Today’s business environment is unyielding and fast-paced. Businesses globally recognize that to drive down costs or drive new revenue streams and increase market capitalization, they need to cultivate the right mix of priorities. In my professional journey, I have had the opportunity to lead, support and collaborate with diverse leaders across sectors internationally.
Take a moment to reflect on those times when you came out of an executive / senior leadership meeting and thought – wow! what a bunch of unruly immature kids with bad behaviours – whose ultimate purpose seemed to be making other people’s lives difficult instead of constructively strategizing, empowering and providing leadership to drive the organization forward?!
Well, you are not alone… in my professional journey globally, I have experienced and observed a wide range of scenarios. On several occasions, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to support in shaping senior leadership teams and their respective governance committees. I have shared some concepts that you can use to make your leadership teams and board room effective.
The automotive industry, like many industries, is being impacted by technological breakthroughs.
Given my keen passion for cars and innovative automotive technology, I have articulated advances in mobile Internet access, electric-powered vehicles, self-driving technology, Internet of Things (IoT). More are all beginning to impact the automotive industry and this article will explore six of these trends and how they will generally impact the organisational workforce.
How close are we to AI robotic machines a.k.a. intelligent cyborgs imitating human behavior? This is perhaps a question for the most renowned Artificial Intelligence (AI) experts the world over, but there’s no doubt that emerging technologies have brought us to the precipice of major business transformation, and there’s no turning back.
According to a recent PWC report, up to 30% of existing UK jobs could be impacted by automation by early 2030s, but new job will be created elsewhere in economy. US is at 38%, Germany at 35% but higher than Japan at 21%. In many cases the nature of jobs will change rather than disappear.
At the latest divisional board management meeting, the latest sales numbers and projections were on target from the prior quarter, but not to the expectations of the ambitious Divisional Head of the software company – Dexter. Dexter blamed marketing and the performance from his employees and executives as the reason for not exceeding the targets. He menacingly told them meeting targets was not enough – they must improve their work or the company would not be able to sustain. The executive team didn’t just sit there and take it all in. Everyone started defending themselves in a reactionary debate. Despite this, Dexter, who was a tough and an intelligent leader, just started giving marching orders. He was not in the least disturbed by the looks and body language of his executives, who sat slumped in their chairs, their looks ranging from fear and anger to disinterest.
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Emily-Jane, the CEO of an ambitious retail company, just got the latest quarterly company performance report. The outward looking indicators – e.g., sales results were lower than expected due to several factors, most notably from losing market share to another larger eCommerce company. The company especially had trouble competing on the new products front despite multiple concurrent strategies it had undertaken. The report also showed a set of discouraging internal organizational health indicators – poor employee engagement, lack of leadership trust, low productivity levels and so forth. (more…)
