Leadership in Classical Universities: Between an Entrepreneurial and Virtual World

Starting from Michael Rendell and his team's "Managing tomorrow's people", this paper sets out to build a possible future of leadership in Romanian universities. We can ask ourselves if Romanian universities could exist in a Blue, Green and Orange World. How would they look like and how efficient would "corporate" universities be, assuming that the Blue World would prevail in the next 10 years. What should their development strategies be and what labor markets would absorb its graduates? What if universities would be in the Green or Orange World? What leaders should they have then? The analysis of the three worlds is made on the axes of individualism-collectivism and integration-fragmentation. We ask ourselves if we can keep the same coordinates for Romanian universities or is it necessary to consider other cultural dimensions. Could it be that universities in the future will only live in a virtual environment? The question is if such a context could be favorable to the university's mission or will it strictly offer the education from the specialization point of view. Will universities be what they are today or will they just be integral parts of large corporations, who, through these universities, will educate and train their employees? If we accept the Green World, a world open for ecologists, it is most likely that universities will focus mainly on research, leading to nearly the extinction of the professional education component. Actually, such a world leaves the individual in their own home, being let to work in their own environment, in order to avoid extra pollution and to stop them from using the car or any other means of transport. As a result, social interactions are confined to the virtual environment and only in rare and special cases is there a face to face encounter. For the Orange World, the challenges are even greater. If the labor market goes back to the guild era, we notice that there is no more need for individual professional paths and that guilds will be responsible for training and development as well as finding and recruiting the necessary resources. As members of such guilds, employees access professional gateways offered by the network of guilds. Starting from these questions we try to construct possible scenarios for a Romanian reality.