Building Leaders For The Imagination Age: The Case For The i4 Neuroleader Model

Over the last few months, I have had the opportunity to speak to both my 30-year reunion of high school and my 20-year reunion of my Stanford MBA class. Both occasions gave me cause to reflect on how much the world has changed since 1985 and 1995, respectively.   

In 1985, President Reagan was sworn into office for a second time, Gorbachev became the de-facto leader of the U.S.S.R., and the FDA approved a blood test for AIDS. Microsoft released its first version of Windows, otherwise known as Windows 1.0. The Nintendo Entertainment System hit the U.S. shores. 

We were in a cold war between the Western and Eastern block European countries, and our KNOWLEDGE of the rising Asia Pacific rim was rather limited.

In our business schools, we were learning the art of management and capitalism, systemic approaches to organisations, complex task management, and new forms of measurement that had arrived from our Japanese competition were refining our 150-year approach in management required for an Industrial Age.  

By the time I graduated from my MBA class in 1995 in the middle of Silicon Valley, the world had changed. There were three events that marked this change in my mind:

1. November 9, 1989 the fall of the Berlin Wall, particularly important to me as I spent two years in West Berlin as a teenager behind the wall with my father acting as the American Army liaison officer with the French-BritishAmerican-occupied West Berlin – signalling an end to the East versus West Europe and a decline in the power of the USSR.
2. The 1994 identification of the East Asian Miracle in the growth of Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan: the Four Asian Tigers that signalled an end to an American-European focus for any successful global corporation.
3. The IPO of Netscape in 1995, that signalled the first large enabler of the internet, which indicated to me the firm arrival of the Information Age.

This White Paper explains a model of leadership for our organisations faced with the challenges of the VUCA World - Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous.

Created by , this model called the , after four of its pillars: Integration, Inspiration, Imagination and Intuition - equips leaders with the challenge that leadership development must be more than the cognitive behavioural changes that we have been teaching for generations.

We must also learn about the biological processes of our brain, our gut, our heart and the way we integrate our minds with the health of our bodies.

By doing so, we can perform more effectively, collaborate with others instead of achieving by ourselves, innovate and execute with an agility never pondered by our Sigma Six/Kaizen/Lean project managers.