MIS-Digital Society

Digital Society

VU Current Topics of Information Systems, Especially the Digital Society

Dr. Alexander Novotny

Edition 1

Digital Technology and Leadership in Society

Overview

» Digital leadership

» Culture and leadership

» Wisdom and phronesis

Let‘s travel to Shanghai, where the Apple iPhone is produced

» Watch the video with Dejian Zeng, NYU graduate student, narrating about working at Pegatron factory in Shanghai, China

» https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ItLIy wwepY

Digital Leadership

Synonyms: Leadership 4.0, E-Leadership, etc.

Tasks and tools for leadership of digitalisation and organisations in phases of digital transformation

6

Eileen Rivers: Leaders of change, 2020

Levels of culture and leadership

Schein (2004, p. 26)

Digitalisation and cultural differences in leadership

Hall (1989)

Leaders need virtue

» Aristotle has distinguished 12 virtues

» Virtue is the Golden Mean: balance of extremes of virtues & vices / balance between excess & deficiency

Wisdom

» “a type of meta-knowledge

» that is used […] to make right judgments […]

» that are of value and good for us in our lives personally […]

» and that are of value and good for others in their lives (ethically good)

» for the ultimate attainment of […] eudemonia”

Spence (2011, p. 266)

11

Analects of Confucius book 6 on leadership and the golden mean

» Chapter 27 子曰：「君子博學於文，約之以禮，亦可以弗畔矣夫！」 Confucius said: “A leader who expands their learning through culture and keeps their behavior in check through ritual is unlikely to go wrong.”

» Chapter 29 子曰：「中庸之為德也，其至矣乎！民鮮久矣。」 Confucius said: “Applying the golden mean is the highest level of virtue. It’s been rare among the people for a long time.”

Nicomachian dianoetic virtues

» Aristotle’s five types of stable dispositions of the soul and which can disclose truth

Vanharanta and Markopoulos (2018)

Nous

Nicomachian dianoetic virtues

Vanharanta and Markopoulos (2018)

Nous Intuition: - capacity developed with experience - understanding of roots of knowledge and truth

Selected traits of wise leaders

15

Spiekermann (2015, p. 195) citing Nonaka and Takeuchi (2011)

Who is a good example of a phronetic political leader? » Dr Kawamura: “Who is a good example of a phronetic political leader?”

» Dr Nonaka: “One of the most important examples of a phronetic political leader is Winston Churchill, the prime minister of the UK during Second World War.

» I just finished a book in Japanese on D-Day, the Battle of Normandy, focussing on wartime leadership. Eisenhower, who was the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces at the time, was said to be an "ordinary man" – no charisma. However, Drucker also said that charisma is not needed. He said Drucker (2004):

» “The constructive achievements of the twentieth century were the work of completely uncharismatic people. Two military men who guided the Allies to victory in World War II were Dwight Eisenhower and George Marshall. Both were highly disciplined, highly competent, and deadly dull.

» Why then, could people like Churchill and Eisenhower accomplish such great achievements? I think because they were phronimos; they owned and practiced the six abilities of phronetic leadership. Both Churchill and Eisenhower held a strong belief in their role as defender of civilization and freedom. Based on their historical imagination, they stood up decisively to fight against Nazi Germany and protect democracy as the common good. The six propositions (of phronetic leadership) explain their achievements well in my analysis.

» Recently, I came across the latest movement in philosophy, neo-pragmatism. Leading scholars are Robert Brandom and John McDowell. They inherit the pragmatism of Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, as well as the pragmatics of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and try to synthesize the mind and body dichotomy by experiences. Interestingly, McDowell refers to phronesis as the key for this synthesis. This would be another new frontier of my research.” “

Kawamura, K. (2014)

Nonaka‘s dynamic knowledge triad

» spiral of tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge driven by phronesis

References

» Hall, E.T. (1989). Beyond Culture. Anchor.

» Kawamura, K. (2014), "Kristine Marin Kawamura, PhD interviews Ikujiro Nonaka, PhD", Cross Cultural Management: An International Journal, Vol. 21 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/CCM-06-2014-0055

» Nonaka, I., Kodama, M., Hirose, A. and Kohlbacher, F. (2014), "Dynamic fractal organizations for promoting knowledge-based transformation – a new paradigm for organizational theory", European Management Journal, Vol. 32 No. 1, pp. 137-146.

» Schein, E.H. (2004). Organizational Culture and Leadership. 3rd ed. Wiley.

» Spence, E. H. (2011). Information, Knowledge and Wisdom: Groundwork for the Normative Evaluation of Digital Information and Its Relation to the Good Life. Journal of Ethics in Information Technology, 13, 261–275.

» Spiekermann, S. (2015). Ethical IT innovation: A value-based system design approach. CRC Press.

» Thornton, L.F. (2014). Case Study: Overwhelmed. https://leadingincontext.com/2014/03/19/overwhelmed/ , accessed Apr 16, 2021.

Image sources

» https://eu.usatoday.com/in-depth/opinion/2020/08/30/mayor-filmmaker-navajo-nation-president-our- take-leaders-change/3296575001/

» https://philosophyfinds.wordpress.com/2017/06/24/traditional-virtue-ethics/

» https://brownbeat.net/2019/05/analects-of-confucius-book-6/

» https://www.capgemini.com/at-de/2019/03/der-digital-leadership-index-die-sechs-wichtigsten- fuehrungsrollen-zur-bewaeltigung-eines-digitalen-wandels/

» Visualization of the Wisdom Cube Scientific Knowledge Space for Management and Leadership - Scientific Figure on ResearchGate. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-Wisdom-Cube-with-the- four-dimensions-of-wisdom_fig1_333561001 [accessed 27 Sep, 2021]