The New Rules for Becoming an Enterprise Leader
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Alison Beard. I'm A Ignatius and this is the HBR Idea Cast. How do you think about the difference between being a great functional leader and a leader that's ready to take on a larger or enterprise wide role. What differentiates the two in your mind? You know, you could be a great team leader, right? You sort of in charge of your folks, you're trying to maximize what they do. You go to an enterprise role, suddenly it's far more complex. You have to make trade offs, things that m might not Favor the team that you work with. You have to have that holistic sense of what the enterprise needs.
Yeah, and because of the pace of change now, all the technological, geopolitical, economic uncertainty, these transitions are getting Trickier than ever. Even the best managers need more skills than they did before to make the lead. Yeah, look, I think there's a whole skill set you need and I assume AI fluency is now pretty high up there. Yes, absolutely, among other things. And that's why we wanted to talk to the expert in transitions, Michael Watkins. He's a professor at IMD and best known for his book, The First Ninety Days, but he just recently wrote a new HBR article, The Three Forces That Are Redefining the Transition from Manager to Leader. He's going to explain what's changed and what that means for those aspiring to C level roles.
Here's our conversation. Before we dig into the practical advice for leaders, I would like to talk about those dynamics that made you want to update your thinking from a decade ago when you first wrote about this functional to enterprise transition. So I guess we have to start with AI, right? We do. 'Cause AI is changing everything as we know.
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