#leadership-strategy

#leadership-strategy

The history of the craftsmanship economy is littered with the ruins of fashion houses which lost their creative soul through founder absence, over-licensing, or managerial drift - as seen at once-iconic examples such as Halston, Pierre Cardin, Liz Claiborne, and Kate Spade - and internal turbulence (Gucci), as well as unsuccessful conglomeration efforts which proved incapable of preserving creative genius at scale.

In the defining years of American business, founding CEOs were virtually synonymous with the companies they led. Walt Disney was Disney incarnate; Dale Carnegie came to represent the steel industry itself. These figures were not just company leaders; they were the gravitational center around which entire industries revolved. Those days are gone. Though we still have echoes in modern chief executives like Tim Cook or Richard Branson, these figureheads, too, are becoming rarer.

When Everett Rogers introduced the S-shaped diffusion curve in the first edition of his book, he was directly following the data. Researchers like Elihu Katz had already begun studying how change spreads and noticed a consistent pattern in the adoption of hybrid corn and the antibiotic tetracycline. Yet it was Rogers who shaped our understanding of how ideas spread. Publishing more than 30 books and 500 articles, he studied everything from technology adoption to family planning in remote societies.