Leadership and Management in a Networked World

What would you do if you woke up one morning and saw the sign "Sorry NO INTERNET Today".

The 21st Century has seen the development of our industrialised society to an information society and now, a networked society due the internet and personal devices we carry around with us, and social networking tools such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

This network society presents immense opportunities  for society, organisations and individuals and, at the same time, issues of security, risk, privacy and intellectual property are heightened.

The networked society is enabling organisations to be become more agile and responsive to customer needs.  There has been notable changes in attitudes amongst the Generations, enough for them to be labelled Baby Boomers, Generation X and Generation Y... I understand that Generation C is on its way.

We are also told that we are living in an algorithmic world - that everything we do can be observed and measured online then, using algorithms, pictures and information are created by algorithms to help us make decisions - but these algorithms are not always under our control as Kevin Slavin argues in his presentation at TEDGlobal.    He explains that "we're living in a world designed for -- and increasingly controlled by -- algorithms and he warns that we are writing code we can't understand, with implications we can't control."

So - enough of the scaremongering.    This blog is aimed to follow me through my journey as I fulfil my PhD at the University of Hull.   To date - it has already leapt me forward into realizing that the future leaders and managers of tomorrow will need to understand, accept and celebrate complexity and uncertainty in order to be able to cope with the pressures that complexity and uncertainty place on ourselves as individuals, groups and as a society.  I hope to devise a very simple method to enable and empower leaders and managers at all levels ... simplicity is meant to be the opposite of complexity (as quoted by Eric Barlow). 

I hope that you will enjoy and share this journey with me.