Constructing Leadership 4.0

Swarm Leadership and the Fourth Industrial Revolution

Richard Kelly

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319980614
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319980621
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Strategy
• Index: Business

The Fourth Industrial Revolution signals a sea change in the way we lead our organisations. Moving away from relational leadership and horizontal, organisationally-led development, it is imperative that business leaders are able to adapt to more networked organisations and shift away from dated assumptions of positional power. Constructing Leadership 4.0 breaks new ground by explaining the urgent challenges facing managers and business leaders. It will teach you how to:

• Approach leadership development as a system rather than a programme
• Develop an organisational ecosystem to support leadership 4.0
• Build collaborative networks
Cultivate a responsive mindset through sensemaking
• Use non-classroom based learning methodologies for educating leaders

Rooted in leadership development methodology and underpinned by cutting-edge research, this book calls for businesses to cultivate responsive leaders through a theory of connectivism and swarm intelligence that reflects the coming cybernetic revolution.

© The Author(s) 2019

Richard KellyConstructing Leadership 4.0https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98062-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introductory Chapter: Towards Leadership 4.0

Richard Kelly¹

(1)

Leadership Issues, Kent, UK

Richard Kelly

End Abstract

On Super Bowl Sunday in 2017, Uber Black driver Fawzi Kamel realised he had a special passenger in the back of his car. It was Uber co-founder and CEO Travis Kalanick. Kamel used the opportunity to confront Kalanick about Uber Black’s pricing structure for the premium service, claiming Uber’s pricing model was bankrupting him. A dashcam video recorded Kalanick firing abuse at the driver. ‘Some people don’t like to take responsibility for their own shit,’ Kalanick exclaimed as he piled out of the car. ‘They blame everything in their life on somebody else.’ The heated exchange went viral on social media, prompting an apology from Kalanick in an email to his staff that was published on the Uber Newsroom blog where he said, ‘I must fundamentally change as a leader and grow up. This is the first time I’ve been willing to admit that I need leadership help and I intend to get it.’¹ Travis Kalanick didn’t get a chance to become a better Uber CEO, he resigned from his post in June 2017 following mounting pressure from investors who viewed him as a liability because of his pugnacious leadership style and controversial lifestyle.²

This episode came at the tail end of a string of high-profile CEO resignations. Toshiba’s Hisao Tanaka quit over the Toshiba Corp accounting scandal. Volkswagen’s Martin Winterkorn resigned because of the Volkswagen emissions scandal and now faces criminal charges. Third Avenue Management’s David Barse was escorted from the building over a credit fund collapse debacle.³ Each of these CEOs was described as being ‘tough as nails’, demanding, and blunt, which sparked news commentary that their dissonant and coercive leadership style contributed to a culture of suppressing bad news which led to the organisations’ disclosure problems.

Something curious is happening in the world of leadership and leadership development today. Research reported in the Financial Post states that two out of five new CEOs fail in their first 18 months on the job, which ‘has nothing to do with competence, knowledge, or experience, but rather with hubris and ego and a leadership style out of touch with modern times.’⁴ Such dissonant leadership styles have led to a culture that intimidates coworkers, deters transparency, kills self-reliance and innovation, delays decision-making, creates unnecessary bottlenecks, decreases motivation and productivity, and drains the organisation of its talent.

Organisations’ annual spend on leadership development is approximately $4000 per person⁵ with studies pointing to a global organisational spend on LD in excess of $50 billion a year⁶; and, yet, recent research suggests that this huge investment is not paying dividends:

• A 2015 Deloitte study revealed that $40 billion of the annual global spend was squandered, despite 86% of organisations identifying leadership as business critical.⁷
• A 2015 Gallup study, which surveyed 7272 US adults, revealed that 50% had left a job because of poor management or leadership issues.⁸
• A 2015 Grovo study estimated that $13.5 million was lost each year per 1000 employees as a result of ineffective L&D interventions.⁹
• A 2016 Harvard Business State of Leadership report revealed that only 7% of surveyed companies considered their leadership programmes to be best in class.¹⁰

The state of organisational leadership seems more uncertain and discordant than at any time in its relatively short history, and throwing large sums of money at it is not improving things; it simply contributes to what Beer, Finnström, and Schrader term in their Harvard Business School working paper as ‘the great training robbery’.¹¹ This book seeks to address this leadership gap, a gap that aspires towards effective leadership, but has lost its way regarding how to attain it. To echo James MacGregor Burns, ‘If we know all too much about our leaders, we know far too little about leadership. We fail to grasp the essence of leadership that is relevant to the modern age and hence we cannot agree on the standards by which to measure, recruit, and reject it … Leadership is one of the most observed and least understood phenomena on earth.’¹²

This leadership gap has been compounded by the plain fact that we are transitioning to a new social and economic world order brought about by new technologies. These new clusters of emerging technologies, collectively contributing to Industrial Revolution 4.0 (IR4), are changing consumer expectations, needs, and habits, destabilising political certainties, and wrong-footing organisations by exposing their arrogant attitudes, disjointed structures, secretive practices, directive leaders, and sycophantic followers.

We need to create a leadership that is fit for purpose for this new technological wave. This leadership is being called Leadership 4.0 and it has evolved from previous versions of leadership.

This chapter explores the nature of Leadership 4.0 via a brief Western-centric timeline of business leadership and LD. The timeline charts the different actors, theories, and characteristics of business leadership and examines how organisations have developed leaders over the decades.

Timelines are awkward instruments—more intriguing for what they leave out rather than for what they contain. That said, they are a useful way of capturing trajectories and trends. This chapter will not be able to exhaust the entire history of leadership development and will restrict itself to four core pillars of learning that have helped shape and define leadership and LD. Such a timeline can help us review what has gone on in the past and extrapolate future trends—as Winston Churchill remarked in a 1944 speech, ‘The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward.’¹³ It will also serve as an orientation or compass to be carried through the book’s journey (Fig. 1.1).

Fig. 1.1

Leadership timeline

The Four Pillars of Learning and the Elephant in the Room

There are four sequential learning theories that support this timeline period which are crucial background to this book. A simple way to think about these pillars of learning is via the parable of the blindfolded men and the elephant. This is a parable that originates in text form from Buddhist scripture, but has been widely used in other religions and contexts throughout the centuries. The story goes that six blindfolded men were asked to examine different parts of an elephant in order to understand the nature of an elephant. Here are their insights:

‘The elephant is a tree,’ said the first man who touched its leg.

‘Oh, no! It is like a rope,’ retorted the second after touching the tail.

‘Goodness, it’s a live snake,’ the third man said recoiling back after touching the trunk.

‘Nonsense! It is a big fan,’ said the fourth man feeling the ear.

‘I think it is more like a huge wall,’ opined the fifth man who groped the belly.

‘Are you all dumb?’ exclaimed the sixth man with the tusk in his hand ‘An elephant is clearly some kind of spear.’

Some versions of the story describe the six self-proclaimed experts arguing about the nature of an ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introductory Chapter: Towards Leadership 4.0
• 2. Making Connections
• 3. Introducing a Systems and Vertical Approach to Developing Leaders
• 4. Leadership Development and Structure—From Egosystems to Ecosystems
• 5. Leadership Development and Connections—From Leading Through Structures to Leading Through Networks
• 6. Leadership Development and Mindsets—From Directive to Collective Behaviour
• 7. Future-Proofing Organisations for Leadership 4.0
• Back Matter