20 Dialogues on Modern Leadership

By Duke Corporate Education

Duke Corporate Education is one of the world’s leading providers of executive education (ranked number 1 by the Financial Times in 2023) and the co-publisher (with LID) of the leadership journal, Dialogue. This book (published to coincide with the 10th anniversary of Dialogue) contains 20 of the most influential articles from Dialogue about modern leadership. Covering the five key topics of leadership, strategy, innovation, finance and marketing, the articles are written by well-known thinkers and practitioners from within Duke University and elsewhere. The result is a collection of authoritative and highly informative readings that will provide managers and executives with a solid briefing and review of current and future issues in management and leadership.

• Language: English
• Publisher: LID Publishing
• Release date: Jun 27, 2024
• ISBN: 9781915951649

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

THE FUTURE OF LEADERSHIP, NOW

Ten years of human leadership thinking

Writing Sharmla Chetty

SHARMLA CHETTY is chief executive of Duke Corporate Education

What’s next? It’s a question that we at Duke Corporate Education have been asking, and answering, in the ten-year life of our house magazine, Dialogue. Preparing our partners for what is to come is at the heart of what we do. That is one reason why we are consistently top-ranked in the Financial Times’ global rankings for custom executive education: by exploring the future today, we ready organizations for the opportunities of tomorrow.

Our global footprint and diverse set of clients enables us to bring unique insight to new situations. Couple this with local sensibilities and delivery capabilities in over 85 countries, and you get high-quality leadership solutions delivered anywhere in the world. We lead with ideas founded on our experience and insight. But we believe the best results come from iteration and collaboration.

Our thought leadership is a manifestation of this. Our executives and educators deliver expert insights from the intersection of business and education. Many of those leadership thinkers feature in this anniversary anthology. In a decade of publication, Dialogue magazine has provided a unique platform to share the ideas we have developed with our world-class partners. Founded in 2013, it has been at the vanguard of leadership and management thinking, providing innovative strategies, original solutions, and imaginative techniques, to tackle the challenges faced by organizations daily. Throughout those ten years, it has maintained an unwaveringly prospective view: if, as LP Hartley once said, the past is a foreign country, the future is an unknown land. Dialogue has made it its business to chart what is to come, however challenging such forecasts might be.

Take my recent article with my colleague Vishal Patel Everything All at Once (page 26). In the piece, we try to anticipate the strategies necessary for the polycrisis, a clear and present danger where geopolitical, environmental, and economic crises strike in concert. How can leaders survive such a maelstrom? As our essay argues, by applying a series of principal measures leaders can fashion opportunities from the polycrisis.

Yet not everything can be easily identified as crisis or opportunity; threat or promise. The advent of artificial intelligence is cast simultaneously as both: leaders cannot agree whether it will be the savior of humanity or its destroyer. As with so many epoch-changing technologies, the outcome will be shaped by the input. Dr Vivienne Ming, the decorated Berkeley professor, entrepreneur, and activist (page 106), argues that all routine work – in the broadest sense of the term – will eventually be handled by robots. That is scary but also exciting. It will create, Dr Ming says, the space for humans to become explorers of the future while machines busy themselves with the everyday work of the present. The idea of humans as inquisitive adventurers is enthralling, but such a positive future is only possible if leaders manage their robot colleagues, so that machines become workhands, not overlords.

The key to that, says Duke University Fuqua School of Business professor Saša Pekeč, (page 90), is human leaders leaning into their crucial role as critical thinkers. Several AI-based ventures, he points out, have failed – because humans have trusted them too much. Pekeč recounts the story of an online realtor that was providing AI-generated offers to house vendors. After the company sustained heavy losses, the robots were fired: the accuracy of the valuations was insufficient to ensure the viability of the business model. It was small mercy that only money was at stake. Without humane critical-thinking, argues Pekeč, the march of AI can be as dangerous as unchecked nuclear technology.

Yet humans must be more than sentries in a world run mostly by machines. They command a quality infinitely more potent than the best AI: the power of emotion. In a seminal essay for Dialogue (page 8), Professor Bill Boulding, dean of Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, demonstrates how elite leaders pose a ‘triple threat’. IQ is just one pole of the pyramid; EQ – emotional quotient – the second. It is DQ – decency quotient – that completes the triangle. DQ stems from an authentic motivation within leaders to do the right thing for employees and colleagues. It is the opposite of robotic: an invaluable trait that machines can neither replicate nor learn. Dean Boulding first heard of the concept from Mastercard chief executive Ajay Banga. IQ is important; EQ is important, Banga told Boulding. What really matters to me is DQ. If you can bring your decency quotient to work every day you will make the company a lot of fun for people – and people will enjoy being there and doing the right thing.

