Long story short: In the end we’ll need both, a new system and leadership that builds state capacity. The Covid crisis revealed a capacity divide between East and West and accelerated already existing international economic trends. We may be in something like a “The Emperor has no clothes” moment: no leader and no amount of leadership can compensate for a fundamentally dysfunctional system that rewards the results we’re currently getting, as Katherine Gehl put it.[…]
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It may not be true that the 19th century French politician, Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin, once uttered the words: “Eh! Je suis leur chef, il faut que je les suive!” [“I am their leader, I must follow them!”] But the line is quoted often to this day. It evokes a chaotic world in which leaders have lost much of their authority, and feel intimidated by the uncontrollable power of the crowd.[…]
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Imagine a world where it is acknowledged that unknown unknowns are the primary triggers of economic and social change; where literally everything is recognized to be an “accident” (in the statistical sense of having a finite probability of occurring); where humans and machines coexist on teams where work has a high-knowledge content, immersed in unprecedented volumes of data; and where organizational and contextual complexity can only become more complex[…]
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Welcome to the Drucker Forum 2020, with a theme this year of “leadership everywhere.”
It is a theme we chose a year ago, before anyone could know the challenges that 2020 would bring. As it turned out, this year cast a bright spotlight on the performance of leaders everywhere – and the light has not always been flattering.[…]
If you’re working to improve your leadership capability, what exactly should you be trying to develop? The experience of the 2020 pandemic offers a powerful lesson: A hugely important skill a leader must bring to the table is the ability to figure out what kind of thinking is required to address a given challenge.[…]
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Has there ever been a more telling test of leadership than the past nine months? It is hard to remember a time when the values and purpose of an enterprise have been thrust more sharply into the spotlight[…]
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There are some things we’ve learned in the past seven months that make sense to carry forward into the next normal. Chief among them is that the amount of partnering among firms occurring to combat the pandemic, the neighborhood tie-ups to support small businesses, and bubble quarantines in learning groups as well as professional sports teams, requires a collaborative leadership style[…]
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A critical function of leadership is to ask questions and not settle for answers. This protects uncertainty as a space for curiosity and imagination. When there are too many answers provided and too few questions asked, things stagnate and the atmosphere stifles. Protecting uncertainty is akin to keeping a window open for light and fresh air, maintaining a sense of opportunity and the ambiguity that keeps the spirit of humanity as a search for meaning[…]
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