Making All the Right Connections:: The Strategic Leadership of Top Executives in High-Tech Organizations

Abstract

O ur world is a technology-driven world. Everyday the business press bombards us with information on new technologies, and on how these technologies help organizations become more efficient and profitable. Clearly, organizations cannot sustain their competitive advantage and utilize their full potential if they are not leveraging the newest technology to achieve their strategic goals in today’s business environment. Technology systems that support business operations serve as pervasive strategic assets, because they transfer one of the most important commodities in today’s organization: information and knowledge. Employees, customers, partners, and suppliers also represent important strategic assets because they provide the ideas and relationships that result in success. These people must use technology systems to accelerate the dissemination of information and development of strategic knowledge in line with the organizational strategy. The technology-driven world is creating completely new ways for top executives to formulate strategies, facilitate work and business relationships, and create value for stakeholders. The trends pose new challenges for executive leaders, who must leverage technology to enable and empower their followers to successfully execute the organizational strategy. Some executive leaders, such as Jeffery Skilling of Enron Corp. or Bernie Ebbers of WorldCom Inc., knowingly or unknowingly disconnect their people, and in so doing, disconnect their organizations from being successful. Others, like Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com, Inc., Meg Whitman of eBay Inc. or Steve Ballmer of Microsoft Corp., work each and every day to make the connections that are critical to being agile and adaptive in today’s rapidly changing markets. In this article, we show that to fully connect people and technology systems requires top executives to display outstanding strategic leadership that focuses on both strategy and people. The strategic leadership processes we describe below are based on the results of our interviews with 75 top executives of 65 organizations operating within five major industry groups (finance, information technology, life sciences, manufacturing, and services). All of these organizations use technology as a strategic source of competitive advantage. Key leadership lessons derived from our interviews are summarized below.