“Leadership skills for the disruptive century” was the topic of a breakfast discussion at the Fortune Global Forum in San Francisco, led by author and consultant Ram Charan.
The lively discussion yielded the following takeaways:
“No longer does command and control work. Bureaucracy doesn’t work. I see my job as connecting the dots….and making people feel excited about their work.”—Denise Ramos, CEO, ITT
“Leadership is change. Only a baby with a wet diaper likes change. Everyone else resists change. The job of a CEO is to resist the temptation to look at last year, and to persuade everyone that where we are going is worth fighting for.”—Mike Ullman, Executive Chairman, JCPenney
“Anything that can be digitized, will be digitized—by you, or by someone else. Anything that can be information-enabled will be information-enabled…. Please don’t put the people who understand digital and analytics under IT. They need to be building your strategy. ”—Ram Charan
“Humans are social animals, and they are going to want human interaction indefinitely. There will be a lot of aspects robots cannot provide.”—David Gilboa, Co-CEO, Warby Parker
“I think this next era is going to belong to the leader-entrepreneur – who has the ability to imagine something that doesn’t yet exist, and lead the company to it.”—Keith Yamashita, Chairman, SY Partners