From "Captains of the Ship" to "Architects of Organizational Arks": Communication Innovations, Globalization, and the "Withering Away" of Leadership Steering

Traditionally, leaders were referred to as “captains of the ship” to denote their stewardship role in operating the organization entrusted to their care. Their primary tasks were to balance competing requirements and align organizational goals with a diversity of human behavior. The primary source of wisdom and direction—a rather strong direction—was from leaders whose power stemmed primarily from their position in the organization while subordinates simply complied (Manz and Sims, 1990). Leaders of the 1990s still retain much of the role of organizational stewardship; however, the focus has shifted increasingly to the role of the “organizational architect.” The principal contributing skills of architects is an ability to design and develop organizations—skills that require considerable creative insights and technical knowledge about how to analyze, design, and stimulate complex, increasingly globalizing, social and communication networks supported by rapidly advancing IT (Boettinger, 1989; Forester, 1989; Korac-Boisvert and Kouzmin, 1994; Kouzmin and Korac-Boisvert, 1995a).