Rethinking the leadership agenda: while business has moved to a new level of complexity, many leaders remain stuck in the past. With leadership more crucial than ever, a radically different set of competencies is required.

• Author: Gibson, Rowan
• Position: Cover Story

LEADERS WANTED FOR TODAY'S ORGANIZATIONS. Those who are willing to: 1) Routinely consider the unthinkable; 2) Not run the company by the numbers alone; 3) Focus on the company's core strategy; and 4) Create a community of friends.

What does it take to be a successful leader in today's confusing high-pressure business environment? That's the multi-million-dollar question. Get the answer right and you could earn yourself a place in the business Hall of Fame. Get it wrong and you're out on the street.

Never before have we seen so many top executives being fired by their own boards of directors. A recent study of CEO succession at the world's largest companies revealed that the forced departure of chief executive officers due to deficient performance reached an all-time high in 2002, rising a staggering 70 percent over 2001.

The reason is obvious. With capital markets now pulling the strings in business, senior executives either find the right strategies for growing shareholder value or find themselves out of a job. As written in management consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton's Strategy + Business magazine: "Aggressive shareholder capitalism has become the defining characteristic of business in the 21st century."

This is creating an unprecedented challenge for senior executives. On the one hand, they're living in the age of "deliver-or-depart leadership," an age that mercilessly demands results, not excuses. Yet, on the other hand -- if they're truthful -- they'd admit that the incredible volatility and ambiguity of the times is making it harder and harder to know how to lead. The business world becomes more complex and more chaotic by the nanosecond -- one in which none of the old rules or assumptions seem to apply. When futurist Alvin Toffler predicted in the 1970s that this current era would resemble "a kaleidoscope run wild," he was, with hindsight, making an understatement.

Therefore, it's time to rethink leadership. We cannot expect the kind of leadership that worked in the past to work in the future. While the Winston Churchill or Charles de Gaulle models were effective for their time, today's leaders need to transition from commanding and controlling the "troops" to creating inspiring, high-performance and highly adaptive corporate cultures. All over the world, teams of senior executives need to tackle a tough new leadership learning curve and take on a radically different set of competencies. In fact, they need to consider a whole new leadership agenda.

Competency 1: Routinely consider the unthinkable.

Leaders need to be able to radically rethink everything about the company and the business they are in, even when things appear to be going well. Management guru Peter Drucker was not exaggerating when he wrote: "Every organization has to prepare for the abandonment of everything it does."

This is not to say that everything the company ever did must be abandoned or ignored. The past can deliver some valuable lessons and skills. But a company's history is increasingly proving to be an unreliable reference for considering its future sustainability. Current economic realities have already demonstrated the potential to render conventional business models, processes and paradigms irrelevant or obsolete in a very short space of time. "This company will be going...