Own the Future: 50 Ways to Win from The Boston Consulting Group

Chapter 4

Adaptive Leadership

Roselinde Torres, Martin Reeves, and Claire Love

We commonly think of leaders as strong personalities who imprint their will on compliant organizations. Increasingly, however, business executives are finding something lacking in this view of the leader as hero. As the former CEO of IBM, Sam Palmisano, wrote in “The Globally Integrated Enterprise,” an essay in Foreign Affairs, “Hierarchical, command-and-control approaches simply do not work anymore. They impede information flows inside companies, hampering the fluid and collaborative nature of work today.”

Our research and experience suggest that the fundamental shifts in today's business environment compel us to rethink the nature of strategy, organization, and, consequently, leadership. Consider the following trends:

• Turbulence and uncertainty have undermined the effectiveness of long-range forecasting and traditional strategic planning in many industries. How can leaders chart a course when they cannot predict the outcomes of their choices?
• Companies are increasingly organized into interdependent, multicompany ecosystems, a result of lower transaction costs and “deconstruction.” When boundaries are blurred, who leads whom?
• The pervasiveness and economics of digital communication and computation have made every business an information business. In such an environment, how can leaders ensure that their organizations are reading the right signals and acting on them?
• Society's increasing interest in ...