As nations and groups emphasize cooperation over competition, leadership is becoming less about wielding authority and more about being accountable for fostering achievement at every level of an organization. Authority is diffusing from credentialed sources to people we believe share our beliefs.

"The number-one trend in the world today, which has gone on for the last 500 years, is the declining ability to have centralized control over information distribution. This has led to the defrocking of ‘priesthoods’ of knowledge centers," said Arnold Brown, chairman, Weiner, Edrich, Brown Inc. As a result, the role of the leader is changing. "Leaders help rather than lead. They navigate," he said. "Leadership increasingly relies on the willingness of people to be led. This requires humility and accountability."

"Mexico should enlarge its relationship with the European Union, and also Asia—these are long-term goals," said de la Madrid. "Mexico shares a common history with Latin America, a common language. But Latin America has not been able to strengthen its economic and political links," he pointed out. While Mexico has been striving to make arrangements with the Mercosur nations (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay), "it has not been possible, and the disarray [there] makes if far from possible still."

De la Madrid was a member of a strong delegation from Mexico, led by WFS Council member Julio Millán of Grupo Coraza Corporación Azteca.

The New Faces of Leadership
By 2040, half of all Americans will be "minorities," pointed out Nat Irvin II, president of Future Focus 2020 at Wake Forest University. Demographic trends in the United States—including the growing numbers of minorities and rising educational levels among minorities and women—led Irvin to forecast that, within the next few decades, the United States will elect an African-American female president and will see the appointments of an Asian female Chief Justice and an African-American male Federal Reserve chairman.

Leading in a Nobody-in-Charge World
"There is no President of the Internet," noted Harlan Cleveland, former U.S. ambassador to NATO and president emeritus of the World Academy of Art and Science. "There is no boss, though there is a committee trying to figure out what will and should happen, what its ethics are."

Dee Hock, founder of VISA International, said this philosophy led to the creation of VISA as a for-profit membership organization: It is "pluralcentric" in the sense that every member is represented but none is in control.

One type of ideal organization is holarchy, a system of organizational structures that link networks together, suggested Elisabet Sahtouris, a biologist specializing in evolution and systems theory. Communities may be looked upon as self-contained cells working together within a multi-celled organism, she said.

Meeting the Authors

One of the unique benefits of attending World Future Society conferences is the opportunity to meet and exchange ideas with authors such as Joel A. Barker (left), author of Paradigms.

Stephen Roulac (right), author of Place and Property Strategies.

The emergence of the Internet could provide a key lesson for leaders, suggested Paul Tinari, director of the Pacific Institute for Advanced Study and a professor of applied creativity at the University of British Columbia, Coquitlam. "We could create a planet that works the same way the Internet does—a world with nobody in charge and that does what we want," he said.

The information sharing facilitated by the Internet has led to the phenomenon of "distributed communication," noted Robert Floran, a principal member of the technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories. An example is the user groups downloading and distributing music files from Napster. The impact: "Everyone connected everywhere all the time." The end result could be the development of a "planetary computer," such as the SETI@home Web site (setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu) that draws on the power of 3 million home computers, 23 teraflops of power, to search for extraterrestrial life. "This is the world’s largest networked computer," he said. "The Internet will morph into the Global Brain."

Floran described the Global Brain as "a collection of complex, adaptive agents, like bees organizing into hives," which will have "intelligence greater than we predict and with unpredictable properties, including sentience. . . . On the personal level, that makes superhumans possible, as well as humanlike robots.

David Pearce Snyder, lifestyles editor of THE FUTURIST, concluded, "Having encountered both globalization and the Information Revolution at the same moment in time, humankind has suddenly been confronted with an enormous range of potentialities that were not plausible just 25 years ago. Equipped with powerful new technologies and unconstrained by any single, overarching global vision of the future, humankind is free to make of the twenty-first century pretty much whatever it wants.

We’re In This Together

As the world evolves toward networked relationships—collaborating creatively to solve problems rather than being told what to do by old-paradigm leaders and authorities—so must future leaders evolve. Even leaders need networks.

"We’re terrified of downsizing; we need a network to go to," said careers specialist Adele Scheele, author of Skills for Success. "We must learn to be both a team member and a star simultaneously."

Leaders all over the world must now deal with severe skill shortages left in the wake of our ongoing technological revolution, noted Edward Gordon, author of Skill Wars. He called for a "rekindling of international spirit" among global businesses. "We’re all in this together," he summarized. "We have to work together, collaboratively."

Futurist Groups Meet
• Police Futurists International, celebrating its tenth anniversary, focused on issues such as cyberethics, privacy, and professionalism.
• The University of Houston–Clear Lake presented examples of student work from the Graduate Program in Studies of the Future, founded in 1975.
• Communities of the Future, in its fifth year of collaboration with the World Future Society, organized sessions on how the Web is transforming institutions and on how values and trends are changing business.