Leaders of the future are accountable for results. Leaders need to get those results through their people and partners. The results come from customers to whom people and their partners sell and give service. Customers have needs, wants and fears all upon which the results depend.
Leaders must understand the trends and directions that customers are following. Read this presentation on Leadership 2000 - Results Management and learn what leaders need to know today about trends affecting their customers and themselves.
If you want to learn more, sign up for NBO University's Action Learning program Trends mapping.
Leadership 2000 and Results Management are today’s talking points. It is not just that we have entered the new millennium. It is the fact that nothing really counts in the new millennium unless there are results attached to both our calendar and fiscal years. Leadership and management must focus even more on their objectives and expected results. Are the plans in the marketplaces in which we have chosen to compete, achievable?
The graph shows a curve with change on the vertical axis and time on the horizontal axis. It is titled the SPEED OF INFORMATION CHANGE.
Change has been rapid, particularly in the last 25 years. As you follow the horizontal axis, you see that for hundreds of thousands of years information and knowledge was not something that was available to everyone. In all cultures, East, West, North and South, information and knowledge was controlled by the wise man, the shaman, the village elder, the patriarch of a family, the king, the czar and their close associates.
It was only in the century 900AD that the first movable print was created in Korea. The ruling dynasty, however, saw the power of that technology, the power of information, and thus kept it for itself. It wasn’t until some 500 years later when the Gutenberg Press was invented in Western Europe that you had an explosion of learning and education. Schooling, the dissemination of information and the shaping of thought in the mass population occurred. The Gutenberg Press facilitated the Protestant Reformation and changed the entire philosophical landscape and political control in Western Europe. For the first time, mass communication spread throughout the Christian world, toppling Kings, Queens and dictators as well as Popes. Other aristocracies were created, but the real change was that information, history, sociology and mathematics were available to the larger population, which could then put the knowledge to innovative and creative use.
What followed over the next few hundred years was the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, which brought about a permanent transformation of the way many societies lived. This facilitated a rapid urbanization. At this time in your reading, I will ask you to pick your technology. Tell me, how old is the Industrial Revolution? Many of you chose the
telephoneas the critical technology, but it is just 100 years old; some picked the steam engine which was developed 250-300 years ago. If you pick other technologies it is very difficult to find one that is more than 300 years old. So the Gutenberg Press is the oldest Industrial Revolution technology; information and education led to a more urbanized and innovative society in Western Europe and thus led people to think about processes, bringing about the Industrial Revolution. However the Revolution is at most 300 years old; in historical terms this is a very short time when mapped into the span of human history.In East Asia an Industrial Revolution can actually happen in some countries within a generation. Singapore today has progressed through an industrial revolution cycle in just over 20 years. When businessmen visited independent Singapore in its early days (35 years ago) they were asked to build factories to support the industrialization of the country (low cost workers, seven days a week, 24 hours a day, industriously toiling in the factories to produce the goods that were needed for export). But in the last 10 years Singapore has shifted to a technology and knowledge worker-based society. The higher cost of land, higher cost of labor and a better educated workforce prompted Singapore to shift from industrial goals and objectives to strategies that support financial services, information technology and a future as a regional hub. So a generation will have experienced industrialization, the white-collar revolution and now, technology and the knowledge worker. The same can be said for Hong Kong where 30 years ago manufacturing ruled, but today it houses the the headquarters of operations that have manufacturing facilities in mainland China.
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