Disruptive Leadership

I’ve long been an advocate of using for-profit business principles (e.g. capitalism) to promote development and world progress, specifically in technology. This belief has been formed from:

My personal experiences working with local entrepreneurs in emerging market countries.
Leading business initiatives such as Intel’s “World Ahead” program that (uncomfortably at times) straddles business and philanthropic objectives.
Reading/following [...]

Every month I am going to highlight a specific leader in the technology industry that best exemplifies the skills and qualities of a Disruptive Leader. Each will be a leader who:

Embraces challenge and adversity as a way to strengthen organizations and business fundamentals.
Uses game-changing strategies and tactics to overturn the status quo both within their [...]

This is a reposting of an article I wrote last week for NextBillion.net.  NextBillion is a site that “brings together business leaders, social entrepreneurs, NGOs, policy makers, and academics who want to explore the connection between development and enterprise.” While a few of the ideas are covered in the About section of this blog, I wanted [...]

I wanted to comment on a June 2008 article from The Economist from June 2008 since it directly relates to my previous post on being successful in emerging market countries.
A multinational company, Vodafone, builds their business and brand locally in Kenya through their local subsidiary Safaricom. Vodafone is completely behind the scenes. The visionary leader is [...]

First a caveat … emerging markets is a catch-all phrase to describe developing countries.  It was coined by Antoine van Agtmael in the early 1980’s to replace the more negative term “third world country.”   It is supposed to designate those countries in a transitional phase between developing and developed status.
But here’s the rub … China [...]