“There are technology leaders who are laggards in adopting opensource.”

and would rephrase it:

“There are technology managers who are laggards in adopting opensource.”

(Although I do like the oxymoronic quality of your statement.)

Or to go back to your original quote “Leadership is about taking the risk of managing meaning” – the people who are laggards in adopting open source are not managing meaning, therefore they are not exercising leadership, therefore they are not worthy of being called leaders.

Please excuse my pedantry, but leadership is a fairly rare quality and I guess I’m a bit over-sensitive to the term being used undeservedly.

But, yes, I do agree with your underlying sentiment.

There are technology leaders who are laggards in adopting opensource. Their laggardliness does not make them non-leaders.

When I look at the technologies used for the Beijing Olympics, there is much that does not seem opensource, many opportunities that appear to have been wasted.

you say: “Leadership in that strange space where information meets technology is fundamentally bankrupt”. I disagree: you give as an Open Source as example: “As leaders, we allowed ourselves to be drawn into the wrong debate.” Well, no – the people who allowed themselves to be drawn into that debate are not leaders, they are laggards. There are plenty of leaders who realized that that debate was a diversion and went on to capitalize on Open Source.

Similarly the leaders in the IPR domain are having arguments far more sophisticated than those about downloading and stealing.

I’m not worried about the so-called leaders who head off in the wrong direction. Rather than impose their meaning on everyone, they’ll just get lost.

More important is the point that your post implies….. beyond leadership.. To me, strategy is about framing the meaning of choices. One of the best discussions that I have had teaching strategy is to use Graham Allison’s book: Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis. It is powerful to understand how decisions are framed and enacted. By looking at a major decision context, we can see how different insights emerge when questions are framed differently. The students love that.. and they get it….
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We have not seen that sophisticated understanding of strategy at the interface of information and technology. We still see it as an efficiency driver; we accept it as such–even if we know deep down that IT is more than that. Simialrly, many managers frame IT Strategy as supporting business strategy. Then, it becomes so difficult to examine how IT strategy can shape and create new business strategies.
In short: we have seen little creativity when it comes to framing and understanding IT Strategy not just within enterprises but as it impacts the global economy.
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What we need is more systematic discussions and debates about IT Strategy and Leadership that go beyond context-free generalities. Truly, leadership involving IT in business contexts (including IPR, Internet and Identity) is more challenging and fascinating than what the current literature on IT leadership has addressed so far.
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If we fail to understand and frame IT leadership differently, we will leave lot more value on the table…

I agree, and yet there are people who are making significant efforts to change the black/white nature of copyright and enable it for the Internet. It is all the more important to support efforts such as Creative Commons if you believe such statements.

http://www.businessweek.com/print/globalbiz/content/aug2008/gb20080815_901512.htm

The web is bigger than AOL was; it is bigger than Netscape or IE were; and it will be bigger than AIR or Silverlight or JavaFX.

But that does not mean RIA has no role to play. The web will work it out.

Good thinking – you should take more holidays!

that strange space where information meets technology

is one of those fundamental pressure points that exists in many of the more interesting spaces I have been exploring lately – beyond the world of ‘CxO management’, in the frontiers of scientific research to the place where art meets science.

The need for leaders to ‘take risks in managing the meaning of three key concepts: intellectual property rights; the internet; identity’ is what I have been banging my head against for the last six months.

Consider me inspired to think more deeply and focus more sharply on those three areas as I try to manage meaning by creating prototypical examples of what might just be possible.

Fang – Mike Seyfang