Leadership 3.0
There is a lot of buzz about Web 3.0, a term used to describe how the Web is predicted to evolve in the very near future.
Web 1.0 is informational. Businesses created websites to provide customers with information about products and services. These Web 1.0 websites are essentially electronic billboards; digital megaphones to blast to anyone landing on the site the superiority of the products and services for sale.
Web 2.0 is relational. Websites continue to provide information, but they include mechanisms that facilitate listening to and conversing with customers. These sites allow businesses to build trusting, respectful, and responsive relationships with customers. Instead of interrupting and spamming customers, Web 2.0 technology and process provides customers the ability to authorize businesses the permission to build relationships with them.
Web 3.0 is anticipatory. Ubiquitous, interconnected technologies learn the individual patterns and preferences of customers. Because mobile technologies will allow businesses to know where we are, they can use their increasing knowledge of individual preferences to anticipate what we might need at any given moment and offer real-time suggestions on options to help us meet our needs.
For your business to survive and thrive, you will need to develop the competencies to serve your customers with a Web 3.0 mindset.
If you want your employees to be able to excel at learning and anticipating the needs of your customers, you are going to have learn and anticipate the needs of your employees. Leadership 1.0 is unable and unwilling to facilitate employee 3.0.
Your customers are changing. Your employees are changing. If YOU don’t learn to change your leadership style, you and your business are in trouble.
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About the Author: Bret L. Simmons
Welcome to my blog! Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section of my posts. I publish all constructive, non-anonymous comments. 
Hi, Bret,
That’s a great point there. I believe the foundation for “anticipatory leadership” will be leaders’ self awareness, their willingness to better understand themselves in order to be able to really understand those they are leading.
This means that leaders are starting to get more knowledgeable about their own biases and blind spots and thus become aware of their missed opportunities in dealing with others.
It also implies that organizations are starting to pay more attention to issues such as “company culture” – assessing it and striving to transform it for the better.
And there seems to be a whole generation of coaches, trainers and other L&D people (I count myself among them) who are devoted to designing and facilitating programs to do just that – increase awareness.
What is your view on this “self awareness” trend and its value for promoting authentic individual and organizational leadership?
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Bret L. Simmons Reply:
February 5th, 2011 at 3:24 pm
Welcome, Alis! Self-awareness is key to other-awareness. Both take a lot of hard work and practice. Thanks! Bret
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