This could be any suite of rooms in any hotel in any city in the United States -- except, of course, for the police officer and the bomb-sniffing German shepherd guarding the entrance. And the group of Secret Service agents patrolling the halls and controlling access to the rooms. And the cadre of young, enthusiastic aides talking among themselves, ushering people in and out of the suite, and making sure that everyone keeps to the schedule. Vice President Al Gore is in New York. He has just given a standing-room-only speech on economic policy and has agreed to do this one-on-one interview, so that I can follow up with questions about the new economy.
On the stump (as in his speech earlier that day), the vice president can come across as a somewhat uncomfortable orator. It's easy to make fun of his speaking style, and, knowing that, he tries to use it as a source of self-deprecating humor. But in person, his wooden style gives way to focused intensity, and his sometimes-halting speech patterns turn into genuine thoughtfulness.
Al Gore may not be a natural campaigner, but he is a student of the new economy and its implications for the nation's social and economic future. Here, he answers questions about leadership, the Web, government reform in the Internet Age, and the challenge of the digital divide.
Does the new economy change what it means to be a leader today?
The new requirements of leadership are very different from the old ones. First, in any organization -- whether it's a company, a government, or a nation -- the right kind of leader accepts responsibility for articulating and making manifest a clear vision of what the organization is all about. That means not only where it's going but also how it's going to get there.
Second, a leader also accepts and discharges responsibility for creating and constantly maintaining a shared set of values that can serve as a constant guide for decision making in any part of the organization. Most organizations encounter change at their edges, not at their centers. The leader of an organization is usually at the organization's center. That means that the people at the outer edges of the organization, not the leader, are more likely to encounter change expressed by a customer.
Now, it's totally inefficient to require those people to engage in time-consuming communication -- conveying descriptions of the change, begging for permission to respond to that change, and waiting for a lot of information processing to occur at the center before taking action. And, of course, it's also inefficient for the leader at the center to respond to similar requests for permission that are coming from all parts of the organization simultaneously.
Instead, it's far more efficient for a leader constantly to refresh the shared understanding of the organization's values. That way, in any situation, the person who is meeting directly with the customers is likely to make the same decision that the leader would make in that situation.
Third, a leader has to articulate specific goals, a rough prioritization of work, and a time frame for achieving those goals that everyone can understand. The goals, of course, have to be consistent with the values, and the goals should be in line with the vision that the entire organization is pursuing.
What about the job of the president specifically? Do you think that there is a new way to be president, based on the principles of the new economy and the Web?
Different presidents have done the job in different ways. And, in fact, the job today is different because the world is so different. But antecedents for many of the changes that are going on today can be found in the presidencies of people like Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt.
Nevertheless, it is true that the Web makes the job very different. When the president and I went into the White House in 1993, there were 50 sites on the World Wide Web. I remember going on the Today show and introducing Bryant Gumbel to the Web. Look at it now: It has fundamentally shifted the way that organizations relate to themselves and to one another. At the same time, it's a continuation of the communications revolution that's been under way throughout human history.
From the movement of shared knowledge into language, to the appearance of the written word thousands of years ago, to the revolution of print (which made knowledge accessible to a much wider audience), to the invention of the telegraph, the world has become a great vibrating brain -- instinct with intelligence. It was a short leap from the invention of the telegraph to broadcasting, then to satellites, and now to the World Wide Web. We have the capacity to share -- instantly -- high volumes of information with large numbers of people. And that changes our lives as profoundly -- ultimately, more profoundly -- as the printing press did.
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