leadership Archives - GlobalFocus

If we required a reminder of our need for resilience, the pandemic provides it. Everybody has to go through difficult times in their life; some more than others. But the way we manage these situations determines how we are going to handle similar situations in the future and what we learn from them. “Hard times…

The coronavirus has exposed what is working and what is not, as we adapt how we manage our teams and workplaces. What can leaders learn from the crisis? They don’t need a post-Covid transformation plan; they need a ‘listening plan’. Employees want to know their situation is understood. The big bang that COVID-19 brought us…

The COVID-19 pandemic has provided us with a unique opportunity to stand back and look at the world of work in a new light. Many assumptions about the way we structure organisations and how we run them have come into question. The role of leaders is under more scrutiny than ever before. Lessons from home working…

How to lead and create a way forward in a fast-moving and ambiguous world. Developing leaders It’s clear that we now live in a world full of confusion, ambiguity and disruption. The pace of change has outstripped our ability to keep up with it. Things don’t seem to work the same way anymore. It’s like…

How kindness can transform the workplace for sustainability of the organisation Across all cultures, since the beginning of time, there has been a sense of organised humanity. We suggest that kindness has always been a universal quality of this, although its manifestation may take various cultural forms. Kindness in the workplace is our focus and…

We would argue that to date, and due to COVID-19, sustainability as ‘the new way of doing business’ has been side-lined and largely ignored. The clock is ticking, and short-term business thinking still prevails. “We won’t have a society if we destroy the environment” noted Margaret Mead (1901-1978), an American anthropologist. Instead of innovating, we…

The working world - world of 2030

The Vision By 2030, over 70% of the workforce will be comprised of generation X and millennials. The economic effects of COVID-19 will feel like a distant memory and work itself will be integrated into a broader holistic lifestyle. The working world will be thriving as human respect and kindness take centre stage. Navigating change…

COVID-19 has had a devastating impact on the world. Governments and businesses have been challenged as never before. Leaders are struggling to not only manage the immediate, but also the long-term impact for their businesses. The crisis has dramatically exposed many businesses for their lack of any kind of organisational resilience. As customer demand evaporated,…

A simple proposition has emerged from the personal experience of most knowledge workers during the last six or seven months. Working from home… works! Not on its own necessarily, and not for everyone, but as a broad idea…it works. With that understanding – that the rows and rows of desks that we find in today’s…

The American industrialist Jean Paul Getty is said to have once stated that contracts are useless. If you can trust your partner, you don’t need contracts, and if you can’t trust them, contracts are useless. The well-known saying of trust and control should be reversed: Control is good, trust is better. Trust is well researched,…

The world is getting greyer. 10,000 people in the US turn 65 years old every day. By 2025, the population aged 65 or above in China may hit 300 million. The number of Americans aged 50 and above who are working has grown significantly over the past decade, and is expected to keep increasing. In…

2020 has been a turning point in history. The pandemic has disrupted life across the globe, leading to millions of deaths and crippling large parts of the world’s economies. It has made leaders stop and think about their priorities more powerfully than any other recent event. Just one year ago, in the introduction to a…

What does it mean to have a ‘profession’? Ansgar Richter explores the evolution of the concept, and how business schools can develop future-proof education for professionals ‘To educate future generations of professionals’ is an important aim of many business schools. A significant proportion of their graduates end up in more traditional professions such as accounting…

Views from EFMD’s webinar on business school leadership, by Julie Davies, Ewan Ferlie, Heather McLaughlin and Howard Thomas Business school leaders are ‘squeezed’ by a range of internal metrics. These metrics focus on a micro-managed narrow range of key performance indicators (KPIs) to raise revenues, research, and rankings. This style of financial centralised control has,…

John Knights discusses new leadership and education for the information age One of the reasons for the success of the Industrial Age in the Western world was the introduction of education for all. Though there are many parts of the world where the standard remains inadequate, in macro terms education has continually increased across the…

Sarah Hardcastle asks “Just how much challenge are you, as Dean, prepared to accept?” Advisory Board: “And I would say to the Dean: ‘If I ever tell you how to run the Business School, you can fire me. And if you ever tell me to stop challenging you, you can fire me.” After twenty-seven in-depth…

The brief was as brave as it was wide: take 328 bankers of varying seniority from 20 African countries and help them unlock their untapped potential – as individuals not financiers – through a programme co-designed by two ostensibly rival business schools.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people comprise 3% of Australia’s population and continue to experience high levels of disadvantage. Indigenous men die on average eight years younger than non-Indigenous men. Youth suicide rates are four times higher than in non-Indigenous communities, and employment and literacy rates continue to remain lower than those of non-Indigenous Australians.

Johan Roos says we must learn how to make best use of the input of academics and scholars to recover from an unprecedented pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic is testing every thread in the fabric of humanity – our personal lives, families, jobs, communities, companies, nations and the entire world as we know it. What is…

We do not need to read journals or study research results to know that the world is changing rapidly. We just need to look around and see what is happening. Our lives are being transformed by technology, bringing with it some real benefits and many thorny problems. We are experiencing social change on a…

This is a test

We have arrived in the digital age but we forgot the human factor in our businesses and business schools. How come when we talk about the one thing that makes all the difference in our businesses we talk about mindsets, emotions, passion, identity, purpose? The human factors, as we say. And how come when…

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…

Leadership challenge of talent management

The context of business is undergoing a radical rethink or at least a questioning of the fundamentals. In particular, the role of the leader is being challenged to be more inclusive and to add some form of social responsibility to an already tough job description. Talent management is a key area where leaders are…

Leadershift: Creating the innovation-ready organisation

There is perhaps no greater challenge for modern leaders than to protect their companies from the threats of the near-term future. Companies such as Woolworths, HMV, and Thomas Cook failed to meet the challenge of external threats. In contrast, companies building processes to import innovations developed outside of the organisation are maintaining their relevance…

Tomorrow's Leaders

Everything you always wanted to know about motivating the next generation but might have forgotten to ask. Are we listening to the needs and concerns of our talented professionals who will soon be tomorrow’s leaders? Seven young professionals talk about how they see leadership today, what needs to change and how they would do…

We are in a parlous state and we need a new cohort of leaders to regain people’s belief and faith in the system. Capitalism is believed to be the system that best provides the wealth necessary to lift the standard of living for all people. Yet in the developed world, it is far from…

Leaders of the future who underestimate the importance of “respect” as a central element of their culture do so at their peril. Leadership culture will be the biggest single influence on organisation performance and success. Without appreciation and respect for other people, leaders will struggle to be effective. Business leaders today face pressure for…

Building_new_ecosystems

Interest in ecosystems is back with a vengeance but, say Arnoud De Meyer and Peter J Williamson, setting them up and maintaining them is far from easy. We all know that the world in which businesses operate is changing fast. Agility and speed have become more important for an organisation than stability, predictability and…

The_paradoxical_age_of_me

Jordi Diaz explains why we love personalisation but fret about the technology that makes it possible. “Personalisation” has become one of the principal keys to corporate success in a world of increasing consumer power. In times when the companies that go furthest are those who offer existing and potential clients access to previously exclusive…