“Change has never been this fast, and will never be this slow again.” So said Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel. To his point, it seems like just yesterday we were celebrating the eve of the New Millennium. We blinked, and over twenty years have passed.
Just since that day, the top ten companies in the world (by market value) were displaced by the likes of Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet (which owns Google), Amazon, and Meta (formerly Facebook).
The rise of a parallel online world and social “community” changed our society across all generations. New forms of local and global and local inclusion, exclusion, crime, and well-organized and rampant mis- and disinformation, created substantial opportunities and challenges.
Changes in the world of work and organizational management were just as profound. Technologies made some once human-dependent tasks obsolete. Top talent became accessible across the globe.
As if the digital technology tsunami wasn’t a sufficient challenge, we also contended with the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Great Recession, numerous wars, significant environmental degradation, climate disasters, and rising social and political polarization. These events became so frequent that many of us became numb to them.
And then, along came COVID-19, a pandemic affecting most parts of the world. Investors, business owners, and managers were quickly overwhelmed with significant, unexpected new challenges in traditional workplaces.
Fortunately, the speed of digital is not the speed of most entrepreneurial, small, mid-sized, and even the largest of businesses around the world. You have time to be thoughtful and deliberate, make some mistakes, recover and survive. However, a deliberate approach to adaptation, playing the long game of building value through capability (direct and indirect), and improving leadership skills to make it happen, aren’t optional any longer.
Look immediately around you at best practices, operational shifts, resource access, and especially, the changing expectations of the assets responsible for driving your success: the humans. These are the closer-to-the-ground changes that provide challenges, yes, but opportunity too.
Individual adaptation however valuable and necessary, is not the same as organizational adaptation. The speed of change across the spectrum of leadership challenges has never been faster. The stakes for leaders of organizations large and small, all around the world, have never been higher. New knowledge has become a tsunami the likes of which humankind has never witnessed. It gathers momentum each day.
This is the backdrop to the book, The Leader & The Coach: The Art of Humanity in Leadership, by world-renowned leadership, business and life coach, Steve Chandler and me. This is the jumping-off point for our short but powerful case for the need for leaders to rise to greater mindfulness and humanity in their roles, and how to get there. ~Will Keiper co-author with Steve Chandler of The Leader and The Coach–The Art of Humanity in Leadership https://tinyurl.com/bdfzffmr
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