I’ve enjoyed much of the e-mail exchange and blog feedback about “The Wiki Way and University Leadership.” While next week I want to focus on the connections between the digital campus and the broadband nation, I thought I would first offer some additional thoughts on leadership.

From my vantage point, the distributed nature of the Net — and the emergence of bottom-up collaboration tools online — has helped advance leadership that aligns and leverages the Internet and its bottom-up ethos. The Net does not respect borders, hierarchies, command-and-control organizational structures, or traditional forms of power (including the power of centralized knowledge). Strong leadership, even charismatic leadership, looks and works differently in the wiki era. Barack Obama’s leadership style and engagement strategy epitomize this wiki-way of leadership.

The study of leadership has most often been framed by what the 19th-century historian and social commentator Thomas Carlyle called hero worship. Just look at the way America has built up its sports heroes, political leaders, and Hollywood stars. Theories of organizational leadership and management followed — hence a high number of autocratic leaders with a my-way-or-the-highway attitude. They’re long on order-giving and short on listening, great at micro-managing and poor at motivation, good at caring for their organization’s results and poor at promoting the welfare of the people achieving those results. Autocrats ruled most American boardrooms throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

A second tradition, which has roots dating back to the late 19th century, is generally known as the laissez-faire approach to leadership. Complex organizations promoted rational planning supported by various forms of meritocracies, plutocracies, and technocrats. The theory goes that in these “new” organizations, full of competent deputies, the leader’s passive, hands-off role leads to a “sink or swim” world. More times than not, the leader is herself or himself a career technocrat who has “made it.” Throughout the world, and especially in Asia and Europe, laissez-faire leadership is an extension of management rules and behaviors.

I think it would be possible to make a compelling case that both autocratic and laissez-faire forms of leadership are themselves products of the technologies and communication-patterns associated with the industrial era.

It is time for new leadership rules to align organizations to the realities of the networked economy. The combination of globalization, world-spanning fiber-optical networking, and new generations of students coming into the workforce is creating the need for new kinds of leadership. Leadership is no longer like piloting an ocean liner but more like white-water rafting. It calls for organizations that can change rapidly and accurately. And it calls for decentralized decision-making, motivated employees, and inspiring relationships. The nature of wiki-way leadership — informed by a distributed architecture that encourages distributed communications — means that power will consist of leveraging individuals’ power to work together.

But wiki-way leadership is hardly a foregone conclusion. This is distinctly contested terrain. Incumbent leadership is likely to resist the decentralizing of power that accompanies the wiki way.

Universities should model this new form of leadership to set an example for how to thrive in the Web 2.0 era. —Lev Gonick

Lev Gonick, this month’s guest blogger, is CIO at Case Western Reserve University.

Categories: Leadership