By Thornton May
Futurist, Senior Advisor with GP, Executive Director & Dean - IT Leadership Academy

Every age, era and epoch has a feel to it.

Many journalists, analysts and academics attempt to capture this zeitgeist in an aphorism worthy of a bumper sticker. In the pre-bust dot.com era the mantra frequently heard at the top of the house was “Don’t be Amazoned, ” transforming the iconic company of that age into a verb. Fast forward to the age we just left where for many the chant was “Do more with less.” Judging from interviews and workshops I recently conducted with hundreds of executives, indicates that the mandate for our time might well be:

“Create value with data.”

A defining reality of the age we live in is increased digitization. Just about everything in the business world has become or is well on its way to becoming “machine readable.” This has the knock-on effect of making everything in business “searchable” and of increasingly greater impact subject to analysis. This changes how we must lead and the skills we must cultivate and celebrate in the modern enterprise.... Read more

By Thornton May
Futurist, Senior Advisor with GP, Executive Director & Dean - IT Leadership Academy

In my previous blog post I shared the general consensus that the state of leadership in enterprises today – just about all enterprises – was not good. Workshops conducted with five hundred plus executives at five universities concluded that “the world has changed” and put forth the hypothesis that this change “mandates a new kind of leader.” This hypothesis begs the question – what kind of leader does this changed environment require?

Working with David Weinberger [author of Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room is the Room and a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School] I concluded that “digitization has transformed knowledge.” I believe that the transformation of knowledge requires us to re-frame how we think about leadership.... Read more