Building change from grassroots: The use of the Web

Abstract

Over the last couple of decades, there's been an enormous emphasis on leadership: studying leadership, dissecting leadership, learning from leaders. We've learned a lot from this process, but a one‐sided emphasis on leadership as it pertains to position can be dangerous. It can set up a heroes and drones syndrome, whereby we overvalue the contribution of those at the top and, by implicit corollary, undervalue the contribution of the rest of the people in the organization. This approach can be profoundly demoralizing to the great majority of people in our organizations who will never achieve the very top rank. It's also an inappropriate approach for organizations in what Peter Drucker has defined as “the knowledge era.” In knowledge organizations, as Drucker defines them, expertise is vested very broadly throughout the organization. For an organization to thrive in this environment, it must be able to draw information, ideas, and talent from a very wide base.

Citation

Helgesen, S. (1995), "Building change from grassroots: The use of the Web", Planning Review, Vol. 23 No. 5, pp. 37-40. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb054527