Chapter 5: Digital Leadership

Klaus Schwab, Founder and President of the World Economic Forum, suggested that the digital transformation we are experiencing is ‘an invitation to reflect on who we are and our worldview’, because the more people reflect on technological transformation, ‘the more we analyze ourselves and the social models that these technologies represent and foster’. Thus, this is a change that will bring numerous opportunities for the improvement of society that necessitates even more of the best leaders.

Talking about leadership today is more challenging than in the past. We live in the digital transformation age, an accelerated stage where everything is disruptive and new things happen. For the first time, it is the future that comes towards us and not vice versa, as it always has been. Thinking about it, we have always been the ones to ‘direct’ the future, to imagine, and to create it. Today instead, innovation is so overwhelming and its speed so extraordinary that it seems to come at us, like a vortex, bringing with it a change that embraces everything. Many people feel the instinct to move away from it. It is useless, though, because it is too pervasive an innovation, and it is liquid, as Zygmunt Bauman (2013) pointed out.