Tomorrow's leaders will act differently

I am old enough to remember when we had to use punch cards in order to use a computer. (And as a student I remember the trauma associated with dropping a pile of punch cards on the way to the card reading machine!) On these cards there was the injunction “Do not spike, bend, fold or mutilate”. The message was that every card was unique—it had its own particular message encoded upon it and anything that might affect this coding would result in error messages and computing problems.

It seems to me that we need to hear that message again when it comes to dealing with people.

A negative mark of recent years is that we have moved from living in societies to living in economies. In other words, we have moved from living in a world where relationships are important to a world where what happens to and with people is considered secondary to the economic factors surrounding the organization, area, or country.

In a society where the influx of information and the speed of change is increasing at almost an exponential rate, the need for people to receive consideration as individuals in their own right is more important than ever before. Unfortunately, for too many of them, they are grouped in socio-economic categories—and we wonder why we have problems.

Tomorrow’s organisations will need different leaders.

More information about Douglas Long on http://www.dglong.com/