Systems Leadership

Leaders of today live in an increasingly uncertain world, and the challenges of the times are drastic. At some level, all leadership right now is crisis leadership - getting one's team and organization through unprecedented times. Sometimes the ability to lead through these changes is due to talent; other times, luck plays the more important role. Technological and political changes are upending assumptions and conventional wisdoms that have guided the world for decades. Tomorrow's business leaders need to navigate multiple dimensions and horizons in order to guide their organizations to success: they need to excel in strategy and execution, understanding details and context, navigating digital and physical, and many other dualities. This course explores how leaders at the world's leading companies are driving frame-breaking transformational change inside of organizations that have grown up with a physical foundation, or who have a digital foundation and are moving into the physical domain as a new entrant. The issues facing business leaders across multiple industries require insights on how to drive technological, cultural and ecosystem changes under unprecedented duress. The changes brought about by these dynamics require the development of new types of leaders which we call Systems Leaders. These people seek to maximize and thrive in the chaos of the times. Systems Leaders are adept at systems thinking - in having the ability to analyze the complexity in markets and organizations by paying attention to how the component parts interrelate to each other. The course will delve into the need for systems thinking at multiple levels - of products, organizations, cultures and individuals. By systems thinking we mean having a thorough understanding of how customer success is optimized by knowing how all of the elements of an organization work with both internal and external constituents. This course is a 3-unit version of STRAMGT 502.