Chapter 1: Strategic Leadership: A Fresh Look

Leaders are people who can define and then move individuals, groups, and/or organizations from A to Z. “A” represents where the organization and its members are currently, “Z” represents what the organization and its members want to achieve. The problem is that in the twenty-first century the space from A to Z is constantly changing. We are losing our assuredness about how the world we live in works. In the past, things seemed certain. Today, they are uncertain.

The twenty-first century began with an interesting confluence of demands upon organizations and their leaders caused by the move towards globalization. The heritage of the previous century was a search for absolute truth and an attempt to fashion, in a Newtonian sense, a coherent global view and a focus on efficiency of results. Leadership theorists emphasized management skills based on an efficiency of means, top-down decision making, bureaucracy, and central control to bring about organizational success.