JCI ECM 2011: "EVERYTHING ABOUT THE FUTURE"

Tallinn, capital city of Estonia, had the privilege this year to host the JCI “European Capitals Meeting” (ECM). JCI ECM 2011 theme was “Everything about the Future!” The aim was to make the participants aware that we can make the future to work for our benefit and have participants thought about the courses or training we and our children should undertake today in order to be successful 25 years later, or how we would communicate and travel 25 years from now. JCI Tallinn brought together the best experts who were able to discuss, show and explain the possible trends and scenarios which will help us to think and act right now in order to create the future we desire.

Conferences (not to mention tours of the city and great parties!) took place from the 11^th to the 15 of May. One conference particularly retained my attention. It was untitled "The trends of future leadership: which are the biggest challenges we are facing and how are we able to solve those?" and I will try to give you most of its substance in this short article. 

The speaker, Pentti Sydänmaanlakka[1], gave us insight about “Intelligent Leadership”. Pentti Sydänmaanlakka has been the author of a study on “Intelligent Leadership and leadership competencies” in which he described and explains the concept of “Intelligent leadership”. According to him, “Intelligent leadership” means that we have to look at leadership with “new eyes”. Creative intelligence has three components, which are intellectual, emotional and spiritual. Pentti Sydänmaanlakka has defined leadership as follows: “Intelligent leadership is a dialogue between leader(s) and followers where they try to influence each other in a certain situation in order to achieve shared vision (purpose) and objectives effectively.   This process will take place in a certain team and organization in which the same values and culture are shared. The macro environment - industry and society - also affects this process.”

Pentti Sydänmaanlakka explained that some solutions of Intelligent Leadership emerged. Those are (i) a new innovative framework of leadership, (ii) a collaborative/shared leadership, (iii) a balanced leadership made up of balancing efficiency, renewal and wellbeing and (iv) a holistic approach to leadership going from a self leadership[2] to an ecosystem leadership.

Pentti Sydänmaanlakka further gave us his definition of what is intelligence and defined it as the ability to exploit various kinds of competence when solving problems and acting in a certain environment: physical/practical (“skills of hands”, bodily-kinesthetic…), rational (linguistic, logical, mathematical), emotional (social and self awareness, emotional intelligence), spiritual (values and balance) and cultural (awareness, appreciation and utilization).

The audience has further been explained the concept of “ecosystem”.

To that end, we have first been shared with what Stephen Elop, new CEO of Nokia, once wrote, i.e. “the battle of devices has now become a war of ecosystems, where ecosystems include not only the hardware and software of the device, but developers, applications, ecommerce, advertising, search, social applications, location-based services, unified communications and many other things. Our competitors aren’t taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem. This means we’re going to have to decide how we either build, catalyse or join an ecosystem.”

Pentti Sydänmaanlakka then described to the audience what an innovative ecosystem should be made up of. To recap, the essential elements are (i) a common vision for the area, a “community of fate”, (ii) a culture of continuous renewal: innovative culture, sustainable innovation (iii) a symbiotic combination of large established companies and new companies (iv) specialization and good cooperation among companies (v) a strong entrepreneurial culture that stimulates creativeness and risk taking (vi) top level universities and research institutions (vii) sufficient financing for a new companies and research institutions (viii) availability of skills (ix) good local networking skills (x) the ability to build teams quickly (xi) good services for companies: service companies specialized towards the need of local companies (xii) a sufficient local market for new innovative products (xiii) global networking with other innovation centers (xiv) an innovative action model: encourages open networks and decentralized experimentation, based on trust and must be learned gradually (xv) a diversity of the population and (xvi) the attractiveness of the area: area should be a global talent magnet.

Silicon Valley was the given example of a culture of innovativeness based on openness, sharing, trust, risk tolerance, entrepreneurship, collaboration, experimenting and hard work.

Pentti Sydänmaanlakka finally wrapped up the conference with specific questions “Intelligent leadership” tries to answer:

- “How are you able to lead yourself? What is the essence of self leadership?

- How are we able to lead individuals? What is good leadership at individual level?

- How are we able to lead our team? What are the attributes of high performing team?

- How are we able to lead distributed teams? What is virtual leadership?

- How are we able to lead networks? What is ecosystem leadership?”

All the above questions relate to a very interesting topic bound to evolve in the future.

To be followed…

Greetings,

Matthieu Chambon,

JCI ECM 2011 participant

ECM 2011 - www.ecm2011.jci.ee