Thinking Ahead Visions: The Leadership Circle

“Leaders get the best out of followers and followers get the best out of leaders,” says Manfred Kets De Vries, Clinical Professor of Leadership Development at INSEAD. The connection between leaders and their staff is only one of many circular connections he sees. The challenge for leaders multiplies as organisations get bigger and as globalisation makes companies more diverse and more virtual.  “It’s very hard to manage large organisations, things become so enormous,” he said in an interview with INSEAD Knowledge. Another circular challenge for leaders is to keep an organisation growing over generations. “To me, the real test of a leader is how well his or her successor does, and very few leaders pass that test,” he says. Leaders have to help people re-invent their organisations. Kets De Vries imagines this as an ancient mythical serpent that swallows its tail but is constantly reborn in a circular connection. To complete that circle, leaders are required to leverage their vision and their skills to create sustainable, results-oriented organisations. He believes group or team coaching is one of the most effective ways of achieving that long-term success.

Thinking Ahead Visions: Overhauling the Global Financial System

Rethinking global financial systems A radical rethink of the structure of the global financial markets and greater cooperation of the major regulatory bodies are paramount, said the heads of major financial institutions at the World Knowledge Forum in Seoul. Speaking at the World Knowledge Forum, Douglas Feagin, head of Goldman Sachs’ financial institutions group for Asia, believes that reforms of the financial services sector are crucial in restarting economic growth in the US, Europe and the rest of the world. Douglas Feagin Pointing to the bubbles in key asset classes, “unclearly unsustainable” leveraging in the financial systems, and poorly understood and managed derivative securities, Feagin says: “We are going to have to have a change across all these areas – the asset price bubbles, deleveraging and reform of the fundamental securities markets – in order to have a basis to restart economic growth.” Meanwhile, fears of a global recession continue to weigh heavily on financial markets around the world, even as many individual countries – such as Australia, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia – have announced new financial and regulatory measures to shore up their financial systems and currencies, and boost confidence...

The Role of the Project manager is being redefined

O2ibm

Visit this group The role of the Project manager is being redefined.   Projects generally in the past had a long lead time and adequate resources, and customers were located locally making it easy for the Project manager to focus on a well developed project management process. In a globally connected world projects are no longer constrained to a single location. In today's business environment priorities are constantly shifting, and far deeper insights are needed to take full advantage of emerging trends and match customer preferences. In addition technological changes have accelerated globalization and have intensified competition. The complexity of the project management has dramatically increased. The life time of business cycle is dropping fast. Business processes have to be agile enough as to adapt to changing competitive landscape, and to effectively support fast decision making and execution of strategy.

Strategic Innovation - The AVAC framework (Activities, Value, Appropriability, and Change)

In his book Strategic Innovation (Routledge, 2009), professor Allan Afuah provides us with a comprehensive strategic framework for assessing the profitability potential of a strategy or product.- the value of "new game" strategies -  in the face of rapid technological change and increasing globalization. It's not enough to create value in new and different ways, he says. Nor is it sufficient to merely capture value today. To compete and win, firms may need to rewrite the rules of the game altogether, overturning existing ways of both creating and appropriating value.  The most important thing, he stresses, is that a firm pursue the right new game strategy...