Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

This is the second Executive Update in a three-part series exploring how organizations can use intermediaries to better engage in a particular (and somewhat peculiar) kind of open innovation -- solving problems by leveraging large, anonymous populations of potential innovators, an approach commonly known as crowdsourcing.

As the level of consciousness enhances, it will no longer be the survival of the fittest, but the survival of the wisest.

-- J.M. Sampath, 2000

Have you suffered personal turmoil in applying conventional project management approaches only to fall short of expectations more often than you would like? Do you suspect that having successful projects under your belt is not quite enough to be a top-performing project manager? What more is required of today's project managers to evolve to the next level in a new decade?

For those of us who love and work with technology, it can be very difficult to relate one-to-one beyond the superficials, because doing so makes us emotionally vulnerable. However, that level of authenticity is required if leaders are to influence and persuade others to agree with and implement their ideas and visions for results. This is particularly true when the leader is less knowledgeable than the followers doing the project tasks.

When you make a new thing using a collaborative iteration process, you encounter the question of closure at each iteration. And, of course, you have to decide when you've got what you need or what they want, and make a choice when to quit altogether.

Social media represents an incredibly important opportunity to leverage existing technology onto internal and external strategic and operational business objectives of all shapes and sizes. Who, for example, would have suspected that new product lifecycles could be affected by wikis, blogs, file sharing, and opinions?

"Nine outsourcing contracts. Do we really have nine outsourcing contracts?" The news came as a shock and a real eye-opener. You could tell.

The seductive beauty of owning your own house is that you can put up a fence, plant your garden, and paint your deck the way you want to, not the way your neighbors want you to, unless you moved into one of those subdivisions that control all of that. Ownership is synonymous with individual control and is instinctually attractive.