A New Construct For Global Leadership
"The key to successful leadership today is influence
, not authority". ~ Ken Blanchard.
Ideas are a form of power. Ideas that upset the applecart of conformity can be especially powerful. This message was driven home to me at a recent conference on the 'Power of Disruptive ideas' at Yale. The two-day conference, organized by a forward-thinking Swiss wealth management firm, offered a rare interface between private investors and eminent academics.
I was there for the chance to straddle those two worlds and exchange ideas with leading thinkers whose goals are closely related to our New Constructs initiative. Among the highlights were sessions on whether and how the world will de-globalize, whether the BRIC countries will become the next superpower, and whether the concept of superpower itself needs to be re-examined.
On the prospect of new geo-political realities, several key observations emerged:
From a bi-polar world during the Cold War to a uni-polar world since the fall of the USSR, we now live in a multi-polar world.
The financial meltdown has eroded the US's legitimacy to lead the world, and has increased the importance of countries like China and India.
While the US and Western counties have lost the legitimacy to lead the world, the Asian countries do not yet have the maturity to lead.
Governments and other global institutions like the UN and World Bank have proved incapable of delivering what the world needs today in areas like ecological balance, climate change, financial regulations, maintaining peace, promoting trade, and alleviating poverty.
At the conference, a World Trade Organization official lamented the way the WTO's vision of a simple, neat, universal trade framework has disintegrated into a messy version of globalization, with more than 400 bilateral or multilateral trade agreements.
This set me thinking. As human beings we want simple, neat elegant solutions that are familiar and comfortable to us. We naturally resist change. We're afraid of the new and unfamiliar. We would like to have a single leader, a common vision, and a clear set of rules that everyone follows.
Like it or not, however, the world keeps changing. The 21st century world is heterogeneous in culture, aspirations, and world views a place where every person and every voice counts. Globalization is no longer just 'McDonaldization'. We need to respect and celebrate the diversity inherent not only among all humans but all sentient beings.
If the WTO had been put in charge of promoting the Internet in 1990, where would the Internet be now? Conversely, why can't more global institutions mimic the Internet creating a global network that has no single owner, a minimal set of rules of operation, tremendous flexibility, and diversity in how each country, each organization, and each individual use it?
For anyone seeking to take charge and control it, the Internet is very messy. But for people looking to collaborate and communicate across a diverse yet interdependent world, there couldn't be a better solution.
Global leadership in the Connected Age cannot follow a hierarchical, 'silo' structure of command and control. Leadership in the Connected Age would be fluid and issue-based. It would need to be as local as possible and as global as necessary. Issues like climate change would cede decision-making to empowered global institutions; local decision-making would devolve down to the village panchayat level.
Sovereign nation-states have proven unable to deliver on their social contracts with their citizens; the old applecart of nation-states needs to be re-examined for relevance and scope. What powerful ideas can you share for governing our world in this century?
by: Sudhakar Ram
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