A study where interviews have been conducted with hundreds of managers in Germany has recently surfaced, that two third of them sees the current style of leadership (authoritarian/command and control, hierarchy-based) as outdated and no longer valid to cope with today’s business requirements. They say that rather self-organization and network-based collaboration would be needed, as well as experimentation and non-linear search-approaches to work on complex tasks and problems.

The challenge that makes these managers struggle most is the management of change.  Moreover, it seems that they are well aware of the connection between their leadership style and the difficulty to manage change.

So far so good – so why don’t they simply change towards a new way of working, leading and collaborating?

Here are some offered answers from the presenter of that study, about what would be needed (and is missing):

• Courage to experiment with new things

• Abandon (at least some) power and power symbols

• There must be the readiness at the very top of an organization

Not surprising, thus, that this type of change towards really modern leadership only progresses outside large corporations, so far. Out there, in non-work-networks and, a lot of good action happens – in a space of our life where we are allowed to think and do whatever we find meaningful and interesting. It also rather happens in very small companies, where the contact to consumers is very tight, thus the contact to the needs of real life outside the company is much more intensive. In these contexts one of the most important questions still seriously raised and allowed: What is all that business and economic activity good for and who should it serve? Or asked in a different way: Are human beings there to serve economy or is the economy there for to serve human beings?

Very strange that this question is not asked any more in large corporations – or at least rarely. They seem to go with the assumption that it is self-understood that human beings are there to serve the piece of the economy that they represent, their big business. As soon as the revenues are great, the need is not seen any more to think about what sense all that makes for the human beings that form our societies. I wonder how such blindly executed business activity can keep a direction that serves life ans societies and that does not destroy life and societies.