Dynamic Leaders
With the fast-moving world economy, leadership has become a shift away from managerial traditionalism to a more revolutionary role: that of business trailblazer. They are not content with optimizing existing frameworks or operating within the rules of present markets; rather, they are the inventors of completely new paradigms, literally re-mapping industries, challenging conventions, and creating unprecedented standards. A closer examination of the multilateral role of these contemporary business innovators reveals that they have played a most significant role in innovation, culture, market forces, and economic growth during the era of rapid change and high competition.
The most critical role of contemporary business innovators is their visioneering and setting game-changing innovations. They possess the sixth sense to foresee future requirement, see possibilities others miss and imagine solutions others cannot. Trailblazers create new products, services, or business models that create entirely new markets or render others obsolete. Take Elon Musk and SpaceX and Tesla, or company disruptors Travis Kalanick of Uber and Brian Chesky of Airbnb (beneath previous scandals) shook up sectors like hospitality and transport. These corporate innovators not only take up space, but they set a new mold, compelling entire industries to conform or perish, hence propelling technological adoption and innovation.
In addition, business innovators are also at the forefront of reshaping industry expectations and consumer norms. Coming with higher quality, unparalleled convenience, or even very unusual value propositions, they set the bar higher for others. Apple, for instance, under Steve Jobs’ leadership, didn’t just sell phones but a complete package of hardware, software, and services that created a new standard of consumer electronics user experience as well as design language. It set other tech companies to a very high bar of extending their services and products way out and thinking about end-to-end customer experiences. Similarly, business innovators like Netflix transformed the entertainment space with innovation in streaming and personalized content delivery and made models of media consumption traditional become redundant. The continuous quest for perfection and customer focus of such business innovators put the virtuous cycle of innovation which enhances human existence and induces entire industries to innovate.
The influence of such business innovators also goes fairly deep into organizational culture and talent management. They will develop mission, experimental, and dynamic cultures. They get their organizations comfortable with strategic risk-taking, and they are learners from failure. They innovate continually. They model the behavior, demonstrating resilience, flexibility, and single-minded striving for greatness. This kind of leadership attracts very special kinds of talent—talents that are drawn to challenging the status quo and to being part of something new. By developing psychological safety cultures, intellectual curiosity cultures, and shared visions, business leaders develop highly committed, responsive workforces who are able to perform well under uncertainty and bottom-up innovate.
Furthermore, such business leaders are helping democratize access and new ecosystems. The majority of record-breaking innovations build upon platforms that are more participatory. For example, cloud infrastructure-based platforms revolutionized by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, spearheaded by visionary business leaders, empowered start-ups and small businesses to take advantage of enterprise-class infrastructure with little initial capital investment. Democratization of technology has produced a proliferation of entrepreneurship and innovation in industries. By creating enablement technologies and open platforms, business innovators spur symbiotic relationships between companies, developers, and consumers to create strong ecosystems that spur collective industry growth.
Strategic vision of today’s business innovators also shapes industries by redirecting investment flows and capital investments. Investors, perpetually looking for the next phenomenon, are drawn to firms and CEOs who can talk about futures of possibility and a history of disrupting. It draws huge amounts of capital with it, which reinvests in complementary or related business, generating more innovation. It channels investment away from aged models to future-based technology and business practices that accelerate the growth and development of industries at a rapid rate. In addition, business innovators turn into good agents of social influence and good ethics. It creates a fund of capital to follow these, which again flows into allied or derivative business, further increasing innovation. Most modern revolution leaders today are motivated by a double bottom line: purpose and profit. They weave in environmental responsibility, social responsibility, and moral leadership into their business models at their very core, compelling a greater transformation toward responsible capitalism. Patagonia’s legacy of environmental activism, for instance, has set the benchmark for corporate accountability beyond the clothing sector. This ethical leadership, in turn, generates brand equity as well as regulatory policy and purchasing behavior, driving whole industries towards cleaner and fairer practice.
Ultimately, the part played by today’s business leaders in transforming industries today cannot be overstated. Through dreaming and carrying out disruptive innovation, recreating industry standards, creating new organizational culture, democratizing access through early stage ecosystems, redirecting investment flows, and creating social good, these are the true forces of change. Their constant search for belief, dissolving havoc with norms, and ability to bring about deep alteration are needed to the rhythm of the times. As the world continues to see its industries get up and running at record scales, the effects of these business trailblazers will keep on being broad and far-reaching, laying the foundation for innovation, competition, and growth for decades and decades ahead.
