Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

Barbara A. Carlin connects character and ethics by delving into sneaky problems commonly faced by managers. She uses two cases to illustrate the often-obscured moral dimensions of business choices and explains how nonmonetary transactions, framing effects, and ill-conceived goals can contribute to ethical lapses. Carlin proposes remedies such as awareness, collaboration, and fostering an ethical organizational culture. She notes that virtues like humility, collaboration, integrity, and courage can help managers recognize and address the ethical nuances of strategic decisions, ultimately fostering a culture of ethical decision-making within organizations.

Muhammed Shaahid Cassim and Fatima Hamdulay explore the concept of heartfelt leadership through the lens of the Islamic Sufi tradition, focusing on tasawwuf, the science of character excellence. Grounded in the belief that the heart is the seat of emotion, spirit, and morality, the authors delve into the Sufi perspective on good character and its role in leadership. They emphasize three considerations (intentionality, entrustment, and sincerity) that govern the heart and its decision-making.

The authors cover the strategic impact of character development in the public and private sectors. They advocate a shift from mere awareness to integrating character development into organizational practices, with an emphasis on the interconnected nature of character dimensions. Introducing the Virtuosity mobile app as a practical tool for character development, the authors propose a strategic embedding process model for sustained change. They highlight the crucial relationship between individual and organizational systems and emphasize the need for alignment. The article concludes with a call to action, asserting that the tools and understanding necessary for achieving lasting impact are readily available.

There are three main themes in this issue. The first is the importance of embedding character dimensions within leadership processes and frameworks, whether through paradigm shifts, Sufi traditions, ethical decision-making, historical perspectives, or education. The second theme is the interconnectedness of individual and organizational systems. The third theme is recognizing that leadership responsibility extends beyond traditional performance metrics. Leaders need to recognize their accountability to communities, the broader world, and long-term societal and environmental considerations.

As we move into an era of “hyper-enterprise connectivity,” most businesses will need to manage an ecosystem — a complex web of interdependent relationships aimed at creating and allocating business value. In this Advisor, Myles Suer offers his thoughts on a new book that can help enterprise architects and digital business strategists tackle these complex ecosystems with AI to build enterprises of the future.

Modern management emphasizes empowerment, flexibility, collaboration, and innovation. But what should we call it? While there are a number of labels thrown around for modern management, none have stuck as much as “command-control” (used to describe traditional management practices). In this Advisor, Cutter Fellow Emeritus Jim Highsmith offers a new label for today’s emerging management practices: agile-adaptive leadership.

People made decisions for many millennia without the benefit of IT, and it’s not self-evident that we make our really big decisions in the computer age consistently better than before. Smaller decisions in relatively information-rich situations are another matter. As this Advisor explores, IT has been and will continue to be important to decision makers in critical ways.

How do organizations create business adaptability? How can CIOs guide their CEOs and other business leaders to build truly adaptable organizations? We asked a group of CIOs these questions; this Advisor shares their responses.