Rethink leadership

In the coming years, business leaders will be forced to face challenges for which they are ill prepared. For the past century, management has essentially focused on eliminating error and securing production. Nowadays, however, Google delivers beta versions of its applications to volunteers who are often only too delighted to suggest improvements. The rise of networks and interconnectedness has erased traditional dividing lines and brought together formerly separate worlds. Leaders must thus learn to manage their participation in many different communities and create value in a more open and uncertain context. Such changes require both unlearning obsolete skills, such as certain planning reflexes, and developing new skills, such as agile project management. Managerial roles and attitudes must also be rethought in the process.

Executives, talent managers and professionals at every level of the organization must recognize the emergence of these new demands. Indeed, the individual and collective price for ignoring them is reduced employability for managers and poor adaptation to business conditions for companies.

The publications selected for this synopsis underline three new requirements which deserve particular attention:

- Learn to manage uncertainty for yourself and your teams. Because it is risky to rely too heavily on knowledge or expertise which may become obsolete, managers must learn to support their teams in turbulent times.

- Learn to manage exponentially growing volumes of information to avoid being submerged and distinguish the essential from the secondary.

- Pay attention to your emotions to manage the stress which may be generated from a barrage of demands and interact effectively with increasingly scattered counterparts.