Chapter 1: The Evolutionary Leadership ChallengeWhat if one morning you arrived at your corporate offices and no one was there?
Your marketing staffers had decided to base themselves at various client headquarters.
The salespeople, equipped with Palm Pilots, Thinkpads, and digital wireless phones, were operating in mobile virtual offices.
Because of economics, customer service had been moved to another city, as had your distribution warehouse.
The R&D team you assembled was a collection of brilliant thinkers located around the world who worked with each other on networked computers and the occasional videoconference.
Your support staff -- accounting, communications, corporate counsel -- preferred to telecommute, plugging into the network from home offices and talking to each other via email and fax.
Even your personal assistant actually was located at the offices of your corporate parent, five hundred miles away; you and he communicated via calendar software, pager, and overnight mail.
What if, sitting alone at a big desk, you realized you didn't need a corporate office building at all? What would you do?
Welcome to the world of evolutionary leadership, where business strategies are fluid, workers are smarter and more demanding than ever, and the old rules of business just don't apply.
It's a world of global markets, ad hoc teams, telecommuters, email, videoconferences, online ordering, virtual offices, intranets, networked alliances, and instant information. And it's full of both challenges and opportunities for evolutionary leaders.
What Is Evolutionary Leadership?
Evolutionary leadership is a new style of business management designed specifically to guide top executives as they retool their businesses to compete in the eWorld.
In this brave new world, what does evolutionary leadership entail?
Evolutionary leadership means shaking up your corporate culture and fostering an attitude of speed and flexibility in order to facilitate the internal transformation to an environment for the new economy.
Evolutionary leadership means managing the clash between baby boomers and the new, brash Generation X and Y workers -- and finding a way to combine the talents of both groups to achieve success.
Evolutionary leadership means making the tough decisions that will set your company on the path to success in the connected economy -- and in the process save jobs, companies, and even entire industries.
Evolutionary leadership demands heroic behavior. It requires abandoning past business models and challenging current assumptions and beliefs. It entails breaking many of the rules we've played by for generations. It means sacrificing the comfort of the status quo in the quest for a new direction that will survive.
And most important, evolutionary leadership ultimately is not about connecting technology, but about connecting people.
Says Dave Tolmie, former CEO of yesmail.com, a permission email marketer, "The success of a company is based on the collective capabilities of its people. Every company needs to be more collegial and less structured so that the collective talents have a way to manifest themselves."
Microsoft chairman Bill Gates echoed the significance of the work environment in his book Business at the Speed of Thought: "The most important 'speed' issue is often not technical but cultural. It's convincing everyone that the company's survival depends on everyone moving as fast as possible."
Reinforcing that comment, international eBusiness consultant Eric Marcus says technology represents only 5 percent of the transformation process. The other 95 percent of a company's metamorphosis is represented by the changes in organizational behavior and culture that are at the heart of evolutionary leadership.
As a leader, it's not your job to worry about how your technology is set up. There are people more techno-savvy than you to make those decisions. Your job is more compelling, and ultimately, more critical: to create an environment where everyone can unleash their creativity. Technology is not an end in itself, but merely an enabler in the search for new products and services.
In the example above, evolutionary leadership means challenging the accepted belief that running a successful business includes bringing the entire staff under one roof from nine to five every day. Evolutionary leadership may require trusting employees to work independently in scattered offices. It may force you to give up some of the symbols of the Industrial