The Impact of the Knowledge Economy on Leadership in Organisations

Abstract

The world economy is in transition. It is moving from the industrial age to a new set of rules — that of the “Information Society” or knowledge economy. This will change everybody’s work, affecting the flow of new ideas into enterprises, their management, organisation and procedures. These changes have major impacts on the roles leaders need to play, and on the skills they need. The focus of a leader has shifted towards more intangible issues, being a visionary, a storyteller and a change agent. Leaders need to change and to keep reinventing themselves, they have to be ready to adapt, to move, to forget yesterday, to forgive, and to structure new roles and new relationships for themselves, their teams and their ever-shifting portfolio of partners, and they need to have the capacity to employ more than one style of leadership. The chapter reviews the literature on the skills and abilities leaders need to be successful in the knowledge economy, and describes the way in which they need to manage their organisations by managing the organisation’s business model, creating a risk-encouraging culture and by playing different roles.