Amazing story on the new paradigm of leadership

Almost three years ago, I attended a leadership seminar at which Carly Fiorina was one of the speakers. Yes, she supports John McCain, and was one of his leading surrogates until she admitted on camera that neither Sarah Palin nor John McCain were qualified to be a CEO of a corporation. However, a lot of what she had to say about leadership three years ago made a lot of sense (maybe they were her ideas, maybe they weren't; I don't know). Here are a few points from the notes I made back then:

• She said that as we’ve entered the 21^st Century, we’ve entered unchartered territory.Up to and including the 20^th Century, leadership was vertical, or “mechanical.Information went up the vertical chain of command, and orders went back down it.This was inefficient, because it meant that the leader was responsible for knowing everything that was going on among the rank and file, and for arranging for the transfer of information between groups that eventually reported up to him/her.
• In academia today, the greatest innovations and breakthroughs now come through collaboration between different departments (I forget the example she used, but it was something like biology and mechanical physics).Today’s problems are more complex, and therefore horizontal collaboration (vs. vertical chain of command) is more important.
• Important questions yet to be answered in the 21^st Century: How do we share information/power? How do we enforce accountability?

This perspective on leadership fascinated me because I realized for the first time why the traditional management styles of the organizations in which I'd worked were so limited.

And tonight I've found an inspiring example of how this new paradigm of leadership has been successfully applied. You may not support Barack Obama, but this is really interesting reading. And if you get through the article and see how he's organised his campaign, you just might be converted into believing he should be running the United States.