Leo D’Angelo Fisher, Business End Ediotr of BRW Australia offered this heartfelt opinion piece on the current state of leadership in corporations in the context of the global financial crisis.

 "Successful companies riding the pre-crash wave of prosperity presented themselves as efficient, finely calibrated and sophisticated organisms. Companies proclaimed their commitment to globally competitive leadership, shareholder value and the highest standards of probity and transparency. That was then. As companies - those that live to tell the tale - prepare for a horror annual reporting season, shareholders, employees and the wider community are left to contemplate another broken mirage of corporate rectitude.

Fallen economies are unforgiving in what they reveal: poor judgement, incompetence, profligacy, hubris and lax governance. When companies can no longer rely on generous market conditions for growth, weak leadership and poor management are exposed for all to see. A downturn of this magnitude brings flaws into even sharper relief.

The obvious question is: how did so many companies get it so wrong? In fact, it is too obvious. Such a question presupposes that enumerating instances of corporate and human failings will provide the key to avoiding these ills in future.

The mistakes and excesses writ large in the current economic meltdown are all too familiar, and their like will be seen again. Organisations are the sum total of the best and worst of humanity, which makes them complex and contradictory entities. Over-confidence, ego, arrogance, single-mindedness ... these are characteristics that apply equally to individuals and organisations, and they have their place.

At times they may be considered essential attributes of leadership and corporate success, but inevitably lines are crossed, or circumstances change, and yesterday's strengths become today's vices. Add moral turpitude, psychopathic behaviour and base incompetence and allthat's missing from this volatile cocktail is a lit match.

With each downturn come the headline-grabbing corporate collapses and scandalised cries for reform. Just as inevitably follow the mea culpas, the repentance and the promises to turn over a new leaf. And the cycle begins anew.

Perhaps the key to getting our corporate houses in order is not to seek purity in their leadership and governance, but to frankly admit that purity is unattainable. Current business models, predicated as they are on human behaviour, are inherently unreliable. Companies - particularlylarge companies - need checks and balances with teeth.

Why not second boards to oversee the overseers, shadow chief executives, chief ethics officers who report directly to the chairman, orexternal ethics auditors with unambiguous mandates? These are not necessarily new ideas, or even feasible, but the lesson of this latestcrash is clear: it's time to rethink the status quo."

"Refocus for Recovery" was my response, published as a Letter to the Editor.

Senior management is still steeped in industrial-age thinking and practices - the continual loop of process, measurement, risk reduction and the oldand faulty belief that people control the system and its outcomes ('The statusquo is broken', BRW, July 16).

Management focus has not been on productive outcomes, but on the notion that an emphasis on risk provides greater certainty. This is nonsense, and played abig role in the global financial crisis.

A leadership philosophy called emergence offers a way of recovery that requires a different focus. It asks management to see with new eyes, to sense new fields and to adopt uncertainty and paradox as a way of viewing the organisation and the economies and markets it operates in.

This theory emphasises values, innovation and sustainability and reflects the way the world operates asopposed to an economic model.

Social media and the digital world mean innovation and change are occurring rapidly. Leaders must make sense of constantly evolving relationships and networks and rapid flows of information. Governance and regulation have little influence here.

Creative leadership is needed. Rather than more checks and balances and more bureaucratisation, management must facilitate a creative workplace in which every component of the business is up for discussion, instead of enslavement to a corporate ideology built on fictions of the past.

Ralph Kerle
Chairman, Creative Leadership Forum
Sydney