LEADERSHIP IN QUESTION
Nowadays, a culture of rapid renewal is healthy, so we must consider how an organisation handles technological breakthroughs such as AI. In the industries that transform the business landscape, R&D plus fast adoption and roll‑out of technology favour growth and a leading position in the marketplace. Business leaders must ensure they have the proper organisational structure in place and that this structure can adapt and scale to meet evolving needs. They also require the right routines, meaning essential processes should be redesigned to embed key competencies into how the organisation operates, ensuring they can be consistently applied. Ultimately, the capacity to learn faster and better than one’s rivals is the greatest competitive advantage. A philosophical outlook In the ancient Greek philosophical tradition, the essence of the world was governed by two basic principles: permanence and change. It remains the leader’s role to keep in mind this dualism and to understand how both stability and movement inhabit and animate the people they are meant to lead. All living beings – and in particular humans – aspire to persevere in their existence, or permanence, but they also make use of an ever-evolving world to fulfil this aspiration, which is where change comes in. This is true not only for what concerns leadership’s followers, but also the organisations themselves for which leaders are responsible. Ensuring preservation while promoting change must go hand in hand, so that neither entrenched conservatism nor frenetic movement will interfere with good leadership’s purpose. New tools and innovative techniques, plus the mind-boggling development of computer sciences and AI, are all extremely powerful but could become sterile or even destructive if their users lose sight of these two driving principles of our society and of life itself, ie permanence and change. Leaders must, therefore, be careful to avoid two often‑tempting traps: paralysing statism and uncontrolled hubris. Although immobilism doesn’t seem to be a predominating threat in today’s world, hubris on the other hand is driving the efforts of an expanding number of researchers and developers. More often than not, they seem to want to unleash the fantastic powers that they are discovering without really fathoming the whole scope of how these will impact their sheer vocation as living beings, which is to ensure the perpetuation of their human existence. Perhaps we should highlight the two possible roles of leadership today: the first is to ‘lead the charge’, to promote the transformation of our environment so as to best serve our will to live; the other involves taking a step back to reflect on the longer-term consequences that our unlimited creative powers will eventually bring to bear on our lives.
caught in a fierce storm, knowing your destination is crucial even if you must significantly change course along the way. Nevertheless, strategic thinking and practices must change drastically. The strategic tools and processes that have been performing for several decades are no longer useful in the present-day situation. The increasing impact of technology and particularly AI, the porosity between politics and business through the drastic changes in geopolitics, along with profound societal shifts are all good reasons to reconsider the composition of most corporate boards and the profile of leadership. Strategy is no longer about adapting resources to the changes in our environment to get an optimal match between the two; it is about creating a new world. It’s about innovating in every sphere – products, services, business models, organisation, people management, financing and so on. Most importantly, it also revolves around what not to do. The first thing to keep in mind is that when there is a fear of disruption, there are also massive opportunities. The future arenas of competition are still wide open, with arenas being those industries that transform the business landscape; they are characterised by a high rate of growth and dynamism. To be active and succeed in such industries requires paying close attention in many areas. To take hold of these new arenas, insight and foresight should prevail over prediction and adaptation. We need to ask ourselves if we have the necessary talent to explore and exploit them. An organisation must ensure it has the right workforce to achieve its long-term vision in terms of its future goals and strategic effectiveness. Its culture needs to be future and risk-orientated rather than anchored in a comfort zone of past successes.
BIOGRAPHIES Pierre Casse (pictured left) is the leadership chair at Iedc-Bled School of Management in Slovenia and the author of Leadership without Concessions and Leadership for a New World . Paul George Claudel held the post of director of human resources at several large industrial corporations before becoming a professor, teaching philosophy and leadership at various business schools and universities. Maurice A Saias is a retired university professor; he began by teaching economics, decision theory and statistics and has been involved in executive education in 55 countries across Europe, North America, Latin America, Asia and South Africa
Ambition • ISSUE 4 • 2025 33
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