I was reading this week’s Newsweek, and enjoyed the one-page interview with the CEO of Cisco Systems on the future of leadership. When asked about the value of different perspectives, he answered:
“There’s a fundamental change that may be really important to the future of business in this country and the world. At Cisco, we’re moving to collaboration teams, groups coming together that represent sales, engineering, finance, legal, etc. And we’re training leaders to think across silos. We now do that with 70 different teams in the company. We’re going to train a generalist group of leaders who know how to learn and operate in collaborative teamwork. I think that’s the future of leadership.”
It’s great to see this emphasis, and interesting to think about how software needs to evolve in order to facilitate such thinking. Certainly, software can greatly assist in aiding communication and facilitating more transdisciplinary workflows.
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Great post I’ve come to expect from you, but let my be Mrs Jones (my first English teacher): is it “software needs to (be) involve(d)” or “software needs to (e)volve”?
Thanks for the catch. I definitely meant “evolve”, and more to the point “engage”. I’d like to see vendors place more of an emphasis on this to make collaboration easier.