Over the years there have been several leadership and business books that have stood out and made an impact on my own philosophies. With the transformation of how we do business that is underway due to the growth of social media, I have been wondering whether the philosophies or strategies promoted by these books have been impacted in any way.
Though it was about 15 years ago that I read this, one such book was Lincoln on Leadership by Donald T Phillips. There were two ideas in particular that I took from this book. The first is the philosophy that you should get into the trenches with your team and understand what is going on at every level. The second is the philosophy of surrounding yourself with thought leaders with whom you can discuss ideas and strategies. There are many other keys to leadership included in the book, and upon recently revisiting the book I discovered great ones that I didn’t even remember, but today I am going to focus on those two that resonated with me.
One of the things that social media and Twitter give us access to are the thoughts and readings of some of today’s business leaders. We can follow anyone on Twitter, and many of today’s leaders are on Twitter, posting their latest readings and thoughts for all of us to view. We can also see who they are following and learn a little about their interests though we may not know why. It is not the same as being able to sit down with them one-on-one, but gives us some insight and access that we could never have had in the past.
Though it is not exactly getting into the trenches with their team, leaders can now get a better idea of what both employees and customers are thinking and saying about them. Social networking platforms have given us unprecedented access to thoughts, opinions and people who previously would have been inaccessible to us. Does the access give us the same information and understanding that we would get through in person interaction? I think there are trade offs. We get more information but may miss nuances and emotions that you may pick up on in person. There is a lot of clutter to get through to obtain the information that you are looking for. The more familiar we become with the technologies and the more platforms are built to help us manage this information, the more efficiencies we will see.
There are many great business books out there that were written prior to the advent of social media and it would be an interesting study to revisit some of those books and identify how social media can be applied or provides us with additional tools to achieve those philosophies.
