These are times when cause and effect thinking is not effective, planning is untimely, and ambiguity offers more promise than false clarity. Knowing how to react is critical, but the actions need to avoid the easy selling of the marginal to the more deeply placed personal ethics for doing the right thing, and doing it right. When your customers and employees are no longer satisfied with your static policies and smoky mirrors, something more is required.

When your business idea can become a product with the blink of an eye, and then become a competing product two blinks later, and when it is designed and produced in places you cannot pronounce, and financed in places you recognize but don’t control, you have encountered a new reality. Under such conditions appreciating interdependence, tolerating difference, seeing things that have yet to be named, and participating in dynamic networks all provide keys to your future. Rapid thinking connected to trustworthy actions provides the common denominator. We cannot promise to make you proficient in all these but we can at least help you access them.

Being at the edge may not be enough. Innovation often calls for you to go over the edge to see where it was. We are here to help you with these conditions, this negotiation with reality and in locating its edges. We encourage your separate explorations and preparations to be leaders in doing things that have yet to be defined. 

NJIT’s School of Management allows you to build a strong base for venturing into these unknown worlds. Our ongoing collaboration with international schools and regional organizations at the edge are to assist you in your explorations. There are risks associated with operating at the edge, but the consequences of hiding in the core and avoiding the edges can be even riskier. Let’s work together to build a sound basis for leadership in inventing what ought to be, not managing what is, nor explaining what used to be.

We want to raise your confidence in leading others to do the right thing.