Overview of This Book

Chapter 2 tells the story of how a small, unlikely band of entrepreneurs from different countries and industry backgrounds teamed up to create a new company called Living PlanIT. We get to know Steve Lewis, the CEO who envisioned the future and enrolled others to help enact it. While many were put off by Lewis's enormous claims, some were drawn to the project by his charisma and experience, others by the company's bold vision, and some by the promise of putting their talents to the highest use (not without personal sacrifice). Their stories convey the first leadership lesson: building the future starts with a bold and exciting vision to motivate others to join an uncertain journey with no guarantee of success. From the IT geeks to the fiercely proud mayor who gave the fledgling company a piece of land on which to build its dream of the future, we see how different these players, these strange bedfellows, really are.

Five Leadership Lessons for Building the Future: A Preview

Chapter 3, which positions the startup in the IT industry, is the first of five chapters portraying norms, values, and expectations in a particular industry. As we explain, innovation and information technology go hand in hand. Software and hardware engineers expect change and are even comfortable with the inevitable failures that mark the path to successful new products. Living PlanIT's early employees, for the most part, hailed from IT backgrounds. Several came from Microsoft. Some had remarkable pedigrees, with successful stints at blue-chip companies. Others were younger and less accomplished. Many, true IT enthusiasts, relished the startup environment. They believed anything was possible (and in software it's almost true). They were young, idealistic, ambitious, and sometimes naive.

It becomes clear in this chapter that Living PlanIT cannot build a city on its own. The company must team up with other organizations, with vastly different resources and skill sets, if city building is going to happen. This is the nature of the nascent smart-city industry. In this way the second leadership lesson—future-building requires Big Teaming across industries—begins to take shape.

Chapter 4 focuses on the role of real estate development in building the future. We show how visionary leaders with the capacity to envision a new future can shift the conversation in an industry. Often such visionary leaders are inspired by a revelation—an aha moment that allows them to imagine a new order of things. This was the experience of Adrian Wyatt, the then CEO of London's Quintain property investment and development company, who opens the chapter. In this way chapter 4 brings out the third leadership lesson: the importance of engaging industry mavericks who have vision as well as credibility built on past success. We examine the opportunities and the challenges of Living PlanIT's new partnership with Quintain, as well as how shared vision brought it about. But deals, especially big deals, are not built on vision alone. The challenges of Big Teaming become especially apparent in the professional chasm that lies between IT and real estate development.

Chapter 5 introduces local government as a critical partner in the cross-industry teaming of building the urban future. These are the elected officials and civil servants who regulate the present while aspiring to build the future for their constituents. We meet Celso Ferreira, part visionary, part pragmatist, the elegant Portuguese mayor in search of a legacy. He too is a maverick—out ahead of the curve in envisioning the future city. We then meet the remarkably thoughtful policy analyst Robin Daniels, who ably bridges the worlds of technology, government, real estate, and business. Boundary spanners like Daniels, we argue, play a crucial role in building the future by facilitating Big Teaming.

In chapter 6 we dig into construction and architecture—fields with limited attention to IT historically yet central in today's plans to create new or retrofitted cities of any size. We meet two members of Quintain's construction team and recognize how their comfort with visual and tangible objects is vital to innovation. They long to see shovels hitting dirt. We also consider the role of architects—right-brain thinkers who astonish with their visual fluency, their ability to pick up a pen and an unlined piece of paper and create visions of the future. They readily glimpse new possibilities. We meet the stylish and iconoclastic Portuguese architect Pedro Balonas, who worked on a master plan for the new city Living PlanIT hoped to build. Can they team up with IT? The clash of ideology and temperament between construction and software is revealed in stark relief.

Chapter 7 explains that high-tech corporate giants embody conservatism and an appetite for innovation at the same time. Can they help bridge the gulf between the IT startup and the real estate developer? We meet two executives who joined Living PlanIT, leaving major corporate roles behind, and who seemed, at first, perfectly suited to help the young company grow up and get serious. Their pragmatism, their appetite for action, balances the visionary. Observing a flurry of meetings and memos of understanding (MOUs) that spread over months that turned into years, we see how the corporate world constitutes another distinct culture in the smart-city landscape. In the meantime Living PlanIT faces more than its share of small setbacks. We glimpse the potential hazards of successful external influencing activities that shortchange internal innovation efforts, as Lewis's penchant for the limelight, for shaping the global smart-city dialogue, grew to dominate his schedule.

Chapter 8 weaves together the insights and examples from chapters 3 through 7 to focus on teaming across industries—its challenges as well as the opportunities for overcoming them. We integrate our case study data with social psychological research to identify the culture clash that lies between industries, to examine its implications for Big Teaming, and to suggest leadership strategies for overcoming it. How can leaders bridge the psychological divides that separate industry domains? We dig more deeply into what leaders can do to build creative, psychologically safe interpersonal spaces to team up across industry "fault lines."

Chapter 9 updates the unfolding Living PlanIT story as of 2015: several promising smart-city projects were under way as we finished writing this book. This chapter highlights the fourth leadership lesson: the need to embrace small action as a strategy for making progress on a big vision. We reflect on the audacity and brilliance and on the naiveté and blindness (blindness in the present perhaps unwittingly caused by an intense focus on the future) that fueled and inhibited the company's progress. We conclude with the fifth leadership lesson: the need for future-building leaders to balance the competing goals of influencing and innovating.