Great Leaders Don't Have Followers: They Collaborate; Huffington Post, 8/10/15

Don Tapscott, Huffington Post; Great Leaders Don't Have Followers: They Collaborate:

"I was asked recently about my leadership style and what makes a great leader. As Peter Drucker said years ago, stable times require excellence and good management. As we transition to a new age, our organizations need more; they need leadership. So managers shouldn't just manage. Today they need to lead and think of themselves primarily as leaders rather than just managers.

In the past, tinkering could do the trick. These times require deep innovation and transformation, though, and that means leadership. However, leadership is changing too.

The type of leadership I embrace mirrors the digital revolution I've spent my life studying. The old model of technology was based on the mainframe; all intelligence was in the host computer, and mainframes communicated with peripherals down the hierarchical network.

Similarly, the old model of leadership was focused in a single, powerful individual. Great leaders were often those with the biggest brain or brain/mouth combination. They created a vision and sold it down to others.

Command-and-control leadership worked well with command-and-control computing and command-and-control business. That's not how technology is modeled anymore, and increasingly not how business is done. Why should we keep the old ideas about leadership?

My approach to leadership is collaborative. This approach is the antithesis of the old-style, brilliant visionary, take-charge, rally-the-troops type. In the past, Winston Churchill, Thomas Watson, and Lee Iacocca embodied the single dominant leader. Today, the leader is a collective, networked, virtual force and no longer necessarily embodied in a single individual."