Business Leadership: A Jossey-Bass Reader

Chapter 30. Leading at the Enterprise Level

Douglas A. Ready

For the past couple of decades, companies have focused on creating strong leaders of business units and influential heads of functions—men and women responsible for achieving results in one corner of an organization. But they have not paid as much attention to a more important challenge: developing leaders who see the enterprise as a whole and act for its greater good. And that perspective has become increasingly necessary as companies seek to provide not just products but broad-based customer solutions.

It is easy to understand why companies emphasized the development of strong unit and functional leaders. Since the 1980s, the dominant view has been that effective organizations are highly ...