Part 3: 21C People

What will be the corporate boardroom in the 21st century? Three professors from the Center for Effective Organizations in the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California—Jay A. Conger, Edward E. Lawler III, and David Finegold—open this part of the book and have outlined how boards and their governance practices must change if they are to truly play a greater leadership role in the future. There are five important changes that Conger, Lawler, and Finegold think need to be made to transform boards into effective governance structures: (a) the board must ensure their own independence from management; (b) they must hold themselves accountable for the performance of their boardrooms through rigorous annual evaluations; (c) they must more effectively build their knowledge capabilities especially in the areas of strategy, implementation, and globalization; (d) they must more successfully harness the power of information technology to ensure ready access to critical information; and (e) they must move their mandate from serving solely shareholders to serving a broader set of constituents.

In the 21st century, organizations will require people who are versatile and comfortable with themselves. They will have to be comfortable with exercising their tough and tender sides, with making tough decisions alone and with sharing power, with influencing and being open to influence, with passionately driving decisions and also being willing to admit that others may have better ideas or contributions that can shape the decisions, and with taking initiative in all directions. Distinguished professor of Babson College Allan R. Cohen and Stanford Business School professor David L. Bradford strongly believe that power and influence in the 21st century organization will be sophisticated and versatile. They've observed that too often managers are good at one or the other approach to getting things done, but that genuine lasting effectiveness requires both ways of functioning.

Framing has powerful consequences when it involves cleaving the world into us and them, an “in” group and one or more “out” groups; when others are included as part of us, their plight and delight are both felt almost as if they were our own, prompting effort on their behalf. When others are psychologically exiled to them, however, there is very little in the way of empathy, caring, or helping. Columbia University professor Harvey A. Hornstein's exciting findings are the scientific foundation for what has been labeled the psychological golden rule of organizations. His evidence invariably shows that when employees identify with their employing organization, experiencing it as us or we, rather than them, their work behavior is nudged by the golden rule's powerful psychological prescription: Harming you becomes difficult for me because the two of us are part of we.

People can develop emotional intelligence. Richard E. Boyatzis, chairman of the Department of Organizational Behavior at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University, along with his doctoral student, Scott N. Taylor, confirmed this finding by their research with professionals and graduate students: Adults can develop the abilities that are vital to outstanding performance in management, leadership, and many other occupations and professions. As leaders and managers, we can only create environments in which others want to use their capabilities and emotional intelligence if we ourselves are authentic and consistent in our own demonstration of these behaviors. Through the self-directed learning process, we have the opportunity to truly make a difference by developing emotional intelligence in ourselves. And then, by extension, to help others develop them. Their research indicates that we can access and engage deep emotional commitment and psychic energy if we engage our passions and conceptually catch our dreams in our ideal self-image.

Why is the art of managing people such a challenge for us when we seem so much more advanced in our understanding of people than we were only a few generations ago? What makes people continue to be so parochial and tribal when business is becoming more global and networked? Renowned London Business School professor Nigel Nicholson finds that many features of human existence remain unaltered, and it is these that make us subject to the shortcomings. Human nature is what stays the same. He convincingly argues that if we persist in trying to squeeze the human foot into the badly designed organizational shoe, we'll continue to hobble, stumble, and complain our way into the future. So how can we shape the shoe to fit the foot? What strategies can we enact to accommodate what we know about the human animal? In the concluding chapter of Part 3, Nicholson finds those answers for us so that we can do better to design the shoe to fit the human foot.