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Journal of Education for Business
ISSN: 0883-2323 (Print) 1940-3356 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vjeb20
A Review of “Leaders Make the Future: Ten New
Leadership Skills for an Uncertain World”
James L. Morrison
To cite this article: James L. Morrison (2014) A Review of “Leaders Make the Future: Ten New Leadership Skills for an Uncertain World”, Journal of Education for Business, 89:1, 57-58, DOI: 10.1080/08832323.2012.731438
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08832323.2012.731438
Published online: 13 Dec 2013.
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JOURNAL OF EDUCATION FOR BUSINESS, 89: 57–58, 2014 CopyrightC Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 0883-2323 print / 1940-3356 online DOI: 10.1080/08832323.2012.731438
Book Review
Johansen, Bob.Leaders Make the Future: Ten New Leader-ship Skills for an Uncertain World(2nd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler. (2012). 242 pp. ISBN: 978-1-60994-487-2.$29.95.
A BOLD PROPOSAL TO GENERATE A NEW CADRE OF LEADERS IN AN UNCERTAIN
WORLD
InLeaders Make the Future: Ten New Leadership Skills for an Uncertain World, Bob Johansen argues that we are in the midst of accelerating disruptive change. As a result, there is an opportunity to develop a new cadre of leaders who can address the future needs of organizations and society at the same time. In this regard, Bob Johansen, past president of the Institute for the Future, promotes 10 skills that will enable leaders to better react to the changing demands of organiza-tions. These skills are based on a 10-year forecast of expected future global forces predicted to have immense impact upon the ability of leaders to engage in meaningful roles. One of the forces identified is that of the emergence of digital na-tives who are individuals presently the age of 16 years or younger immersed in social media. These individuals are ex-pected to take over the leadership of organizations and will have a profound effect on how decisions are to be made and products to be produced. He also identifies cloud-served su-percomputing, ego-friendly products, amplified individuals with longer life spans, financial disruption, and an expanding conflict between the rich and poor as driving forces impact-ing on the ability of organizations to compete in a global environment.
Based on interviews completed with leaders from such companies as Procter & Gamble, Target, Walmart, Johnson and Johnson, and General Mills, among others, Johansen ar-gues that today’s leaders must learn to ‘listen to the future’ by being sensitive to cues that are around us. For example, he creates an acronym, UVCA, to summarize those cues that will impact the direction that the future global economy is likely to take. Operating in a UVCA world (one character-ized as by uncertainty, volatility, complexity, and ambiguity), traditional leadership strategies and corresponding skills will not be sufficient. As a result of these predictions, Johansen provides leadership development tools, professional advice,
and specific examples to assist faculty in preparing future leaders with the capacity to tackle troublesome issues lying directly ahead.
Therefore, the text targets not only undergraduate busi-ness students, but also those currently in leadership roles in organizations in the private, public, and nonprofit sec-tors. In this regard, he advises today’s leaders and those who prepare future leaders that traditional leadership practices such as problem solving, research-based decision making, conflict management, and self-promotion will not be suffi-cient to deal with such external forces as new technology, challenging environmental issues, depolarizing politics, and more frequent terroristic threats. To assist in the develop-ment of better prepared leaders, Johansen introduces a three-phase process that provides some context to the style and depth of training now required. First, he suggests leaders must use foresight and immerse themselves in becoming aware of powerful forces that will likely impact on their ca-pacity to lead. Secondly, they must gain insight on how to design appropriate strategies to advance organizational inter-ests in a significantly changing workplace. Finally, the third phase is taking action immediately to make a difference in an organization’s capacity to maintain its mission and ensure sustainability.
The text consists of an introduction and 12 chapters. The introduction references work completed by the Institute of the Future in collaboration with the Center for Creative Leadership in providing the background for defending the proposal of an entirely new set of leadership skills. Each of the next 10 chapters focuses on one of the proposed lead-ership skills beginning with learning how to apply creative instinct skills and followed by exhibiting clarity, dilemma flipping immersive learning, bio-empathy, constructive de-polarization, quiet transparency, rapid prototyping, smart-mob organizing, and commons creating. The skill labels used by Johansen are intriguing and provide valuable insight into the overall leadership development framework being proposed.
For example, in Chapter 2, Johansen defines clarity as the ability to see through chaos and contradictions in an effort to find a viable direction in the midst of confusion. To the author, as the world gets more confusing, it will also likely become more difficult in the future to exhibit clarity by pro-viding clear answers that result in immediate certainty as
58 BOOK REVIEW
issues are addressed. Therefore, Johansen believes that fu-ture leaders need to be seers, sensors, and listeners. They will be required to see through contradictions and also have the ability to discern what to do and where to go when neither is apparent. Another intriguing new skill to develop among future leaders is rapid prototyping introduced in Chapter 8. This skill reflects the capacity of a future leader to take a new idea and turn it into an actual product or service quickly with the expectation that a successful effort in this regard will likely require the experiencing of initial failure. This is a startling perspective suggesting that failure needs to be accepted as part of the process for becoming successful, especially when creating something brand new. Therefore, Johansen argues for the design of new assessment mecha-nisms of leadership performance that actually reward those who take risks and experience failure—especially during ini-tial attempts at generating something new and different for the marketplace. These and other examples of the new skills required of future leaders sets the content of the text apart from other publications.
Concluding the text are two chapters that illustrate an ac-tual model for learning the 10 new skill sets. In this regard, Chapter 11 describes an implementation model developed by the Center for Creative Leadership that adopts a three-cycle leadership development strategy. Initially, this leader-ship development strategy requires students to complete a self-assessment. Secondly, future leaders are challenged to apply the 10 skills though real-life work experiences. Com-pleting the training cycle is the formation of a personal plan that brings together the people, money, and other resources which can help an individual accelerate his or her career once employed. The final chapter to the text, Chapter 12, provides the reader with a series of critical questions that may be utilized in conducting a formal self-analysis of individual leadership capacity
The strength of the text is its practicality. Johansen offers many practical suggestions for learning each of the 10 new skills, beginning with a self-assessment. In this regard, the reader is requested to rate him- or herself and then to develop
a personal strategy using the three-phase training cycle previ-ously introduced (direction, alignment, and commitment). In addition, the author has integrated credible supportive mod-els and tools recently developed by the Center for Creative Leadership. These models add to the ability of the reader to actually get immersed into the learning process by extending current skill sets with a more contemporary set. It may have been helpful if the author could have matched item-by-item each of the proposed new skill sets with the current tradi-tional skills used by leaders. The direct comparison could have provided insight for the reader to compare what he or she is in command of currently and where changes may be necessary. Johansen does imply on several occasions that the new skills proposed are different from those in the past, but perhaps having a chapter stipulating comparative skills used today with those expected in the future would bring the message home more clearly.
This text is a must-read for the university-level business undergraduate, the newly hired manager, or a current leader seeking insight as to what lays ahead in terms of needs of future organizations. Johansen has put together an excellent text that could be used for supplemental reading in an intro-ductory course in management or leadership. The text is quite easy to interpret and includes lots of examples and intriguing stories for convincing one interested in leadership develop-ment to enhance personal attention to future skill building. The unique perspective provided by Johansen offers an op-portunity for our future leaders to discuss and analyze as they design strategies to enhance their personal endeavors. This is definitely a call for action. Those who desire to be on the cutting edge need to read this text. The text is worth the purchase price just to have an opportunity to access and preview the unique inside of the book cover which illustrates 10 future forces combined with 10 future leadership skills through a most dynamic illustration.
James L. Morrison
University of Delaware Newark, Delaware, USA
