corporate culture Archives - GlobalFocus

Experiences with virtual meetings One of the biggest challenges for leaders during the pandemic has been adapting to virtual meetings. In the past, it’s been the person with the loudest voice in the room or the one who gets to interrupt first, who usually has the most influence. Now it’s more likely to be the…

Jawad Syed explains how organisations can ensure the involvement of their employees during a crisis and suggests 15 steps to enable or sustain employee engagement. In a fast-changing and uncertain situation such as the COVID-19 pandemic, many leaders are struggling not only in terms of organisational survival and operations but also in terms of the…

We need to create productive organisations by genuinely empowering employees and allowing them the freedom to choose how they work. We have spent the last 200 years building ever-more complex organisations. We have built up multinational empires blindly assuming that economies of scale are justifying the mega-corporations. Exciting, innovative, organisations have been bought by…

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Kirsty Bashforth examines the three aspects, strategic, social, and political, that need to be included in helping to change or maintain the desired culture within an organisation. Culture is an oft-used word with many variations in what people are really referring to when they use it. Just like the word “performance”, it can descend…

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Germany, the US, Singapore, Brazil may sound like an exciting world trip but they are also places where lucky students are IBEA undergraduates. By Ingo Bayer, Yvonne Hall and Christina Vonhoff. The International Business Education Alliance (IBEA) allows students to obtain a bachelors degree studying in Asia, Europe, and North and South America. Intercultural…

The #MeToo movement has unleashed a maelstrom of reports of inappropriate sexual behaviour. But, says Mark Lipton, what he calls the “Mean Men” syndrome has been responsible for equal, and sometimes even worse, wrongdoings. With the arrest of Harvey Weinstein and monthly firings of so many organisational leaders, we are witnessing a day of…

– SILVER WINNER OF THE 2018 EXCELLENCE IN PRACTICE AWARDS – Faced with unique and unprecedented challenges and opportunities redefining the boundaries of its industry, Daimler – the inventor of the automobile – embarked on a journey to lead the reinvention of mobility once more. Through a learning and development intervention that transcended barriers of hierarchy,…

Emerson de Almeida and co-authors report on a four-year research study in how to plan and execute a sucessful successions policy Succession as it really is: from feelings to political games in organisations is the title of a book prepared by the co-founder, professors and managers of Fundação Dom Cabral (FDC), a world-class Brazilian business school. The book is the…

Greater understanding of value, together with today’s big data analytics, gives companies the potential to put value creation at the core of their business. By Peter Stokes, Gautam Mahajan, Gerardus JM Lucas and Paul Hughes Historically, value has been understood largely in economic terms centred on, for example, notions of price, cost, profits and shareholder wealth. However, contemporary understandings of value also…

Peter Thomson points out that our stressful work patterns are not caused by technology but by leaders who have allowed their organisations to develop unhealthy work patterns and are ignoring culture instead of managing it We are living in an era of unprecedented change and transformation. Digitalisation presents businesses with unparalleled opportunities for value creation.…

David Grayson talks to the author of The Mosaic Principle and a key speaker at EFMD’s Conference for Deans & Directors General, Munich, January 2018. Nick Lovegrove is an author, educator and executive coach. He spent more than 30 years at McKinsey & Company, where he became a senior partner in the London office and…

Andrew Rutsch chronicles how Spanish bank BBVA is using its learning centre, Campus BBVA, not only to facilitate development but also to engage people with the company brand, values and strategy. In an environment that is increasingly disrupting industries and even countries, organisations are struggling to respond. Not surprisingly, in the learning and development (L&D)…

George Pennington provides a psychologist’s perspective on why training in soft skills is vital for business (and personal) life. In a 2008 survey the German Chamber of Commerce asked employers which were the most important skills future employees should be conversant with. The results of the survey were remarkable (see Table 1 opposite). Of the…

Personal resilience is an increasingly necessary tool to face the stress of a complex work environment. Fiona Dent and Viki Holton describe what it is and how to attain it. Organisational life today demands more from individuals and is far more complex than in previous decades. While modern (and indeed historical) business life has always…

Cheng Siwei, one of China’s leading management education scholars, says that the country’s economic future depends on a flexible empowered workforce without organisational pyramids. Interview by George Bickerstaffe. Professor Cheng Siwei is one of China’s leading economic, financial and managerial scholars as well as a noted chemical engineer and expert in such esoteric areas as…

Eel soup, floor numbers and compensation packages are just some of the disasters that lack of cultural intelligence can bring about. Ravi Kumar offers some solutions One of HSBC’s most memorable advertising campaigns in the early 2000s positioned the bank as the “world’s local bank”. In a series of television and print advertisements, the international…

Philippe de Woot, in an article based on his latest book, argues that economic actions based on ethical and political dimensions are increasingly essential. If there is a key trend in our time it is that of the progress of science and technology. This trend has become a steamroller whatever the vagaries of history and…