On leadership

We have a crisis in leadership. Smart, thoughtful leadership. That’s why people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, launching large bets in very hard domains get so much attention and fandom. Each era has had its prominent scientists, philosophers, and rulers. In previous eras, however, information was not nearly as available, and fast-flowing as today. Nor science made progress as quickly. Is Newton one of the most progressive thinkers that ever existed? Surely he’ll be close, coming up with one of the most profound realizations in the history of physics without all the calculations available to him to prove it properly. His work and Darwin’s theory of evolution are one of the most intuitive discoveries of humanity. 

Our pace of discovery of our natural world, the rules that govern it, and the moral guidance to keep those discoveries have moved at a higher pace than the leadership that rules the men doing the advancement. Steven Sasson, an engineer at Kodak invented the digital camera in 1975. His bosses at Kodak at the time were convinced “that no one would ever want to look at their pictures on a television set”. He was allowed to continue working on it and came up later with the first DSRL camera, similar to the ones on market today in 1989. It never saw the day of light. Kodak’s decline, as it tends to happen with companies falling off from grace, played out over decades as photography went digital. 

Nikola Tesla could work on alternating current induction motors and other inventions and patents thanks to J.P Morgan who put capital and with it his belief in Tesla’s work and ideas. It was the time of the light, Edison working on what would become the light bulb and many other inventions, Tesla on electricity and motors. It was powered by capital. The challenges of the 2020 decade and beyond are fundamentally different than those that Edison and Tesla faced back at the end of the 19th century. I attended a Marshal conference in which one of the scientists working on the large hadron collider in Switzerland said categorically that the work done there would have been impossible without the collaboration of many countries and scientists. That there is no big scientific breakthrough, especially in the largest machine in the world today that doesn’t involve many people from different fields. Communication is easier and faster.

The world has never been as united in a unique narrative probably since WW2 as the virus of COVID-19 has dominated the collective view of where we stand. In the US, where I reside, 2020 marked also the presidential election year. In the On being podcast, probably one of the shows I listen to that talks more about the future than many futurists podcasts, there has been a theme discussed a couple of times that Krista Tippett calls moral reimagination. The work that we, in a society that is increasingly global and interconnected, have in front of us is to adapt and evolve to a more sustainable way of living through leadership and building. There is an insistence on the universality of the problems that we face and that this will continue to be the way. The genie is not going back to the bottle, and the ways we have led are cracking in every one of our spaces. It took a couple of months to have a vaccine ready for a virus killing millions of people worldwide, more months of licensing and approval, and when all is done it crashed with the wall of crisis in leadership, in the moral imagination of our time. Bezos has said that he likes Amazon's business precisely because it’s a hard business. It’s the business of logistics and moving stuff around while keeping track of it and delivering it safely. Our institutions seemed to be so far behind the current ways of our worlds. A few years back enterprise software was expected to be more sluggish, less snappy and with outdated interfaces than consumer software, it was just the way of land. With time, we have seen what it’s being called the consumerization of the enterprise that is basically catching up to consumer software in terms of expectations. After all, no one likes the disconnection between the software at your work versus the one in your private life being so big. 

It seems to me that the leadership has not caught up yet to the progress in other areas of our lives. Or that our governing body is not pleased with the complexity of the business. We are building less infrastructure in the west, there’s a big wealth gap that is bound to pop up, struggling to distribute a vaccine or even agree on the basics of what a plan should be. And we are all unfazed. We have come to expect it. Jim Collins has said in the context of businesses that “Bad luck can kill you, but good luck cannot make you great”. That’s what leadership is too. Bad leadership killed Kodak. Good leadership brought us electricity but took way longer to reach widespread use and installation. Bad leadership is today, out there, maybe even in your environment killing systems, ideas, and processes that could be life-changing. 

The leadership of the new era can not look the same as the past. We need a reimagination of it. The problems we are facing are global, multidisciplinary, and let me say, life-determining for the very generation of kids alive today. Climate, energy use, viruses, all of these are scientific challenges but they affect us all and will require leaders who are capable of understanding and placing their trust on reasonable bets on the edge of our knowledge. To get these vaccines by now, many factories were put together, simultaneously in the hopes to accelerate the needed production. In a software system’s design, there’s the concept of a Single Point of Failure and it’s the concept of designing systems to be reliable and fault-tolerant by avoiding any single point of failure. You make sure that your data is available even if one computer in the network goes down. You built messaging in a way to detect when there’s a failure, you tighten up your loose ends. The distribution of vaccines in the US has hit its single point of failure in a system that is due for a redesign. But this is only an instance of leadership failure. What would you do with the leadership role that you have today?