the record/CD industry hadn't immediately jumped to a value judgement, and been so blinded by the massive violation of their values, they might have thought about how to appeal to a group like the digital demand.....how to coexist with Napster. My thought was that I'd pay 10-25 cents per song, just for the convenience of having it in such a easy format. The record/CD could have saved 10 years and turned Napster into a pay service immediately. But they'd also have to realize that the value of 'pure distribution' just vaporized. If they revalued their business to account for that, then they save themselves a war with their customers, 10 yrs and millions. The teachable moment is the suspension of judgement.
The open mindedness that come with suspension of judgement allows leaders options. Another key feature of leadership forward is the need for multiple perspectives. We constantly hear about how complex things are now. I can tell you, being drilled deep into technology, it's true. It's not true because of technology, it's true because of all the use model changes that tech innovation has wrought. I remember having a debate with a prior boss about the declining proportion of engineering/math majors. He, being a hard scientist, was quite dismayed by this trend. I saw students voting with their feet to move to the next evolution of our economy. My take is that commoditized skills were moving offshore & that today's challenge would be to assemble the output of those Engineering/Math majors' work into novel combinations. Folks shouldn't read Wired, they should read Fast Company. Business models are where these interdisciplinary perspective come together to create maximum business value.
We can not really know the end form of this new leadership model. In addition to suspension of old judgments & multiple perspectives, we need to understand that its not over. To that end - leaders will need to be more like explorers than Charismatic Answer Men. To receive these leaders we must change. We can not demand an oversimplified resolution. They won't have the answer we can all depend on - they will know that the 'it' is the journey. They'll say things like: It's somewhere over here. They will flourish in ambiguity & teach us to as well. I believe the rate of change has gotten past what our brains can see. It's as if you were travelling in a fast car but you can only look out the side window - you catch glimpses of stasis, but that's all. What if the world speed up so fast that it got past our ability to put our hand on the globe, stop it, think about what we see, collect our thought and move out on that insight? Forward leaders will have instinct in this new world and change course as they go. They'll have a sense for the 4th derivative & stop looking for the slope.
