Menno Lanting

About Menno Lanting

Menno Lanting is regarded as the ultimate expert on the impact of digital technology on leadership, business and the way we work. He is a much sought-after speaker and consultant. More than 100,000 people have read his bestsellers Connect (Management Book of the Year 2011), Everybody CEO (Longlist for Management Book of the Year 2012), The Smart Organisation (2013), Lead with a Tweet (2013) and Oil tankers and Speedboats (2015). For the latter he interviewed 100 inspiring and innovative entrepreneurs and leaders all over the world, on their view of business, cooperation and leadership in the networking era.

The main theme of his oeuvre is ‘adaptability’: being able to transcend what you learnt during your training, or even what you built your career on, the business models you believed in, or how relevant you deemed your (public) organisation to be and which you perhaps had thought would remain intact for decades to come. The goal is to raise yourself and the organisation to the next level.

The world is changing: old laws and models are increasingly proving to be redundant, new ones are being developed on the go. Digital technology seems to make the world smaller and smaller, while all those connections simultaneously create ever more complexity.

Organisations we thought would remain relevant for decades, are crumbling before our very eyes. Nowadays, consumers and citizens are interconnected so well, that information, news and trends spread globally in the blink of an eye. This means organisations need to bring new products and services at an ever increasing speed. This calls for more innovation and smart organisations, and consequently more experiments.

The key requirements for innovation are the right people, the right technology and the right corporate culture. New types of organisation will be born, but so too will our view of leadership change radically. Today’s knowledge worker is more independent of organisations than ever before. This calls for the skill to work together virtually and the ability to showcase one’s own skill and knowledge set through online networks. Leaders will no longer be appointed, but instead be chosen based on what they bring to their network.

”Things change, change things”