The need for leaders to be guardians of decency within organizations is a point picked up by international marketeer Allyson Stewart-Allen (page 162). She frames the onset of poor behavior in organizations as a ‘corporate infection’, toxicity that can damage – even destroy – brands. The lesson? she asks. You can’t just fix outside problems without fixing those inside too.... Leaders need to keep their cultures in good health to prevent such scandals – and be prepared to administer emergency treatment when a crisis does blow up.

The late, great Professor Peter Drucker’s oft-quoted observation that culture eats strategy for breakfast should be pinned on the wall of anyone who argues that humanity will be surplus to requirements in the businesses of tomorrow. The reverse is true: the intrinsic ability of decent humans to shape the culture of organizations will be a premium quality when much of the daily running is done by emotionless machines.

In every area of organizational thought, human leadership commands a critical role for the future. Since its launch, Dialogue has focused on five organizational disciplines that create the lifeblood of companies: Leadership, Innovation, Marketing, Finance, and Strategy. This compendium features four articles from each, penned by Duke Corporate Education’s network of globally renowned thinkers.

Joe Perfetti is Dialogue’s pre-eminent finance expert. Professor Perfetti is a Duke educator fascinated by speed: the rapidity in which businesses trade is as crucial a dimension in financial success as profitability and market share. Perfetti’s Financial Cycle Time rankings (page 112) are a useful measure of agility, the speed at which companies can move. The piece shows how nimble companies can outdo even more profitable ones; lower margins can be successful if your sales cycles are short.

What makes or breaks that is an organization’s affinity with customers. Customer-centricity, what it is and how to achieve it, has formed a key part of Duke Corporate Education’s work over the years. In a remarkable piece (page 44), Rita Gunther McGrath reveals that the move to digital retail may have failed to recreate the joy of shopping: some 70% of online shopping carts are abandoned, akin to almost three-quarters of boutique shoppers getting to the counter then turning back before they buy. Creating a truly customer-centric business in the digital era doesn’t start with the technology, writes McGrath. It starts, and ends, with customer experience. Her analysis might be extended to management itself, where leaders’ customers are both their clients and their teams. Humanity has a vital role to play in enhancing the experience of work, creating space for the explorers that Dr Ming urges, and the decency that Professor Boulding espouses.

When the first issue of Dialogue landed on leaders’ and managers’ doormats in the Fall of 2013, the cover framed our challenge: Our world: a puzzle to solve. On that cover, the globe was depicted as a Rubik’s Cube that could be twisted and turned in the search for lasting solutions.

The mechanics of the puzzle have morphed in the intervening years. Technological advance and external crises have changed the context. Yet the formula for solving the puzzle endures: develop human leaders who can understand, anticipate, and win, the future. Dialogue is Duke Corporate Education’s showcase for the ideas that will make that possible: the future of leadership, now.

LEADERSHIP

DECENCY: THE MISSING FACTOR

Integrity has never been a more important part of leadership

Writing Bill Boulding

BILL BOULDING is dean of Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business

I recently had the pleasure of sharing a stage with P&G chief executive David Taylor and interviewing him in front of Fuqua students. Four years earlier, we had sat in the same spot and engaged in a similar conversation about leadership. Yet instead of a sense of déjà vu, I was struck this time by how much had changed in the last four years.

Taylor moved from president of a P&G division to company chief executive during that time. He stepped into the role when expectations of chief executives had never been more demanding. The leader of a company now must not only ensure profitability and sustainability, but also publicly exemplify the brand and values of the company. Business leaders are increasingly faced with complicated decisions that go far beyond the bottom line.

I found myself asking Taylor questions about his role that I wouldn’t have even considered four years earlier. How does he navigate issues outside P&G which may impact his employees? How does he think about the power of his voice as a chief executive on a political or social issue? How does he bring different people together to work towards common goals during such a polarized time?

The changing role of business leadership demands we consider a new framework for how we think about it. It’s essential we acknowledge the shift in what’s required to be successful today. Why? Because I firmly believe business can be the transformational engine for the 21st century. It can solve some of the world’s toughest challenges, in ways that governments or NGOs can’t.

However, that kind of transformation demands leadership that can bring people together to work toward a common goal – which is increasingly challenging.

THE EVOLVING ROLE OF BUSINESS LEADERSHIP

As dean of a business school, I spend much of my time thinking about how the world is changing and how business education needs to adapt in order to prepare future business leaders to meet the big challenges.

We are fortunate at Duke that our faculty research can help students understand the new context