Reconstructing Leadership

Leadership: Business people never grow weary of chasing it or proclaiming it.

Even though the basic elements of leadership remain constant, we always grapple with how to be leaders among our competitors. Commerce, unlike leadership basics, evolves constantly. For example, major market evolutions always seem to happen on or around the turn of a new century.

The twenty-first century version has been fueled largely by the accessibility of technology. It’s personal. It’s mobile. It’s constant. On our hips and in our handbags, technology has changed not just how we communicate but what we communicate.

Everyone is a producer, not just a critic, of content—all types of content. Word of mouth has been amplified to unimagined degrees. We don’t just recommend a new detergent to our neighbors, we like it on social networks and write reviews on e-commerce websites. Customers influence markets and talent pools 24/7. Geographic boundaries are no longer an issue for data transfer. Add this phenomenon to other innovations in products and manufacturing and we have, yet again, a whole new set of demands for corporate management.