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Two weeks ago at the Global Drucker Forum in Vienna, Austria, two main topics were discussed in depth: The Power of Ecosystems and Leadership Everywhere A Fresh Perspective on Management.

It is no secret we live in a globally shared economy and as my dear colleague Hari Abburi likes to say the lines are (actively) blurring across the different markets.

What does this truthfully mean though? And how is it related to the ecosystem thinking?

In my very first Forbes article Business Is No Longer An Island: Four Trends Affecting the Future Workforce, published in October of 2018, I listed the forces challenging all businesses global and local to (1) rethink their purpose, (2) redesign their business model, (3) rebuild their organizations and (4) consciously tailor their cultures.

Three large categories of force globalization, digitalization and democratization are not only impacting the way we think about, operationalize and realize our businesses, they are redefining how we experience work and beyond. We find the lines are indeed blurring between industries and sectors, processes and applications, geographies and platforms, humans and machines.

Take Amazon.com as an example. Do you consider it a single-industry business? If you are unsure, let me share with you aside from being an online shopping platform with legs in supply chain management and logistics, Amazon has disrupted at least seven different industries ranging from grocery delivery to meal prep to real estate and music streaming. In fact, it is reported that if Amazon were to set up a bank ~65% of its world-wide users would support it.

Amazon is not the only business blurring lines. Rakuten Ichibais Japans single largest online retail marketplace. It also provides loyalty points and e-money usable at hundreds of thousands of stores, virtual and real. It issues credit cards, offers financial products and services (i.e. gaming). There are many more companies that can make the list...

The point is this new environment creates a key opportunity to rethink values, rules, capabilities and practices and the user experience. The end-users whether they are customers or employees are now looking to get into an eco-system through a single entry, easy-access system and have all of their needs, wants and wishes met without exiting the space. While in the zone, they want to know they are going to be inspired, their data/track record will be kept safe, they will be well-served and they will get a tangible outcome; and they want this quality on a repeatable occasion.

In this current environment, a typical target defending strategy for businesses will not work because it is highly likely that a group of competing companies will cooperate soon enough to define an end-model and much faster, cheaper and efficient than what a single entity can offer.

This is exactly where the idea and importance of emerging ecosystems comes into play. As business leaders, we have an immediate need to not only understand the current context, we must reconsider the following to adapt and develop sustained growth:

1.Business Terminology: The vocabulary we have for business and in the workplace is not large enough to hold our current realities. Every time I hear someone use the word management synonymously with leadership, I cringe. Every time I hear work-life balance, I shut my ears because I dont want my brain coding the divide in between work and life (which in reality doesnt exist). A hundred years ago or more, with the help of industrialists, we created language to connect us and never imagined we would become a slave to it; yet, here we are needing to rethink a whole bunch of new terminologies.

2.Business Identity: The purpose (of making profit) is no longer sufficient for the longevity of corporations, nor it is satisfactory for its beneficiaries. Many CEOs I talk to about clarifying purpose tell me they have a strategy and it is bullet-proof. Then, I turn around to show them how they are struggling to keep up and to meet their objectives. As leaders of the 21st century, we need to understand running a purposeful business may feel innocent, but innocence is not about naivet, it is about discoverability and trust-building.

3.Business Governance: One of the principles in architecture and design is that the shape of a building or an object is primarily based on its intended function or purpose. The current policies, procedures, processes, structures, etc. in operation are major struggle areas across a majority of businesses. They struggle to provide the kind of employee experience they want to offer because the very design of their current organization defining, dividing, delegating, designating work actually acts as a disabler rather than an enabler of its purpose. We need to embrace a number of design thinking principles to rebuild our organizational schemes.

4.Business Leadership: One of the biggest challenges facing businesses in the 21st century is having their leaders move from direct to indirect leadership. By this, I mean the move from doing the leading of work to become a guide of others to do the work. In the new era, leaders need to better focus on their being instead to showcase expansion and growth. This change if and where realized will greatly increase the influence and the capacity of a leader. With expanded capacity, then, a leader can not only support the multiplicity of other leaders but also become a mirror for the creation of positive context by their way of being. Naturally, this sort of shift calls for a broader conversation around who is or should be a leader in the 21st century; who is or should be a follower and what is or should be the legacy each aim to leave behind.

5.Business Impact: The Nobel Prize in physics winner Frank Wilczek, who is one of my heros once said: You can recognize a deep truth by the fact that its opposite is also a deep truth. The fact that we are most advanced in human history is true and only one part of the story. The deepening gap in equity, equality, dignity and the displacement and depleting of our ecology are equally true. In other words, there is a relationship between our inner worlds and outer effect/impact. I consider it an insanity to do the same thing over and over again and expect a different outcome or do the same thing while trying to fix disadvantaged or damaged parts. Tipping points require survival need and understanding the role of symmetry in evolution. The intersection of globalization, digitalization and democratization actually requires us to live more compassionately and take responsibility for the impact we leave behind.

Transformations are no longer an aspect of the distant future and they are different than change. Change tries to fix the past whereas transformation re-imagines the future. Evolutionary culture transformation is a dream we never realized... Therefore, I invite 21st century businesses and leaders to engage in a regenerative process and I invite all of us to take part in making a better system (not the system better).

For more information on leading transformations and how it is different than managing change, you can find some of our scientific work and arguments here.

Read more:

Transforming Experience: How Blurring Of Lines In Business Calls For Iteration And Experimentation - Forbes