Kenichi Ohmae: Is there a Cyberleader in the House?

Who knows--when the Martians finally land on earth, they may be demanding, "Take me to your cyberleader."

As if understanding your business, employees, product-line, distribution chains, financials, and holding the room during meetings (annual or otherwise) wasn't enough, today's executives often preside over far-flung enterprises and oversee employees on more than one continent, let alone in more than one city. In addition, your company's online presence, especially if it includes social media, can mean that you are pursuing 24/7 exposure to the world at large. Are you able to hold that larger room?

Management guru Kenichi Ohmae ("Mr. Strategy") urges that you strive to play the new room just as well as you play to the traditional room--that requires honing your "cyberleadership" skills. This new skill set includes being able to communicate with people you've never seen or met and who, most likely, are culturally different from you: these are your employees in Asia, Africa, Europe, or South America (if you are a North America-based company). Your favorite war story or NFL analogy might not fly in that room. How do you express your leadership dynamism in that circumstance? Well,it's certainly not intuitive, and it's generally not been taught in college or business school, though that will undoubtedly begin to change. You have to strive to develop a new skill set to address the larger room--like learning a new language, you'll have to be able to do traditional leadership and cyberleadership interchangeably. You might even have to speak the leadership equivalence of Spanglish.

But cyberleadership doesn't stop when you perfect videoconferencing with your colleagues from Barcelona to Beijing; it extends outside the company "walls" and through the entire chain of management skills that today's leaders must develop. Leaders need to know how to deal with cyber-customers, and the advent of crowdsourcing (opensourcing of the development process) means leaders need to know how to deal with a coterie of people who while only tangentially linked to the company, may be integrally involved with a development process:

 

When "they" demand to be led to your cyberleader, will you be able to step up?