Integrated Leadership Support System (ILSS)After years of promises, we are now seeing the first real-time lead-
ership support systems that extend human capability, enhance
decision-making quality, and accelerate learning in relationship to
goals. We are beginning to see the essential elements of an ILSS
come together. We are gaining understanding about how to com-
bine these elements to help executives and their teams perform at
higher levels of excellence, learn more effectively, and enjoy better
results. Our experience at Motorola and in other global companies
is showing us how such systems can provide extremely powerful
leverage for increasing leader effectiveness and development. Lead-
ership support systems are transforming the leadership experience.
We are digitizing performance and development systems while
integrating them with the essential human touch.
The Motorola Leadership Supply SystemIn 1999, Motorola had a significant problem. When the senior
leaders looked ahead, they could see clearly that the organization
would not have the quality and quantity of leaders required to cre-
ate a winning combination for the future. Planned retirements, the
changing demands of the key leadership positions, and the growth
of new sectors were creating an untenable gap between what would
be needed for success and what the company had. The concept of
leadership supply was created as a solution to avoid a midair colli-
sion with the future. The Leadership Supply System was built on
three concepts from three different but related disciplines.
The first concept was the idea of efficient economic markets.
When the pool of leaders for the company was viewed through a
marketplace lens, it was obvious that the market for leaders at
Motorola was inefficient. Demand far outstripped supply, and the
right leaders were not showing up in the right jobs at the right time.
Any efficient market depends on excellent forecasting, on channel
strategies, and on sensitivity to price, supply, and demand variables.
The second concept was portfolio theory, which led Motorola to
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