Daily Inspiration: “Ponderous leadership, slow structure, committee inertia – relics of the past….barriers for your future!”

“Ponderous leadership, slow structure, committee inertia – relics of the past, and in our eventual post-pandemic economy, new significant barriers for your future!” – Futurist Jim Carroll

You know that organizations are starting to move into the next phase when they start approaching you for CEO-level leadership meetings to share some of your insight on ‘what makes world class innovators tick in this strange new world?’

That became the focus of a clip I filmed in my home broadcast studio late on Friday: “Revisit the Future”. It’s an overview of the key trends that have unfolded with organizational structure, speed and leadership as a result of the pandemic. The video clip is here, but I’ll make it into a separate blog post later today. (Nice studio set!)

The key issue that I’m focusing upon is this: in so many industries right across the board, organizations have had to learn to operate at a new speed that is unlike anything they’ve ever know before. They’ve had to reinvent faster, innovate at hyperspeed, smash through innovation barriers, turbocharge decision making. You’re seeing it in retail, manufacturing, healthcare, transportation – everywhere!

Prior to the pandemic, many organizations brought me in for corporate leadership meetings for a keynote talk on the concept of ‘leadership agility,’ a culture that aligns to the speed of change by adopting new velocity-based management styles. The idea even became one of my key trends in my ’19 Trends for 2019′ series:

19 Trends for 2019: #3 The Era of Agility

If the pandemic has done one thing to the concept of corporate agility and leadership, it’s accelerated the trend!

And so if you aren’t now operating at speed – you aren’t operating fast enough!