Leadership Has a New Formula
Power, Diplomacy, Vision.
Leadership’s new formula has vintage roots.
Today’s breakneck AI scale-ups, fierce tech competition and collapsing social orthodoxies have revived an ancient instinct: the drive to conquer the unknown at lightning speed. Modern leaders aren’t just coaches or facilitators anymore—they’re channeling the bold, decisive energy that is more ‘Alexander the Great’ and less servant leader.
Impatient with the pace of steady economic growth—and convinced that businesses aren’t vehicles for broad social agendas—these leaders are chasing radical, transformational breakthroughs in years, not decades. Their ambition: to shape everything, everywhere, all at once.
The leadership formula powering this ambition draws more from history than from popular management themes. It rests on three forces:
· Power
· Diplomacy
· Vision
Here is how each force is understood and activated.
Power
Relative power has always sat at the center of leadership. Even the idea of “competitive advantage” is just a polished, corporate reframe on gaining power over rivals. What’s different now is the clarity and intentionality: power isn’t hidden behind jargon—it’s being activated deliberately across every key dimension of business.
Leaders weigh power dynamics when setting executive pay. They read the labor market’s power balance before shaping HR policy. Pricing conversations with clients? Often just real-time negotiations of relative power.
Today’s leadership is about identifying where you hold inherent power—and then maximizing returns on it. Where you’re weak, the mission is just as clear: build power until the balance shifts.
Diplomacy
“Diplomacy is the art of letting someone else have your way.”
The exercise of power dynamics must be guided by perspective and an understanding that power is never static. Relative positions can shift—sometimes rapidly, sometimes gradually. Sustainable advantage comes when the use of power avoids triggering conflict. To navigate this, leaders are mastering the art of diplomacy. A blunt pursuit of power’s benefits often signals a leader’s ego more than a strategic intent for the business.
Diplomacy demands that leaders stay sensitive and sharply attuned to the individuals involved. In contrast, understanding the power balance calls for a fact-based, objective view of the broader context. Diplomacy is the craft of smart, sensible conversations—ones that build trust and confidence. Awareness of the power balance means never losing sight of the larger play within which each individual conversation plays a part.
Vision
The new leadership formula starts with vision. Today's leaders see a future that feels audacious when measured against past. This breakthrough view is anchored in conviction—in technological shifts and a willingness to rethink every orthodoxy, whether social, political, or economic. This clarity of vision fuels bold action, decisive moves, and—crucially—an unapologetic drive to build power and extract its returns.
This vision—though audacious—is grounded in a quest for a better world, not just a different one. And because it is bold, it naturally attracts both champions and skeptics. But for a leader to succeed, a critical mass of belief is essential. Without direction, an unrelenting sense of purpose, and a vision that holds real promise, efforts around power and diplomacy dissolve into dysfunction and decay.
It’s tempting to fixate on the visible moves of power of a leader and wonder what makes such a leader so successful. But look under the hood. You will find its not tactics that define these leaders—it’s belief. A quiet, often stubborn conviction that the future must break from the past, and that they are meant to shape it. Without that inner resolve, power becomes noise. With it, it becomes change.
It will be a sad day for the world when servant leadership dies.
Food for thought indeed!
Deployment of power in pursuit of vision is loud and clear. It is also happening at twitter like speed
Diplomacy, on the other hand, appears to be used by corporations and its leaders more as a shied to escape the wrath of the powerful, often at the cost of the individual’s and organisation values. . The way corporate America is responding to calls for total destruction of progressive initiatives related to inclusion, gender etc is just one example of how this is manifested.
The socio political impact of unleashing of the rapidly growing power of AI is already reshaping societies and nations at a pace that even H G Wells may not have imagined. Will the future of consciousness be at the mercy of the powerful and algorithms? I presume retreating to the caves is not an option too!