The Future of Leadership

296 Pages·2018·4.094 MB·English

by  Bharat S. Thakkar

Edited by
Bharat S. Thakkar
THE FUTURE
OF LEADERSHIP
Addressing Complex
Global Issues
The Future of Leadership
Bharat S. Thakkar
Editor
The Future of
Leadership
Addressing Complex Global Issues
Editor
Bharat S. Thakkar
PREM Group, Inc.
Wheaton, IL, USA
ISBN 978-3-319-73869-7 ISBN 978-3-319-73870-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73870-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018931908
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
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Cover credit: Rynaldo Toemaang/EyeEm/Getty Images
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This book is dedicated to the leaders who helped make this world a better
place to live and work; and to those in the coming decades who would help
make it even better for the generations to come. Special thanks are due to its
contributing authors:
Aqueil, Bayo, Christiana, Deepal, Ezenwayi, George, Kadambari,
Kamlesh, Kartik, Lydia, Nicolas, Sam, Sarla, and Tom
F
oreword
Future leadership is all about unforeseen challenges, and we are in the
midst of it. It is not something that might unfold in the future but is
already happening and making waves. With rapid advances in technol-
ogy, everything is changing, including the role of a leader. Those of us
professionals and academicians who discern and practice it feel compelled
to bring it to the attention of the wider world. This book attempts to do
precisely that.
Leadership is no longer about a singularized individual at the top of
the pyramid but a collectivized whole spread across a wide base because
of the breathtaking changes across the world brought about by a conflu-
ence of technologies and related products, applications, and services. The
preeminent force in that confluence is information and communication
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technologies. That we now live in a truly real-time world where human
experience, both bad and good, is instantly collectivized and shared
because of the Internet has caused a fundamental shift in the way we
understand leadership.
Unlike in the centuries past when leadership meant exclusive elites,
mostly men, who controlled knowledge and information and therefore
societies, we now live in an age where information and knowledge have
been rapidly democratized in terms of access and understanding. This has,
in turn, made decision making deeply informed and individualized. I am
not going to dwell on the increasing danger that the rise of fact-free and
fake worldview presents us even though it is something all of us ought to
be concerned about because that has a direct impact on leadership.
The scope of this book is to offer a diversity of scholarly views on
how leadership—corporate, political, economic, social, and cultural—has
changed.
Although throughout human history the advent of technology, be it
the wheel, steel, gunpowder, printing press, steam engine, light bulb, or
telephone, caused unprecedented shifts in their time, what we are expe-
riencing now because an unprecedented confluence of modern technolo-
gies, including the Internet, is incomparable to anything else so far. That
is entirely because the base of the change and those who benefit from it
is wider than ever before. Essentially, knowledge is democratized.
This profound shift is shaping and redefining leadership.
The traditional evolution of leadership from being transforma-
tional—trust-based—to transactional—performance-based—to custom-
er-centric—satisfaction-based—to people-centric—delight-based—is now
at a stage that it incorporates all the above even as it responds to the
exponential growth of technology in every walk of life.
While the human factor remains important, a vast majority of peo-
ple do not consciously realize how much technology, including artificial
intelligence and machine intelligence, has become so deeply woven into
our lives. It is no longer possible to gainfully function in today’s world
without at least some rudimentary skills to operate smart systems. The
most visible example of that reality is the touchscreen phones that many
people now intuitively operate.
That there is so much more computerization in ordinary phones than
there ever was in the Apollo program that took us to the moon is a tes-
tament to how dramatically things have changed. This change directly
shapes leadership in all walks of life.
FoREWoRd ix
Everything is technology and technology is everything now. Even
in politics the ability to get rid of intermediaries the way Twitter and
Facebook have done, allowing political leaders to directly reach people,
has forever altered leadership. It can often be to the detriment of society
if not used judiciously but that is a separate subject outside the scope of
this book.
one can argue that it is no longer possible to predict which way the
future of leadership might turn in the next 50 years. It is true that any-
thing can happen given the massive flux we all are in. At the same time,
it is possible to predict broad trends in leadership. one of the distinct
trends is the way technology has so deeply embedded itself into our lives.
That will only get deeper.
At the end of the day, leadership is also about character, ethics, mor-
als, truth, trust, self, discipline, communication, vision, values, passion,
and lot more. The key is to understand and appreciate the impact of the
democratization of technology, information, and knowledge on each of
these to practice the art and the science of leadership in a new way to
manage, motivate, and mobilize resources to gain productivity and effi-
ciency of an ever-changing organization.
oakbrook, IL, USA dr. Sam Pitroda
Chairman Pitroda Group
Dr. Sam Pitroda is an internationally respected development thinker,
policy maker, telecom inventor, and entrepreneur who has spent over
50 years in information and communication technology and related
developments. Credited with having laid the foundation of India’s
technology and telecommunication revolution in the 1980s, dr. Sam
Pitroda has been a leading campaigner to help bridge the global digital
divide. In mid-1990s, he founded Worldtel in London and invented
mobile wallet in 1996 and set up C-SAM Inc. acquired by Master Card
in 2013. From 2005 to 2014, dr. Sam Pitroda was Chairman of India’s
National Knowledge Commission and Advisor to the Prime minister
of India with the rank of a cabinet minister. He was also Chairman
of the National Innovation Council, smart grid task force, railway
modernization, and public broadcast reforms. At present, he is founder,
investor, and chairman of six start-ups and several nonprofit foundations.
x FoREWoRd
dr. Sam Pitroda holds over 100 patents and has published and lectured
extensively in USA, Europe, India, and Latin America. His biography
was published in 1992, and his autobiography “dreaming Big” was
published by Penguin in 2015.
P
reFace
Leadership has innately existed as long as humans have existed. Perhaps
it is in the nature of life that all species consciously or subconsciously
create and anoint leaders. Leadership is as much about charting a right
course as it is about guiding followers along it. It is also about assuming
a larger responsibility than just self and thinking of common collective
goals rather than individual pursuits. Having this common understand-
ing of leadership and its attributes, the question remains about its
changing nature as the time passes. Leadership is quite different today
than what it was two centuries or two decades ago. The technological
advances assisted greatly in terms of the functioning of virtual businesses,
offices, globalization, and the quality of human resources. This brings up
a question about what would be the leadership in the future, particularly
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