Bottom‐up leadership

Competitive advantage requires continuous innovation. Market‐led organizations must be led internally by those who most deeply understand emerging markets and who can drive product development. Bottom‐up leadership is the next phase of empowerment – to encourage knowledge workers to lead the development of new products. There is still too much emphasis on top‐down leadership. Organizations in fast‐changing industries need to disperse leadership throughout the organization to change fast enough to keep up. Leadership must now be based on content (knowledge) not merely process skills. As senior executives move up the hierarchy, far away from knowledge advancement, they can only use their process skills to develop content leadership in leading‐edge knowledge workers. Survival thus requires new conceptions of leadership.