eLeadership: Digital Challenges Managers

Abstract

Digital is not simply “another tool”, another competitive environment, a new group of companies. We should rather consider it the “mother” of all new technologies, the leading character in transforming societies and markets. This is due to the fact that digital is an horizontal technology, with an exponential growth factor and it is basically “infesting” everything it get in touch with. As a matter of fact it develops and grows at a whirling pace and it mates and hybridize itself with everything it touches. It enters both into products and processes (production, commerce, and governance) and it is the main character both in the business world and in the dreams of our children. For these reasons adopting good practices in the use of digital – above all for the managers – depends on many factors, much more sophisticated and articulated with respect to those tackled by a basic training. It’s not enough to add an “e” in front of the noun “Leadership” and to simply give a dusting of digital knowledge, but letting the managers do the same things they were used to do. We need to reinterpret the leadership by means of a digital lens and – more and more frequently – start to rethink it, to redesign the leadership itself. And we also need to experiment new practices and new organizational models now feasible thanks to the digital revolution.
The challenge driven by digital technologies it’s not a training challenge but an educational challenge. Ordinary digital training teaches the basics (basic terms and main functioning) of the most frequently used tools. But we need to build a deep comprehension, a sensibility and a critical thinking with respect to the digital phenomenon as a whole.
For all these reasons, we need to reintroduce the critical thinking with respect - above all - to digital technologies and unmask the stereotypes attached to them, more and more widespread among users not particularly well-educated. And this has happened thanks to digital solutions’ providers and biased journalists willing to enhance only the brilliant surface of digital applications, its “sunny side”. The knowledge regarding also the “dark sides” of digital it’s therefore particularly relevant. Adjusting the well-known Anna Karenina’s incipit to our purpose, we may say that “the useful digital applications are all alike, but every dark side is problematic in its own way”.