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To understand the challenges of leading and managing in an infocracy today, just consider these common business scenarios: The account manager of a global company has to struggle to get peers in Sydney, Johannesburg, Kuala Lumpur and Paris to pay attention to his-and theirclient. A rapidly growing financial services firm is built around an extraordinary database that allows it to segment its customer and employee base more than 6,000 different ways. A financial services firm grows by acquisition, using a sophisticated merger model based on a fast, accurate and detailed database. A huge insurance company relies heavily on an enormous database and computer network to direct its phone business. A Federal Reserve Bank realizes that it must reorganize its employees in order to utilize new, emerging technology. A global factory automation company struggles to eliminate bureaucracy.
In all of these situations, the leaders or managers are learning how to function in the new, emerging "infocracies." The Information Age is creating a series of new organizational forms that are supplanting the bureaucracies of the Industrial Age. These infocracies create new dilemmas for leaders and demand different decision-making structures and avenues of influence. Some leaders are lagging behind, holding on to the bureaucratic principles of leadership with which they grew up. Others are forging ahead because they have to and learning the new habits and means of leadership.
INFOCRACIES?
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, Eastern and Western societies were largely stratified according to an aristocratic model, which conferred leadership and power by birthright. Kings and noblemen (the leaders were almost always male) exercised extensive power over their subjects. While this male-dominated, lineage-based authority structure was codified around the 13th century with the formal adoption of primogeniture, it has actually been the dominant model for most of human history. Aristocrats were thought to be the primary possessors of the wisdom and the "right" to order and sustain society. The rights to govern and decide the fate of societies and their populaces ran, without fail, through the family line. Simply speaking, the underlying assumption that supported this arrangement could be summed up as "father knows best."
But the Industrial Revolution-as surely as, though less visibly than, the political revolutions in America and France-began to change all that. The...