Leaders Are Masters of Their Context

This article from Fast Company, entitled “The Three Ways of Great Leaders“, provide and interesting perspective of leadership. The crux of the article details how top business leaders, from the past century, mastered their context by “seized the resulting opportunities”.

“…..in building their list of the top business leaders of the past century, Harvard Business School professors Anthony J. Mayo and Nitin Nohria have unearthed an immutable attribute that’s shared by all of the giants of business: They had an innate ability to read the forces that shaped the times in which they lived — and to seize on the resulting opportunities……… Henry Ford, Ray Kroc, Estee Lauder, Jack Welch — these business masters had more than their fair share of what Mayo and Nohria call “contextual intelligence.” That is, they possessed an acute sensitivity to the social, political, technological, and demographic contexts that came to define their eras. And they adapted their enterprises to best respond to those forces. Their outsized success at sensing opportunities and capitalizing on them had a dual effect: Just as the times profoundly influenced these business masters, they, in turn, profoundly influenced their times…….’We’ve always treated the historical context of a particular time as a kind of sidebar to any discussion about business leadership,’ says Nohria…….. ‘But we’ve found that context is far more salient than we ever imagined.’…..As the pair dug into the lives of their 1,000 leaders, they began to glean how contextual intelligence is an underappreciated but all-encompassing differentiator between success and failure. Seeing how context creates different kinds of business opportunities….”

Technorati Tags: Leadership, Context, Business

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