Professor Stewart D. Friedman sees us in the midst of a revolution in gender roles, both at work and at home, as the context for major life decisions about careers and families has changed for young business professionals. Friedman has examined the radical shifts in young people’s values and aspirations about careers and family life to find out what we need to do to ensure a brighter future for them and for subsequent generations.
He starts from the premise that we need to continue replacing the human population; that children will still need caregivers to lovingly care for, educate and support them, both financially and emotionally, as they grow; and that we must continue to build a society that is ripe with opportunity and choice for both men and women. Also for those people who want to become parents, it is essential for society to make it easy enough for them to foresee how they can realize this wish. Organizations and social institutions have an important role to play cultivating an increasingly adaptable and productive workforce that can both compete in the global economy and raise the next generation. He concludes by saying all of this must come together in order to empower individuals to create sustainable change, with a particular emphasis on the challenges and opportunities for the future. […]
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Professor Klepper presents various case studies of companies in the context of their corporate governance and the management of change while confronted with a downturn in their business cycle, when their CEOs were coming under pressure to lead the change.
Klepper’s core argument is that the CEO’s style needs to be matched to the business at each point in its cycle and that the board needs to intervene actively to help the CEO close any gaps between his/her capabilities/style and the requirement of the company.
Because of the changing nature of the business cycle, he states that it is imperative for boards to constantly evaluate their leadership and their strategy. This helps boards and businesses at every stage of the business cycle and can help regulate the relationship between the board and its CEO. Klepper maintains both progress and change are essential for the company of the twenty-first century. To achieve both, the board and CEO must form their social contract of shared values, commitment to stakeholders, risk management, and transparency. This then provides a foundation for addressing the challenges to their strategy and alignment of their business system over time. Boards need to match up the CEO’s agenda, practices and style with what is required to progress in their business cycle. […]
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The author Alison Maitland examines the subtle shift away from the Western male domination that characterized much of the last centuries. She explains that this shift is manifesting itself in many different ways: the feminization of leadership styles, the decline of hierarchy and trust and the rise of soft power, the importance of female purchasing power, the disruptive impact of the internet on business models, the shift of economic power from West to East, and the change in roles and attitudes (especially men’s) towards work and family life. Companies that wish to thrive in the future would do well to take action on these trends, as the gender power shift that is starting to happen in twenty-first-century companies will be an indisputable triumph for economic and social progress if it enables women at every level to realize their true potential. […]
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It is a truism to state that on every important business index, the world is forging ahead at an unpredicted pace, and John P. Kotter sees the risks involved with this singularity—be they financial, social, environmental or political—rising in a similar exponential way.
Professor Kotter sees the major challenge for business leaders today is staying competitive and growing profitably amid increasing turbulence and disruption. He argues that the fundamental problem is that any company that has made it past the start-up stage is optimized much more for efficiency than for strategic agility—the ability to capitalize on opportunities and dodge threats with speed and assurance—and today any company that isn’t rethinking its direction at least every few years (as well as constantly adjusting to changing contexts) and then quickly making necessary operational changes is putting itself at risk. The demands between what it takes to stay ahead of increasingly fierce competition, on the one hand, and needing to deliver this year’s results, on the other, are daunting. Kotter says the key to managing this complex situation is properly balancing the daily demands of running a company with identifying the most important hazards or opportunities early enough, formulating innovative strategic initiatives nimbly enough, and especially executing those initiatives fast enough. […]
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Professors Celia de Anca and Salvador Aragón examine how collaboration has become one of the watchwords of the digital age, and how co-creation, co-sharing, co-working, co-design, and co-thinking are now key elements in a new form of economic activity. This is commonly referred to as the collaborative economy, with people increasingly organizing their lives on a collective basis, mixing their private and professional existences, and operating in small groups akin to traditional clans that can just as easily function on a neighborhood basis or at the other end of the world, as though the global and local were just one continuum.
This collective mind-set has changed our traditional understanding of diversity, expanding into new cultural identities in which, in addition to identities of origin, new, aspirational ones emerge. Anca and Aragón call this “tribal behavior” and look at how it can be channelled into economic activity, integrating it in the process into systems to successfully explore and exploit new business scenarios, as well as developing new business models. […]
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Longstanding expert and pioneer in the field Professor Chesbrough feels there is much confusion surrounding what open innovation is exactly, and he goes on to define it as “the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation and expand the markets for external use of innovation.” He continues by explaining and giving examples of “outside-in and inside-out” open innovation models. Chesbrough sees open innovation expanding well beyond simple collaboration between two firms and he believes designing and managing innovation communities will become increasingly important for the development of open innovation. In this way open innovation’s effectiveness is not restricted to a few select corporations; it makes more effective use of internal and external knowledge in every single type of organization. […]
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Warhurst and Wright’s article outlines the current orthodoxy about innovation, showing that innovation is failing to deliver the anticipated enhanced performance, and how job quality and its potential role in helping lever innovation is underappreciated.
They argue that innovation is misconstrued and that its levers are misdiagnosed. They offer a solution to these problems, pointing out that a different model of innovation exists, one that can be boosted by drawing on a different kind of quality as a resource—job quality. Good job quality underpins organizational innovation and when adopting job quality as a lever for innovation, companies need to rethink how they manage and organize their employees inside the workplace. They see that developing an approach that integrates job quality and innovation would be not just desirable but also feasible for many companies. […]
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Professor Ricart explains how our hyper-connected, digital high density world is opening up to innovation in business models. Although it is difficult to predict exactly what innovations the future holds regarding business, he catalogs possible emerging business models.
These are concentrated in several groups. The first has the premise that anything that does not create value for the consumer should be removed. The second group is “platforms” business models that serve two or more markets simultaneously. A third group is the “global business” opening up to rapid international growth. He underlines the importance of the “pursuit of excellence” focused on developing innovation in order to promote virtuous circles, which is the primary goal of any good business model. […]
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In recent years BBVA has built new headquarters at various different sites. This article provides a glimpse of how this process took place at our group headquarters in Madrid. The original reasons for the move were economy and efficiency. But it was subsequently decided to use the new headquarters as a strategic tool to bring about a shift towards a culture of collaborative work. This far more flexible and open corporate culture—strongly supported by technology—nurtures collective intelligence and encourages innovation.
The “New Approaches to Work” project linked to the newly built BBVA headquarters focuses on the functional and personal needs of everyone working at BBVA. The aim is to guide the entire organization towards the goal of becoming the best—and first—genuinely digital bank; a bank capable of turning information into knowledge and offering a memorable and unique experience to each of its customers. […]
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Geoffrey Moore looks at Case’s influential 1937 article “The Nature of the Firm” and applies it to business leaders in 2014 looking to shape the future of their firms.
Among many findings he sees profound changes in the structure of the firm itself, as in the digital economy most of the resources will be contractors working outside the firm. This will be deeply disruptive to the hierarchical management structures that provided middle-management, middle-class jobs for most of the twentieth century.
As a result, more generally middle-class employment will shift from an economy dominated by its largest institutions to one where smaller, more agile firms will take up more of the burden; subsequently governments will struggle to deal with the impact caused by this new geometry. […]
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