Amit S. Mukherjee - Leading in the Digital World: How to Foster Creativity, Collaboration, and Inclusivity

Amazon.com recently offered over 50,000 results when I searched for business leadership books. So, you may justifiably ask, What makes this book different? Dont buy, borrow, or read this book if my response doesnt (at least) intrigue you.

The first fallacious perspective is Emulate this great man (usually a man) who behaved in this manner/acted thus/had these characteristics. The man is usually a very extroverted and very rich American or British of Caucasian ethnicity. These characteristics collectively exclude most people worldwideincluding most Americans, Brits, Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders. Yet, they bias our views: Even recently, Ive heard superstar leadership professors at top schools extol the virtues of a square jaw and advise women to lower the pitch of their voices. Even if you personally conform to this flawed stereotype, you cant afford to believe it. Quite often in the digital world, the people wholl crucially influence (your) success wont conform to it.

The second fallacious perspective is Our research (with tons of data) shows that these competencies are key for leadership. These competency models unavoidably assume that competencies that were useful in the past continue to be so. Moreover, they often embody unfounded cultural assumptions. For example, one suggests that dutiful people are less likely to protect subordinates from superiors. This devalues the performance of billions of people from cultures where not being dutiful is explicitly dishonorable. No wonder that many Pacific Asian business executives want Asian models of leadership. But thats a flawed solution: Instead of substituting one cultural paradigm for another, business leadership standards in the digital world must embrace diverse peoples equally.

Leadership experts present their percepts as ageless and universal, rarely mentioning technology. Digital technology experts see leadership merely as a tool necessary for guiding complex projects. Both groups ignore the changes digital technologies are demanding of leaders.

A brilliant academic study of centuries of coevolution of technologies and business identified epochal transitions that produced tumultuous change. Each time, sets of novel technologieslike todays digital technologiesraised corporate performance by orders of magnitude. They had long arcs of impactdecades, even centuries, later, we still use them. Not surprisingly, embracers often thrived; those that didnt inevitably faltered.

Embracing these technology sets wasnt easy: The long-arc-of-impact technologies demanded very difficult transformations of work, values, and organizational structure that changed companies and even transformed societies.

Leading in the Digital World differs from all other leadership books because it provides a model of leadership that reflects the impact of digital technologies. Instead of jumping onto the bandwagon of disruptiona grossly overused term that has gotten disconnected from its originally intended meaningit describes precisely how digital technologies are upending the nature of work and organizational structures and, hence, the context for leadership.