Greta, Mark and Leadership in the Digital Age

In the ongoing hunt for followers, with the eternal fear that a like could become an unlike with a simple tap, the very essence of a leader in the digital century can change at a speed to which we are not accustomed. Yet some traits of the leaders born in recent years will be studied and remembered in the coming decades as well, and they are emerging thanks to the accelerated world in which we live.

One distinctive trait is surely resilience. Entrepreneur Mark Zuckerberg, who due to the Cambridge Analytica scandal supposedly lost the trust he had garnered, is a prime example. "Supposedly", because in reality he has not lost trust among the more than two billion Facebook users. In fact, he is in a position to assert that he can "mint" currency like a nation, using Libra.

From resilience, we now move on to communication. The absolute winner is this area is certainly young Greta Thunberg. This symbol of the centennials made her voice heard by returning to the past. She didn't tweet, like or share a story but instead wrote a sign (later amplified by the media on and off line) thanks to which she reached the hearts and minds of billions of people. That's how she strode through the boardroom doors of institutions, not to overthrow them like some fiery populist, but simply to spur them to action.

These two traits, resilience and the ability to communicate, are closely linked to two established characteristics of leaders: vision and innovation. In fact, only true leaders can envision a long- term scenario and direct it through an ability to innovate, even when it takes them to borderline terrain. For this reason, in Italy as in other places, politics today is no longer a fertile ground in which a leader can grow. Politics is always in search of votes, and in this context dominated by likes and thumbs-up, a focus on the short term has taken over, supplanting the ability to look to the future.

Spurring centennials to adopt a long-term vision cannot exclusively be the duty of their contemporaries. Providing them with the tools, above all methodological, to critically understand the past, present and future is the task of the university. A task that in the West the university has fulfilled for over a millennium, and that Bocconi will continue to fulfill even as the means to achieve it evolve, with names such as data science, machine learning and algorithm.