‘Move Fast!’ That’s the golden rule around Facebook that I learnt soon after joining the company in July last. Moving fast means embracing a product philosophy that’s agile, iterative and experimental. But although an engineer is expected to thrive in that environment, for many the reality of constant change and disruption in the creative industries is rather different.

As technology levels the playing field, competition can come from anywhere, and if brands can buy great creative in Mumbai for half the price of London, Paris or Hamburg, they will. Yet this is not a time for fear.

We should be incredibly excited about the new possibilities that exist today — about the opportunity for our work and our clients to make connections with people on a truly global scale. But success in this new world will take great leadership and great courage.

There’s a wonderful opportunity for businesses to redefine what leadership means in the digital age. If you look back 20 years, the guy at the top of the company — and it was always a guy — was doing the same job as the guy 30 years before him, and the guy 30 years before him. The methods were tried and tested.

That’s now gone. Generation Y doesn’t want to stay in one place anymore. They’re happy to move around, they want to experiment, they want to explore, and they want to do things for themselves. That’s exciting because it means there are new rules to be made.

We’re increasingly seeing bold leadership from our clients and partners, too, and we’re collaborating with more and more brands to help them understand the potential of this rapid change. In our Publishing Garages, we gather together senior stakeholders from brands, media and ad agencies and run them through an intensive two-day workshop with our own Creative Shop. The process can be difficult, but the returns are exciting.

We’re seeing Facebook drive real business results — whether it’s Cadbury’s Creme Egg, which redefined their content pillars and saw a fourfold uplift in purchase intent on their next campaign; or Hugo Boss in Germany, which took their learnings and applied them to every aspect of their marketing, seeing ad recall triple among their German audience on Facebook.

This is just a snapshot of how we can embrace the challenges of leadership in a fast-moving world. But what truly inspires me is the thought that if we get this right, if we successfully nurture the next generation of leaders, then the scale of what we can achieve is almost impossible to imagine.

Earlier this year we celebrated 100 years of the Model T Ford. When we think of the legacy of Henry Ford, of the changes his leadership enabled, we remember mass production, automation and the empowerment of the middle-classes. But Ford’s leadership did so much more than revolutionise transport and industry.

His invention and innovation gave rise to the suburbs, changing the way we live. And to big-box retail, changing the way we shop.

We don’t know what kind of future the leaders of today will create. It might require a change of mindset. It might require courage that we didn’t know we had.

It may even require a leap of faith. But as long as we continue to move fast, I think we’ll be OK.

— The writer is the vice-president of Facebook EMEA.