Leadership in the 21st Century

At the most basic level, a leader is someone who leads others. But what makes someone a leader? What is it about being a leader that some people understand and use to their advantage? What can you do to be a leader? Here's what you need to know and do.

A leader is a person who has a vision, a drive and a commitment to achieve that vision, and the skills to make it happen. Let's look at each of those in detail.

The Leader's Vision

A leader has a vision. Leaders see a problem that needs to be fixed or a goal that needs to be achieved. It may be something that no one else sees or simply something that no one else wants to tackle. Whatever it is, it is the focus of the leader's attention and they attack it with a single-minded determination.Whether the goal is to double the company's annual sales, develop a product that will solve a certain problem, or start a company that can achieve the leader's dream, the leader always has a clear target in mind.

This is a big picture sort of thing, not the process improvement that reduces errors by 2% but the new manufacturing process that completely eliminates the step that caused the errors. It is the new product that makes people say "why didn't I think of that", not just a toaster that lets you select the degree of darkness of the toast. Edison did not set out to build a better candle, he wanted to find a whole new way to illuminate the darkness. That's the kind of vision a leader has.

The Drive to See It Through

It is not enough to just have a vision. Lots of people see things that should be done, things that should be fixed, great step forward that could be taken. What makes leaders different is that they act. They take the steps to achieve their vision.

Is it a passion for the idea, an inner sense of drive, or some sense of commitment? Whatever it is, it is the strength that lets leaders move their vision forward despite all the obstacles, despite all the people saying it can't be done, it's too costly; we tried that before, or a dozen other excuses. The true leader perseveres and moves forward.

Trait and Skills a Leader Must Have

There are things that set leaders apart from other people. Some people are born with these characteristics. Others develop them as they improve as leaders. These are not magic bullets. They are things you can do and be if you want to be a leader.

Traits of a Leader

There are as many traits of a leader as there are lists of what makes a leader. Here are the fundamental traits of a leader from my perspective:

Has Integrity….. People have to believe that you are pursuing your dream because it's the right thing to do, not just because you are ego driven.

A People Person….Understands the differences that make people unique and is able to use those individual skills to achieve the goal.

Is Positive…. A leader encourages and rewards people. They make you want to do it and do it right. A leader is not a negative person and doesn't waste time/effort telling everyone what they're doing wrong.

Leadership Skills

Beyond the personal traits of a leader, there are specific skills someone must master if they want to be a leader.

Effective Communication - It's more than just being able to speak and write. A leader's communication must move people to work toward the goal the leader has chosen.

Motivation - A leader has to be able to motivate everyone to contribute. Each of us has different "buttons". A leader knows how to push the right buttons on everyone to make them really want to do their best to achieve the leader's goal.

Planning - The leader has a plan to achieve the goal. He/she doesn't get too bogged down in the details, that are what managers are for, but rather uses a high-level plan to keep everyone moving together toward the goal.

Bottom Line

Leaders dream dreams. They refuse to let anyone or anything get in the way of achieving those dreams. They are realistic but unrelenting. They are polite but insistent. They constantly and consistently drive forward toward their goal. You can be a leader. You will be - when it matters enough to you.

Social Indexing: An Overview

Search sites could take your friends' opinions into account when you look for restaurants. Newspaper sites could use their knowledge of what's previously captured your attention online to display articles you are interested in. Fundamentally, the Web would be better if it were more oriented around people. To bring this idea to fruition, Facebook is creating a kind of social index of the most frequently visited chunks of the Web.

Many sites have tried to personalize what they offer by remembering your past behavior and showing information they presume will be relevant to you. But the social index could be much more powerful because it also mines your friends' interests and collects information from multiple sites. As a result, the index can give websites a sense of what is likely to interest you even if you've never been there before.

This ambitious project gets much of its information from the simple "Like" button, a thumbs-up logo that adorns many Web pages and invites visitors to signal their appreciation for something—a news story, a recipe, a photo—with a click. Facebook created the concept in 2007 at FriendFeed, a social network that pre-dated Facebook, but was acquired by Facebook in 2009. Back then, the button was just a way to encourage people to express their interests, but in combination with Facebook's user base of nearly 600 million people, it is becoming a potent data-collecting tool. The code behind the Like button is available to any site that wants to add it to its pages. If a user is logged in to Facebook and clicks the Like button anywhere on the Web, the link is shared with that person's Facebook friends. Simultaneously, that thumbs-up vote is fed into Facebook's Web-wide index.

That's how the Wall Street Journal highlights articles that a person's friends enjoyed on its site. This is what lets Microsoft's Bing search engine promote pages liked by a person's friends. And it's how Pandora creates playlists based on songs or bands a person has appreciated on other sites.

This method of figuring out connections between pieces of content is fundamentally different from the one that has ruled for a decade. Google mathematically indexes the Web by scanning the hyperlinks between pages. Pages with many links from other sites rise to the top of search results on the assumption that such pages must be relatively useful or interesting. The social index isn't going to be a complete replacement for Google, but for many types of activity—such as finding products, entertainment, or things to read—the new system's personal touch could make it more useful.

Google itself acknowledges this: it recently rolled out a near-clone of the Like button, which it calls "+1." It lets people signify for their friends which search results or Web pages they've found useful. Google is also using Twitter activity to augment its index. If you have connected your Twitter and Google accounts, Web links that your friends have shared on Twitter may come up higher in Google search results.

Another advantage of a social index is that it could be less vulnerable to manipulation: inflating Google rankings by creating extra links to a site is big business, but buying enough Facebook likes to make a difference is nearly impossible. Social activity provides a really authentic signal of what is authoritative and good. That's why Hunch and other services, including an entertainment recommendation site called GetGlue, are building their own social indexes, asking people to record their positive feelings about content from all over the Web. If you're browsing for something on Amazon, a box from GetGlue can pop up to tell you which of your friends have liked that item.

A social index will be of less use to people who don't have many online connections. And even Facebook's map covers just a small fraction of the Web for now. But about 10,000 additional websites connect themselves to Facebook every day. 

With what appears to be an almost casual global data mining frenzy, there is a nefarious side of the Web's voracious appetate for your data. Privacy in business and for the casual web user could be the next casualty in this exponential information explosion. More on this topic can be found in part II of this series.