Professor Julian Birkinshaw uses a vivid metaphor to describe how companies respond to digital disruption:
Unicorns represent fast-growing startups that are agile, innovative, and often driven by cutting-edge technology. They thrive by challenging traditional industries and moving quickly.
Dinosaurs symbolize long-established companies that struggle to adapt. Often slow-moving and at risk of becoming obsolete if they fail to embrace change.
Dancing Elephants are the most intriguing group: large, traditional organizations that have learned to stay agile and resilient. Despite their size and complexity, they’ve found ways to “dance” - to innovate, evolve, and succeed in a disruptive environment.
Birkinshaw’s metaphor challenges the simplistic view that only startups can thrive in the digital age. Instead, he emphasizes that resilience, cultural transformation, and strategic agility can empower even the largest companies to lead meaningful change.
Birkinshaw’s insight reframes the leadership challenge: how can emerging leaders help their organizations become dancing elephants? What kind of competencies do emerging leaders need to develop today?
"Leaders need many of the skills they have always had: education and a solid understanding of business fundamentals, openness to what’s happening around them, effective communication skills, and the ability to get along with people."
"But in addition, I would argue that today's business context requires a couple of additional skills. Leaders have got to be tolerant of ambiguity and sensitive to the possibilities that new technologies are going to disrupt their business."
"There's an old expression that only the paranoid survive. Great leaders balance paranoia with pragmatism. They are staying alert to disruption while calmly steering the business forward."
Birkinshaw says that leaders need to be even a little bit paranoid.
"There's an old expression that only the paranoid survive. Great leaders balance paranoia with pragmatism. They are staying alert to disruption while calmly steering the business forward."
"Leaders must embrace experimentation and tolerate ambiguity but also know when to bring clarity and direction to avoid chaos."
A good leader knows themselves and knows how to adapt
Different organizational models require different types of leadership, and a good leader knows how to adapt to the context.
Birkinshaw identifies three dominant organizational models that reflect how companies operate and evolve: bureaucracy, meritocracy, and adhocracy. Usually, those have three types of leaders too.
Bureaucracy is built on structure, rules, and control — ideal for stability but often slow to adapt.
"Those leaders’ job is quite straightforward because they're managing a stable, traditional organization. They still exist in some manufacturing worlds and some in the public sector. That leadership job is all about incremental improvements and managing by numbers and efficiency."
Meritocracy values expertise and data-driven decision-making, empowering those with knowledge and expertise.
"In meritocracy, leaders have to lead through the power of their intellect. In some ways, they've actually got to show people around them that they understand what the opportunities are, that they are able to articulate it and defend a point of view that they hold."
Adhocracy, by contrast, thrives on agility, experimentation, and action — a model increasingly vital in today’s fast-changing world. Those organizations put a real premium on doing things differently, trying things out.
Birkinshaw takes a startup company as an example of a typical adhocracy.
"An entrepreneurial company is an adhocracy. But I also want to see us injecting that same vitality into large organizations, because large organizations also have to be prepared to adapt much more quickly than before."
The most resilient organizations are those that can shift between these models and embrace adhocracy when speed and innovation matter most.
This demands even more from today’s leaders. They have to have a huge dose of self-awareness.
"So if you ask me what competencies a leader needs today, I’d say that, beyond tolerance for ambiguity and the ability to live with uncertainty, they also need a strong dose of self-awareness."
"Leaders need to understand themselves well enough to know when they are listening to others, to know when it is the right time to listen to others, to be a little bit accommodating of different points of view, and then when to project confidence and decisiveness: knowing when to listen and when to speak. Figuring out how to make that choice is all about self-awareness."
The best leaders often have had executive coaches to help them understand themselves and their own expertise better.
Birkinshaw says that the most successful leaders are the ones who have built up that deep sense of what they're good at and what they're less good at.
"They know when to listen to certain types of people and when to listen to others. How do you build that capability? It takes practice. It takes good track training and an understanding of basic human psychology and human behavior."
"But it also takes a lot of practice. The best leaders often have had executive coaches to help them understand themselves and their own expertise better."
Academic Julian Birkinshaw visited Finland in early September to speak about digital disruption at Aalto EE’s Executive Arena event.
