Over the past several years, Nitin Nohria and I have been studying the evolution of business leadership in the United States during the twentieth century. In our book, In Their Time: The Greatest Business Leaders of the Twentieth Century, we noted that opportunity emerges when environmental factors and individual action come together. And "come together" is the most important part.
The environmental factors that we cited created a specific and sometimes unique context for business. Within this contextual framework, some individuals envisioned new enterprises or new products and services, while others saw opportunities for maximizing or optimizing existing businesses, and still others found opportunities through reinvention or recreation of companies or technologies that were considered stagnant or declining.
For instance, in the eighties, when many industries (including telecommunications and financial services) were deregulated, certain individuals created new companies or transformed their industries. We called this awareness of and ability to adapt to the context contextual intelligence.
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