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A Leader Is...
A leader is someone who has a vision,
not only of where you are but also of
where to go and how to get there.
Leaders also need a strong moral
compass. In the last five years we’ve
seen a lot of failures of leadership,
people taking advantage for personal
gain. The leader has to set the
standards. Fortunately, the American
society is a self-correcting society;
people are looking for corrective action
to keep those things from occurring
again. If people don’t have faith in the
integrity and morality of the companies
they do business with, it undermines the
important principles of capitalism in a
democratic society. As the most powerful
society in the world, we need to set the
standards and be the example.
One of the most important things any
leader can do is to take the
responsibility to ask the right
questions at the right time. No one
person can know everything, but you have
to continue to ask the probing questions
that will lead you to find out if there
are failures. You have to be constantly
vigilant. We need people in business and
in government who are continually asking
the right questions. That’s the only way
you can find out if things are going the
way they should be going.
Robert H. Smith '50 |
“Leaders for the Digital Economy”
was
adopted as the Smith School’s tag line
in 2003. It means different things to
different people and you have to take the words apart to have a true
understanding of the vision, says Smith
School Dean Howard Frank.
(View Leaders
Video Now!)
Leadership: The position or office of a leader; capacity or
ability to lead; a group of leaders; guidance, direction.
Digital: A description of data, which is stored or transmitted as
a sequence of discrete symbols from a finite set, most commonly this means
binary data represented using electronic or electromagnetic signals.
Economy: The system of production and distribution and
consumption; the efficient use of resources; frugality in the expenditure of
money or resources; an act of economizing; reduction in cost.
“This whole world is being transformed, the world of the very near future
is a digital world where everything is digital, the processes are digital,
the products are digital, the services are provided digitally, and the
economy is generated by digital products and services,” says Frank.
Building Leaders?
“You can take somebody who has a capability to lead an organization and you
can give them knowledge, thought patterns and skill sets so their inherent
leadership capabilities will be maximized/optimized and turned towards
leadership in this new digital world as opposed to leadership in the old
analog world,” says Frank.
“The theme of the business school is the convergence of a business and
technology. Technology is transforming society, the economy, the way we do
business so it must transform the Smith School, it must be reflected in the
curriculum and the way we do research and in the way we deliver services,”
says Frank.
Smith transformed in incremental steps, says Frank:
In our first step, we transformed the programs of the school –
what we teach.
In the second step, but in parallel, we transformed our research
agenda, pointing our research towards the issues that will arise and are
arising from this new convergence of business and technology.
And the third step, which again was parallel but also hard, we
transformed the infrastructure of the school and we went from you know an
average infrastructure with the usual kinds of things that you’d find in any
business school to a place which is not just wireless, but state-of-the-art.
Find out more about Dean Howard Frank's vision for the school:
View
Leaders Video Now!
