The systemic challenges we face are beyond the reach of existing institutions and their hierarchical authority structures. Problems like climate change, destruction of ecosystems, growing scarcity of water, youth unemployment, and embedded poverty and inequity require unprecedented collaboration between organizations, sectors-and even countries. As a result, the authors argue, we have never needed System Leaders more. They describe how system leaders share three core capabilities: they are profoundly committed to the health of the whole, which nurtures similar commitment in others; they build relationships based on deep listening, so that networks of trust and collaboration begin to flourish; and they are so convinced that something can be done that they don't wait for a fully developed plan, freeing others to step ahead and learn by doing. Providing examples including Nike and Unilever, they describe how the strategic use of the right tool at the right time-with a spirit of openness-can create collective success.

Peter Senge, the author of The Fifth Discipline and The Necessary Revolution, talks about the challenges of leading organizations at a time when their supply chains need to be radically transformed. The first challenge is building an understanding of the larger system in which any organization exists. The second is learning to work with parties throughout that system, such as NGOs that can provide access to crucial knowledge and expertise. The third challenge is developing a different attitude about sustainability: Being "less bad" is not a vision that can inspire people to undertake large-scale change. These supply chain challenges are all leadership issues, but they are not restricted to chief executives. Leadership in this area can come from many places in the organization, including technical and process specialists, and even from the outside. What's important to effecting change across a supply chain is passion, an ability to form networks, organizational savvy, and a recognition of the realities, such as finite resources, that are now asserting themselves.

Today's top executives are expected to do everything right, from coming up with solutions to unfathomably complex problems to having the charisma and prescience to rally stakeholders around a perfect vision of the future. But no one leader can be all things to all people. It's time to end the myth of the complete leader, say the authors. Those at the top must come to understand their weaknesses as well as their strengths. Only by embracing the ways in which they are incomplete can leaders fill in the gaps in their knowledge with others' skills. The incomplete leader has the confidence and humility to recognize unique talents and perspectives throughout the organization--and to let those qualities shine. The authors' study of leadership over the past six years has led them to develop a framework of distributed leadership that consists of four capabilities: sensemaking, relating, "visioning," and inventing. Sensemaking involves understanding and mapping the context in which a company and its people operate. A leader skilled in this area can quickly identify the complexities of a given situation and explain them to others. The second capability, relating, means being able to build trusting relationships with others through inquiring, advocating, and connecting. Visioning, the third capability, means coming up with a compelling image of the future. It is a collaborative process that articulates what the members of an organization want to create. Finally, inventing involves developing new ways to bring that vision to life. Rarely will a single person be skilled in all four areas. That's why it's critical that leaders find others who can offset their limitations and complement their strengths. Those who don't will not only bear the burden of leadership alone but will find themselves at the helm of an unbalanced ship.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Today, as consumer choices on one side of the planet affect living conditions for people on the other side and complex supply chains span the globe, businesses are facing a host of "sustainability" problems--social and ecological imbalances created by that globalization. Beginning in the late 1990s, organizational members of the Society for Organizational Learning (SOL--including Shell, Harley-Davidson, HP, Xerox, and Nike, among others) began a series of initiatives focusing on collaborative solutions to a variety of sustainability issues. The group's goals have included the application of systems thinking, working with mental models, and fostering personal and shared vision to face these complex sustainability issues. Through its work, SOL (of which two of the authors are founding members) has learned that successful collaborative efforts embrace three interconnected types of work--conceptual, relational, and action-driven--which together build a healthy "learning ecology" for systemic change. In this article, the authors offer examples from particular projects in which learning ecology provided an important foundation for substantive progress, and they draw lessons for companies and managers regarding each of the three types of work. Ultimately, the authors conclude that conceptual, relational, and action-driven work must be systemically interwoven and that there is little real precedent for that. They offer several guidelines for how it can be accomplished, emphasizing leadership and transactional networks. Finally, they pose three questions that must be answered if systemic solutions are to be successful: (1) How can we get beyond benchmarking to building learning communities? (2) What is the right balance between specifying goals and creating space for reflection and innovation? and (3) What is the right balance between private interest and public knowledge?

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. In many ways, the Industrial Age has been an era of harvesting natural and social capital to create financial and productive capital. So far, the New Economy looks more like the next wave of the industrial era than a truly postindustrial one. Why should we care? Because, say the authors, the basic development patterns of the industrial era are not sustainable. In the face of this challenge, organizational learning expert Peter Senge and former Volvo and IKEA senior executive Goran Carstedt hail the emergence of a new environmentalism driven by innovation, not regulation--radical new technologies, products, processes, and business models. They describe how more and more companies are recognizing the business opportunities that a focus on sustainability creates. Such a shift in thinking is already evident in many companies and industries, where learning-organization principles are being applied to create sustainable business models. Simultaneously, they become inspirational, energetic places to work, where even relationships with customers and suppliers improve. Nonetheless, ecoefficiency alone will not create a truly postindustrial age: a strategy must consider how the economic system affects the larger ecological and social systems within which it resides. Only a more integrated view will enable companies to innovate for long-term profitability and sustainability. There are three core competencies that learning organizations must master to profit from sustainability: encourage systemic thinking to sense the emerging future; convene strategic conversations with investors, customers, suppliers, and even competitors to build the trust needed to change outmoded mental models about what business success is; and take the lead in reshaping economic, political, and societal forces that stymie change. According to Senge and Carstedt, no time in history has afforded greater possibilities for a collective change in direction.

On its 75th anniversary, HBR asked five of the business world's most insightful thinkers to comment on the challenges taking shape for executives as they move into the next century. 1) In "The Future That Has Already Happened," Peter Drucker examines the effects of the increasing underpopulation of the world's developed countries. 2) Esther Dyson's article "Mirror, Mirror on the Wall" reveals the mind shift executives will need to make in a networked world, where companies will be known for what they do rather than for what they say. 3) The old language of property and ownership no longer serves executives, writes Charles Handy in "The Citizen Corporation." 4) Technology has given executives more information than today's machines can help them understand, explains Paul Saffo in "Are You Machine Wise?" 5) Peter Senge's article "Communities of Leaders and Learners" urges executives to reject the myth of leaders as isolated heroes and instead to build a community of leaders.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Ray Stata of Analog Devices put the importance of the learning organization succinctly: "The rate at which organizations learn may become the only sustainable source of competitive advantage." At an MIT-sponsored conference entitled Transforming Organizations, two questions arose again and again: How can we build organizations in which continuous learning occurs? What kind of person can best lead the learning organization? This article, based on Senge's book The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, begins to chart the territory, describing roles, skills, and tools for leaders who wish to develop learning organizations.