In today's world of business where organizational boundaries are blurry,
intense competition dictates rapid change, and complex issues and
relationships cut across departments, business units, and even
companies, the old hierarchical command-and-control management approach
is no longer sufficient. Distributed leadership approaches are necessary
and no one individual can do it all.
In fact, an enterprise is more than just the traditional organization.
Value today is often created not just within a company, but also across
a network of companies. Being able to connect the various components and
to work collaboratively within the network is essential to maintaining
competitive advantage. Leaders today must be capable of identifying
potential partners, initiating and maintaining relationships, resolving
conflicts, and reconfiguring their relationships. Cross-Enterprise
Leadership is a new model for success in today's world of complexity
and ambiguity. Leaders who adopt this approach will be more comfortable
dealing with ambiguity, uncertainty, complexity and time pressures, and
with creating value through networks of relationships.
Small, domestic, entrepreneurial companies are, by their very nature,
cross-enterprise focused. Entrepreneurs will tell you that they live in
a world of uncertainty and ambiguity and that they constantly need to
adjust on the fly. Equally, large multi-national companies like
Wal-Mart, Nestle, or Coca-Cola are inherently complex and issues and
relationships cut across functions, levels, geographies, and companies.
Cross-Enterprise Leadership goes beyond a functional perspective to
understanding the complexity of business issues from all angles and how
they can be integrated, how leaders can rely almost entirely on
influence when they may be operating without power or authority, and how
they can develop the capacity to make decisions and implement them in an
environment filled with uncertainty and complexity.
Most managers operate like the traditional orchestra-waiting to do their
written part. But there is no tidy score for business today. CEL enables
today's leaders to be more like a jazz band, improvising and building
off of one another, creating music in real time and in relationship to
one another.
