Two of the world's leading management thinkers and two global CEOs discuss the changing nature of leadership in this excerpt from the 6th annual Global Peter Drucker Forum. Despite their varied experience and backgrounds, they agree that idea of 'architectural thinking' for leaders is becoming very powerful: of leaders designing environments and cultures to enable innovation. They show how the leadership landscape is shifting, and that the young leaders coming along are converging around a new type of leadership. In order to 'act like a leader' today, you have to devote much of your time to four activities: bridging across diverse people and groups; envisioning new possibilities; engaging people in the change process; and embodying that change.

Today's organization must develop young, customer-facing employees who are (a) committed to the company's mission and (b) capable of taking decisions and initiative, not just direction.

India's HCL Technologies has, according to Fortune, the world's most modern management. BusinessWeek says that HCL is one of the top five emerging companies in the world to watch. That's mainly because of a transformation effort that the author, who took over leadership of the $5 billion IT services company in 2005, launched. Nayar learned from talking with customers that what they valued most-above products, services, and technologies-was HCL's employees. So he came up with a radical idea, Employees First, Customers Second, to bring about organizational change. In this article, he explains how he got stakeholders-HCL's founder and chairman, the board of directors, senior executives, managers, and employees-to back his campaign for radical change.