Democratizing leadership will create a more inclusive economy

The rise of new technologies, the gig economy, platform business models and an increased focus on stakeholder capitalism are significant forces reshaping work. Additionally, old-school leadership is increasingly being challenged by a new generation of employees more interested in purpose than power. And that’s good because the traditional leadership model is no longer effective in a world where work is more collaborative and decentralized, concludes to research published by Head of BMJ. So what does all this mean for the leader of the future?

In a word: democratization.

According to a recent to study by the Boston Consulting Group, companies with a democratized leadership model are more likely to be agile, innovative, and customer-centric. They are also more likely to have engaged and motivated employees. For these reasons, leadership is already democratizing in sectors such as technology and media, where companies are adopting flatter, horizontal structures. But democratizing leadership is not just about changing the structure of organizations, but also about how leaders think about their roles.

In the past, leaders have often been viewed as all-knowing, all-powerful figureheads, concludes to research by Oxford University. But this is no longer the case in a world where work is more collaborative and decentralized. Take for example the sharing economy, where people can use technology to connect and share resources: think Airbnb, Uber and Lyft. In this model, anyone can be a leader simply by providing a service or organizing a community: there is no need for hierarchies or traditional intermediaries. Instead, people can just log in and access what they need without centralized authority. This kind of decentralized peer-to-peer model is increasingly becoming the norm in areas such as financial management.

For example, street beat– a fintech app that leverages algorithmic investing – connects users with data and strategies typically reserved for the Wall Street elite. This allows users to make decisions and trade without the need for a broker. In other words, anyone can be a leader in the financial world, regardless of experience or education. “Wall Street has many competitive advantages in data and intellectual property that are not available to normal investors,” Streetbeat founder and CEO Damian Scavo said in an interview. “We want to close the gap by giving everyone the same quality of trading that only hedge funds have had.” Scavo added, “We understand the power of data and AI to level the playing field and democratize financial solutions so everyone can access and benefit from them (not just the 1%). The wealthy invest 25-50% of their money in alternative and actively managed strategies, just like the one Streetbeat offers everyone.

Further proof of the power gap: customers of popular trading platforms like Robinhood and Coinbase would have suffered substantial losses in 2022 – $44 billion and $160 billion respectively in the first half of this year – while hedge funds rose 20%.

What is the main reason for the earnings gap between retail and hedge funds? According to Scavo, it is a problem of access to real-time alternative data and AI that provides instant and expert decision-making based on massive amounts of public and private data. His point of view agrees to research suggesting that the democratization of financial services is necessary to create a more inclusive and sustainable economy. “Streetbeat clients do better auto-investing and diversifying using our proprietary auto-trading strategies,” he added. “We believe this is the future of investing for many around the world.”

Streetbeat customers, who the company says grew 60% to more than 110,000 in the last quarter, can choose to automate their buying and selling with an automatic trading bot – set it and forget it -the – or perform their transactions manually. “Our tools empower people to invest smarter and do better financially than they would alone, even in today’s bear market, providing less risk and greater reward for our community,” Scavo noted.

Andrew Gray, intellectual property lawyer and partner at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius in Silicon Valley, foresees the significant potential of these solutions to enable individual investors, including marginalized and low-income people, to participate more quickly and easily. to the markets. “Personalized portfolio management will become accessible to more people with the implementation and advancement of AI,” Gray said in an interview. “When combined with natural language processing technologies, even greater democratization can result, as inexperienced investors can interact with AI systems in plain language while providing a simpler interface to financial markets. than existing execution tools.”

Understandably, delivering so-called alternative datasets to the next generation of AI investing platforms for retail investors has become big business, as the most recent third quarter earnings reported by Similarweb indicate. The Tel Aviv-based listed company reported sales of $50 million for the current quarter, up 41% from the same period a year ago. According to Similarweb, expert hedge fund managers invest nearly $3 billion a year in alternative datasets, with annual spending increasing by 20-30%. From less than $500 million in 2018, the “alternative data” market will reach $100 billion by 2030, according to a recent forecast from Grand View Research.

Giana Eckhardt, professor of marketing and associate dean at King’s Business School at King’s College London, points out that companies such as Streetbeat and Similarweb are part of a wider trend towards the “democratization of expertise”. It’s the idea that through technology, information and expertise become more accessible to a wider range of people.

“In the past, expertise was only available to the privileged,” Eckhardt said. “But now, thanks to the Internet and other digital technologies, expertise is much more democratized. As a result, people from all walks of life can now access information and knowledge that was once only available to a select few.

Eckhardt believes this trend will only continue as more people gain access to technology and the internet. “The democratization of expertise is inevitable,” she said. “We should embrace it because it can create a more inclusive and sustainable world.” After all, when everyone has access to information and expertise, we can all make better decisions, whether it’s choosing which financial product to invest in or how to vote in an election.

In summary, the democratization of leadership opens the door to new forms of expertise, enabling people from all walks of life to access information that was once available only to a select few. It’s an exciting time for anyone looking to participate in the markets and make their voices heard. As technologies continue to evolve and make more things possible, it will be interesting to see how this trend develops and shapes the future of work. After all, with the right tools, everyone has the potential to play their part in creating a more inclusive economy.