Leading with Purposeful Intent: Leveraging the Hidden Relationship between Competition and Leadership

Where were you in the 1980s? Political leaders like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher sought to liberate the economic vitality of enterprise and value creation through laissez-faire policies. The businesses of the era, led by hard-driving focused champions of competition such as Jack Welch and Lee Iacocca, were constructing environments designed to maximize shareholder value. 

These were leaders who broke the mold of conventional consensual bureaucracy. But look back a-ways to how that corporate paradigm came into being—through Henry Ford and his successors who built what was dubbed “the machine bureaucracy”—and you see how principles of rationality and efficiency created the post-Victorian era of social development. Looking ahead, it is not obvious how these developments would ultimately arrive at Steve Jobs, Marissa Meyer, Ginni Rometty, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, and the legions of digital-age leaders who have played a part in creating highly empowered environments for the flowering of technological wizardry.