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Good morning everyone
and thank you for coming to this presentation.
So I’m gonna focus on leadership.
If you go and look at the definition of leadership in almost any dictionary,
there’s one word that comes up, very strongly controlled
and the essence of my message really is there’s some megatrends around us
that are making it harder for leaders to maintain that control today,
in today’s environment.
Now, a lot of people can feel that we are living in an environment
that is reset by some global trends,
the crisis, the climate change, other kinds of global problems.
Now, already business leaders realize
that they cannot solve these problems alone.
It has to be solved in a collaborative manner
so once again, you cannot control things.
The other megatrends around, we look at, for example, technology progress,
the rate of progress in technology around the world has been phenomenal.
It’s exponential.
I could have given different graphs here, but we feel it every day,
its exponential rate of progress.
But what is also important is that as the base technologies
are progressing exponentially, the adoption,
the society also increasing dramatically.
It took the fixed line telephone almost 90 years,
television almost 38 years, the mobile phone 14 years,
iPod seven years, Facebook 5 years,
to reach 150 million users penetration.
You see the trend is picking up speed.
If you look at the Internet,
the design very much, you know, many decades ago as a computer network.
Today, we realize more and more that it is much more than a computer network.
It is a human network.
Now, this Internet today is also creating a change in values,
a change in expectations. What are some of these changes?
Clearly, what you see is the Internet is a much more open environment.
Today, you go online and you have people from all over the world.
It’s not just the developed world.
It's people from, you know, Africa,
people from India, and so on.
And certainly, mobile telephone is creating and enhancing this feeling
of openness and ease of access to everyone.
As you’re having more information being present,
the level of transparence increasing in terms of what you can see online.
So we feel it today when we reserve, you know, plane ticket
or when making some purchase but you’d have much higher
level of transparency about actions, about prices, about events,
and this is just creating a different kind of a cultural value.
Again, another very important cultural value is the collaboration.
You see this today in the younger generation,
younger people that want to collaborate much more naturally.
They actually want to do things together.
So look at these things, openness, transparency, collaboration,
what you’re seeing is not just the technology network
or technology phenomena, much more a cultural change.
If you look at the role of CEOs now in companies,
most CEOs are framed today in the perspective of Superman or Superwoman.
You look at most of the attributes required by headhunters
or by organizations or leaders,
it's a whole bunch of almost impossible attributes.
You have to be the strong person.
You have to be the empathic person.
You have to be everything all combined in one.
Now, central in this notion also of leadership
is this notion of taking control.
And if you look almost any, you know, change management metrology
is almost always you have to set the vision,
you have to seduce others to follow you, you have to be in control.
And this taking control is a very important part of leadership as defined today.
A lot of leaders are also very hidden from a lot of people in organizations.
You ask the question in terms of how much of your own character,
of your own inner feelings and emotions are visible to people in the organization.
The answer is very little.
People only see a very small fraction of the real you today
in organization the world around us.
Now, technology and lot of these trends are changing things.
Blogging is one very important development.
And there’s a lot of concern about should CEOs even blog.
And I can ask the question on here, too, but I will not because of lack of time,
but the whole issue is that blogging fundamentally creates
the sense of window in which you can expose the real you.
Now, do you actually want to expose yourself?
If you look at the example, this page on Facebook
with the second most popular page on Facebook, Coca-Cola page,
it wasn’t created by Coca-Cola. It was created by two fans of Coke
and they had to, in fact, decide.
Should they shut it down or should we, in fact,
share control of this page with Coke?
It was a major mindset change to share control with the fans
to manage the page together.
Look at, for example, you know, IBM has to go through process
of redefining values. And once again the decision was,
should we do it in a control manner by having focus groups and committees
or should we have a much more of an open jam in which we invite, you know,
hundreds of thousands of people all over the world to collaborate?
And they did it that way in terms of collaboration.
The key message early once again to emphasize
is that the moral compass of leadership is shifting
and they’re shifting because of global trends, because of technology trends,
and I think a lot of us have to ask ourselves really,
is control the paradigm of the future?
Thank you very much.