Do Both: Organizations need top-down and sideways
Registration is now open for my annual SXSW report going live on March 16.
About a decade ago, I served on a World Economic Forum (WEF) council on new models of leadership. Back then I thought a lot about how our world was moving from the hierarchy to the heterarchy.
My thinking at the time for the WEF was influenced by how I was an active experimentalist in using the power of electronic communications to close the distance between leaders and their constituents.
For example, in 2008 I may have been the first chief executive of a university to host an internal blog where I could “talk” with anyone in the organization out in the open. To increase transparency even further, I created an “anonymous Tuesday” where participants could say whatever they wanted to me with full anonymity. Needless to say, Tuesday became a popular day for my community to watch to see what would happen. Eventually I needed to shut the blog down because I realized the world wasn’t ready for such a paradigm shift yet — things like Twitter hadn’t yet taken hold.
The advantage of being able to easily connect across an organization means that the…
