Leadership: Leaders, Followers, Environments

Global trends affecting leadership

Several trends are affecting leadership in fundamental ways. Three of the principal ones are globalization, technology, and politics. These forces are apparent to us every day, from the new products that enable us to connect with (and disconnect from) others to the scenes we see on television and the web from other continents. The Arab Spring protests of 2011, beginning in Tunisia and spreading to Egypt, Syria, and other Arab countries, with citizens demanding political change, the transformation of Latin American dictatorships during the 1980s into new democracies, or the disintegration of the former Soviet Union, are emblematic of new political, technological, and globalization forces interacting with one another.

To be sure, one must be careful not to oversell the wonders of technology and social media like some breathless cyber-advocate at a coffee shop. Too many “tweets” and too many “friends” make it hard to distinguish the valuable and useful from the unnecessary and redundant. Yet, it is true that technology and access to virtually instantaneous information are affecting businesses much more quickly than before. When Netflix's CEO, Reed Hastings, decided to raise the price of Netflix's most popular plan by 60 percent and to split the company in two, the response from customers was instant. With one business continuing to mail physical DVDs to customer homes while the other offered streaming movies from the Internet, the changes required ...