Over the weekend I watched the archive of a presentation given by Allen Delattre, Global Market Managing Director for Technology for Executive Search firm Korn/Ferry at last week's GigaOm Net:Work conference in San Francisco.

In the presentation Delattre makes some interesting predictions about the increasing impact of the major technological shifts that enable (or perhaps require) organizations to grow more global, collaborative, and virtual, while acknowledging that 'virtualization' and 'collaborative' have become so overused as terms that they have lost some of their punch. But despite this, the very real effect and impact on new technology from social, to mobile, to collaborative has had on organizations, augmented by the growing influence of the Gen Y and Milennial cohorts, have created such a new environment and set of challenges that the fundamental human resources issues of leadership development, identification of high potentials, and succession management all need to adapt to this new, technology-based reality. 

Delattre sees the ability to understand and successfully implement these new technologies as not only critical to organizational growth and survival, but that the most successful leaders of the future will be the ones that are best able to assess, adapt, synthesize, and implement new technologies to support business strategy and to unleash the best performance from employees.  And since the technology landscape continues to evolve and change so rapidly, Delattre theorizes that traditional organizational succession planning approaches that often emphasize 'coming up through the ranks' and often taking rotational assignments in different parts of the organization will no longer be the best way to find and groom future leaders. His remark that successors for big-time CIO positions used to count on 'surviving that SAP project and bringing in it only at double the original budget' is both sad and amusing.

This is a simple and really direct argument that the technology itself, is a primary driver and leader of the massive changes in organizational structures and that it presents significant impact on the nature of leadership and talent management.  When these kind of 'technology changes everything' speeches come from hot tech companies, or from systems integrators that stand to benefit greatly from the consulting and advisory fees they stand to earn from helping clients navigate the myriad choices on offer, you would be forgiven for taking the remarks with a grain of salt.  But when a Managing Director of a leading executive search firm makes the case that technology leadership is a fundamental and an imperative for tomorrow's leaders, then perhaps a second listen is warranted.

You can take a look at Delattre's presentation at NET:Work below, be warned, the first few minutes are a series of 'Did You Know?' style statistics about globalization, economic, and demographics.  I think by now we all get the idea the world is changing pretty rapidly. Delattre's remarks start at about 4:10.