Nike and Sony: Leadership Methods

Paper Summary:

This is a paper discussing which leadership styles help companies survive in today's turbulent economy. This paper compares the various approaches used at Nike and Sony as implemented by their CEOs in light of relevant leadership theories, and offers conclusions based on the comparisons. The paper concludes that although the leadership styles of both companies are very different, each style appears to be working for that particular company.

From the Paper:

"As demonstrated by the CEOs of Nike and Sony, leadership can ultimately turn a company into a multi-million dollar success, or a bankrupt nightmare. A true leader must encourage expansive thinking in order to generate new ideas, but also filter through these ideas to decide which to commercialize. One form of leadership, called "loose tight leadership," alternates the creation of space for idea generation and free exploration with a deliberate tightening that selects and tests specific ideas for further investment and development (Kotelnikov, 2005). Looseness usually dominates the early stages of the innovation process; in the later stages, tightening becomes more important to scrutinize the concepts and bring the selected ones to the market (Kotelnikov, 2005). Those who remain loose too long generate plenty of ideas but have difficulty commercializing them. Those who lock into the tight mode choke off all but most obvious ideas, thus confining innovation to incremental line extensions of existing products that add little value (Kotelnikov, 2005)."

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