This is of course also true for the management level. There will be more
“hopping managers,” leading an organization for a time and then looking for new
challenges, development and career opportunities in order to move on. Today Munich,
Bangkok next year, then off to Warsaw. Whether these adventurers provide good
leadership or not remains unclear at this point. Yet what is indisputable is that with
a practically unlimited choice of jobs and employees from the global pool of
knowledge workers, the relationship between employees and leaders will be more
relaxed, which makes effective leadership harder.
In Japan we observe another development, which would seem to contradict
the increasing autonomy at first glance and has been going on for quite some
time: the trend towards working in groups and teams. The highly complex tasks
and problems that must be managed in increasingly shorter times require skills,
abilities and a range of knowledge that an individual alone cannot master. Besides
technical expertise social intelligence, i.e., the ability to communicate and to act
quickly and to establish relationships with other people, will play a growing role in
the future. The German slogan “Toll, Ein Anderer Machts” (great, somebody else is
doing it) as a clever but cynical acronym for the word “team” will find less and less
approval, even in central European countries.
1.1.5 From Egalitarianism to Individualism
In the social sector a trend can be observed that is best described by the term
“individualization.” The trend is increasingly focusing on the “I”: your own retire-
ment plan replaces the contract between the generations, being single takes the
place of having a large family, individual careers supplant standard careers, and
there is specialization instead of general knowledge, class instead of mass, self-
definition rather than roles, ideology or political positions. “People today value
their individuality, they are more confident, better educated, with more freedoms,
and they grew up under conditions of internalized democracy. This evolution will
also be reflected in the companies.” (Sprenger 2001, pp. 82–83).
The global society of expertise, the international markets and the heterogeneous
target groups force German companies to compete: they can only win if they
succeed, not regarding people as mass resources, but as individuals with individual
skills, attributes and very personal, unique potentials to be challenged and encou-
raged. This is not about creating a society of egoists or one-man businesses whose
only goal in life is their own interests, in keeping with the principles of Darwinism.
Rather, there should be an individualized, social network society, as Sprenger calls
it (cf. E-Interview with Reinhard K. Sprenger, Competence Site 1/2004a).
A strong ego and self-interest are not fundamentally selfish and inconsiderate,
and also produce creativity, freedom, personal commitment and personal responsi-
bility for personal and professional success – characteristics that are destroyed by
egalitarianism. The pursuit of individualism does not preclude the welfare of others,
because: “Only the consciousness of being an individual in my individual specificity
1.1 The Only Constant Is Change 7