12 Going beyond Leadership

The knowledge economy of the twenty-first century brings a very elusive future. Global business executives do their best to proactively prepare for what is to come. Often, however, by the time they hear it approaching, they discover that it is still quite some distance away, or worse, it already passed. The speed of business today brings about what Evan Schwartz called a digital Darwinism [2].

More than ever before, business managers need to be smarter, faster, more innovative, and more adaptable. They must be able to lead their executive staff and organization with unprecedented vision and execution to keep pace with the evolving technology and customer needs. As Schwartz writes in his book, “The world's biggest companies are gazing toward a future in which much if not most of their purchasing, invoicing, document exchange, and logistics will be transferred from stand-alone computer networks connected by people, paper, and phone calls to a seamless Web that spans the globe and connects more than a billion computing devices.”