• Strangling in red tape? Too much bureaucracy? Risk averse?
• Large businesses need to be small at the same time.
• Multiple units free to act on their own.
• Encourage all employees to show more leadership.
• Balance central/top down control with entrepreneurial freedom of movement.
• Efficiency is still required to deliver today's products profitably.
• But it's bureaucracy when elevated to an end in itself.

Efficient? Or inflexible?

How quickly can you
change course?

• Being profitable today while creating the future requires a balance of efficiency and entrepreneurial flexibility.
• Learning organizations act without fully knowing where they are going, then learning from experience.
• Entrepreneurial businesses learn fastest.
• Balance strategic planning with improvization.
• Set targets - X% of next year's profits from new products
• Entrepreneurial cultures foster diversity - not uniformity.
• Encourage employees to disagree with you - not easy!
• Reward learning from mistakes.
• Punishment encourages doing what is safe and non-disclosure of errors.

Can management shed its negative image, be reinvented for the 21st century and differentiated from leadership? See Leadership and Management Reinvented. Also 21st Century Management.

We have an ideal image of leaders that actually says more about us and our needs than it does about leadership.

Do you think leadership should be redefined for a knowledge-driven world? Is our current concept of leadership not working? Is there room for heroic leadership today or is it now all about post-heroic leadership? Is emotional intelligence essential for leadership? Is leadership a role, like being a CEO?