As it turns out Bennis underestimated the impact that bad leadership can have. A combination of greed, hubris, flawed judgment, and miscalculation has made the Enron debacle seem almost quaint by comparison to the global financial crisis that we now face. Although numerous pundits and scholars have advanced many reasons for the devastating situation, the bottom line is, as Bennis pointed out previously, bad leadership is one of the major reasons for the current state of affairs. However, it’s not simply dreadful leadership, it’s also the wrong kind of leadership for a new age.

If a group of typical corporate employees from the early 1980s could be time-transported into today’s interconnected, high tech, global world they would be astonished by the degree of change in the way that work is done. This same group of employees might also be surprised to learn that the same leadership models they learned about in the early 1980s are pretty much still applied in our academic institutions and our business enterprises, without any significant modifications or alterations to address the challenges leaders face in the digital age.