I've been mulling over the ideas expressed by Don Tapscott at Atmosphere 2010 (and no doubt in his new book Macrowikinomics) about how the combination of Web 2.0 and the maturing digital generation is forcing organisations to re-evaluate traditional models of management and leadership. Rather than “coming from the top”, leadership needs to be demonstrated throughout an organisation. The stunning visual metaphor that Tapscott gave us was that of the swarming behaviour of starlings, where leader becomes follower becomes follower, all in the blink of an eye.
I've been thinking about my own career trajectory recently, with the nagging thought at the back of my mind that Corporate IT as we know it has a limited shelf life. I've written before about the ways in which the CIO role might evolve into a 'Chief Collaboration Officer', but I've naturally been also thinking about whether supplier side might be the place to build a career longer term.
Something that worries me about that direction, though, is that big IT players seem almost all fixed on old models of leadership and the cult of personality. Apple without Steve Jobs is an uninspired shifter of beige boxes. Microsoft without Bill Gates appears meandering and unfocused. Oracle without Larry Ellison seems unthinkable. SalesForce.com without Marc Bennihof becomes vacuumForce. Google without Larry, Sergey and Eric becomes AltaVista…
With the notable exception of IBM, which has been around forever, and so grew through other industrial and economic revolutions, I struggle to think of any IT company that has emerged to reasonable success without some totemic leader at the front, almost always demonstrating all of the good, inclusive modern leadership styles of Atilla the Hun.
So, the companies that are providing the bulk of the technology that is forcing the revolution are inclusive leadership-refuseniks. What for the rest of us?
In the UK retail sector, there is one notable success story that appears to have inclusive leadership (to some extent) bedded in its DNA. John Lewis (or to give it its full title, the John Lewis Partnership) has shared ownership at its core. It is not a Partnership in the accountancy sense of the term (you work your nuts off to eventually achieve partner-golf-life-balance), but much more inclusive in that everyone who works their shares in its ownership. Other than as a customer, I've had but a glimpse of what goes on behind management doors (an old acquaintance worked there), but it would be fascinating to know how it differs from public or privately-held firms.
In the meantime, it's back to the challenges at Imagination, in itself a company that is based around its head and founder, Gary. Some of the challenges we now face are technological, but many are the management challenges posed by the impact that technology is having on the world around us, forcing us to take different approaches to how we do things.
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I'm not sure I agree about the digital generation argument. If such a digital youth culture exists, what evidence do we have that it's imposing itself on organisations? I think that the operation in the other direction is far more powerful, that an organisation imposes itself on newcomers “socialising” them into the organisational culture. Having said that, technology is certainly enabling changes to the environment that surrounds an organisation which in turn forces organisations to adapt to that change or to flounder.
On the leadership point, perhaps it's because product companies deliver principally subjective rather than objective value and as such need strong direction on what that subjective value should be. Successful product companies often have power cultures to ensure that clarity of purpose.
I think that the features offered by new collaboration and communication technology are making it hard for companies to keep making the excuse that conversation with their employees as something that is hard to do at scale. When it becomes increasingly easy to become open and participative and all the research points towards that being the most productive sort of atmosphere for many companies what excuse is there for not attempting to make those changes?