Corporate Voodoo: Extract 1 - Who has the Voodoo gift?

Speed is the legacy of the age - but speed's not the same as Voodoo.

The business world is moving faster and faster. Maybe you notice that? Maybe you don't?

Maybe you're only used to the way things are - and that because you've no slower age to compare it to, you don't think that it's any faster nowadays. They say that if a cloud were sentient - that's a weird thought isn't it? - it wouldn't notice the effect of being blown about in the sky because it has no grounding, literally, to base the comparison on.

The major legacy of the internet era will be speed. You'll have heard this before. Technology has invaded all of our lives, and life will never go back to the old pace. The new generation of young business people don't think that technology is moving fast enough - do you? - whilst many still fear the advent of this ever more complex technology driven world.

Do you?

But it is not just about technology it is about a different generation of leaders and entrepreneurs who are more courageous, challenging and ambitious: the Voodoo leaders.

The major legacy of the internet era will be Voodoo. That you won't have heard before.

This new cadre of Voodoo leader is exemplified in the New Economy and dot-com companies which exploded on to the scene throughout the 1990s - the Jim Clarks and the Marc Andreessens of Netscape, the Jeff Bezos of Amazon and the Jerry Yangs of Yahoo! But there are many so-called traditional businesses which have grasped some of these new attitudes and have delivered spectacular results on the back of this movement. Think Carly Fiorina at HP. Think Jack Welch at GE.

The key driver for the emergence of this new form of business leadership was the stellar growth in valuations of internet and technology stocks throughout the late 1990s.

And what else? What else made the world a fertile ground for this Voodoo world? The cult of the individual post Reagan and Thatcher greed a demand for more, now, by everyone a higher standard of living the peace dividend changing values in society the rise of the self-sufficient, latchkey-kids generation X workers the growth of self-development, spirituality, health and well-being as an end in itself more TV channels raised expectations of a better life for everyone. And some world-shattering, newly exploited, technological advances.

The possibility of changing the world for real (unlike the hope that your parents' Peace and Love movement would change the world) and the promise of joining the world's largest legal wealth creation system created a gold rush not seen since the Klondike days of the nineteenth century. Similar to the gold rush era, this drive for 'explosive valuations in months' left many casualties, and some spectacular winners. Some first movers were left face down dead in the hard earth. Others stepped over their frozen bodies to make their way to the gold.

It is worth taking some time to look at some of the beneficiaries of a bold, aggressive, impatient leadership approach: the Voodoo way.

Extract 2 will be published tomorrow, or go to our special microsite to learn more about Corporate Voodoo and Rene Carayol and buy the book, at a 20 per cent discount.

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