By Thornton May
Futurist, Senior Advisor with GP, Executive Director & Dean - IT Leadership Academy

As an empirical futurist I encounter a whole lot of people. These people tell me about their work, their hopes, dreams and concerns. As I summarize my interview notes I conclude that in many modern enterprises today the concepts of “leadership” & “management” have been conflated. In popular usage “leadership” & “management” have become synonyms. They are not synonyms. “Management” is getting “there”. “Leadership” is deciding where “there” is. Perhaps the first and most important act of a leader is to understand when to lead and when to manage.

Understanding
We live in a confusing world. We live in a world of constant and perpetual change. EVERY vertical market is being disrupted. EVERY DAY in EVERY Discipline can be an inflection point [i.e., a moment requiring you to make a fundamental change]. “There” – that point on the horizon we are to manage toward has changed. Leaders give voice to that change. Leaders make that change understandable and actionable.

The path to understanding typically includes taking time out from the day-to-day whack-a-mole routine and attending some conferences. Alan Webber, former editor at The Harvard Business Review, co-founder of Fast Company and current gubernatorial candidate in New Mexico was ahead of the curve when he noticed that in the old days, a boss would see an employee at the water cooler and advise, “Hey get back to work.” In the age of connecting, an enlightened boss comes across a worker at his cubicle and chastises, “Hey get out there and learn something, meet somebody.”

In the vein of learning something and meeting somebody I recently attended a conference focusing on the impact of consumer technologies on enterprise IT. The topic was supremely relevant. The program was magnificently MC’d by a journalistic greybeard who seemed to have a pretty good feel for where the industry had been, is now and where it was going. What concerned me [and prompted me to pen this blog] was the parade of “hot” new tech start-ups accompanied by phalanxes of claiming to be “still cool” incumbent vendors trotted out for the audiences’ intellectual delectation.

It became very obvious to me that both new companies and incumbent solution providers did not understand their customers [i.e., the needs and wants of enterprise IT]. In approximately three hours of on-stage time solution providers rarely, if ever mentioned customers.

Ted Levitt, the revered former editor of the Harvard Business Review was a seminal thinker on marketing. He counseled generations of would be leaders that customers do not buy products, they buy the benefits the products create. So people who purchase film are not buying treated paper, they are buying memories. Individuals purchasing cosmetics are not buying chemicals they are purchasing hope. Effective marketing [of which there appears to be very little in the technology sector] translates “what the product is” into “what the product does for you”. In a similar fashion leaders translate “what is going on in the environment” into “what you need to do about it”.