Today we want to recommend a TED-talk by Dr Robert Muggah, he is the research director of the Igarape Institute and a principal of the SecDev Group. He is talking about the biggest risk facing cities and the business opportunities connected to that.
Is Talentism the New Capitalism?
Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, thinks so and said as much as he opened 2013´s event in Davos. Today we started the day at KTH Executive School together with fifty persons working within consultancy discussing exactly this, attracting and engaging young professionals. The CEO of Universum was there to present their numbers of what engineering students think about their careers and their future and a panel of your professionals gave their point of view.
Do you want to improve they way you and your organisation adress this issue? Contact Johan Olsson to get help. The question is also adress within our Executive Program Consultancy Management.
Knowledge; the key to success abroad – A small and medium-sized enterprise perspective
For well over a decade asian countries has been a powerful engine of the global economy, regularly posting high single-figure or even double-digit annual increases in GDP. For a long time, asian companies had the reputation for being shameless copycats of Western products. Today they are pushing the frontiers of innovation. For international businesses interested in the asian markets, the biggest difficulty is how to address the complex dynamics between cultural, social, political and economic factors.
Brown Bag Lunch at KTH: Thinking inside the Box
Time: Thu 2018-02-01 12.00 – 13.00
Lecturer: Christian Pleijel, KTH Executive School
Location: Room Bora Bora, Teknikringen 10B, 2nd fl, KTH
Islands are shiny buttons on the big European coat. Although surrounded by vast volumes of water, freshwater is often scarce. Having lots of tourists, islands need lots of water especially in summer when demand peaks sharply.
Is it a choice between Big Brother watching you and you watching Big Brother?
The TED-talk recommendation of today is about data and how it can be used. In a nutshell, it’s a choice between Big Brother watching you and you watching Big Brother. Susan Etlinger want us to not become passive consumers of data and technology. She believe that we shape the role it plays in our lives and the way we make meaning from it, but to do that, we have to pay as much attention to how we think as how we code.
Does collecting more data lead to better decision-making?
Does collecting more data lead to better decision-making? Competitive, data-savvy companies like Amazon, Google and Netflix have learned that data analysis alone doesn’t always produce optimum results. In this TED talk, data scientist Sebastian Wernicke breaks down what goes wrong when we make decisions based purely on data – and suggests a brainier way to use it.
I’ve noticed a sort of pattern or kind of rule, if you will, about the difference between successful decision-making with data and unsuccessful decision-making, and I find this a pattern worth sharing…
Understanding and acting on challenge
Understanding a challenge and acting on it is two different things. How can we act today to enable the company to be prosperous in the future?
The three voices that need to be in the same room
- The different voices involved can be highly engaged, all wanting to add their perspective. You have the voice of today, the manager(s) responsible for delivering todays result that are more concerned with managing the existing, maximizing returns and keeping the organization going efficiently and effectively.
- Then you have the second voice, the voice of the entrepreneur, the one eager to experiment, try out new things, explore and extend, accepting some aspects will not work
- Last we have the third voice, of the aspirant, who is looking to build a different vision, believing in different, more pioneering ways and visualiz things in their ‘mind’s eye’, far more aspirational, that can seemingly on first ‘take’ look to be totally incompatible to the reality of today.
A methodology that can help 80% of all Swedish companies survive the next 15 years
Our experience from working with Swedish companies in developing their strategies, skills and mindset of working with innovation is following: They are great in facing the operational challenges of today and to discuss strategies of the distant future, but the gap in between, where the journey from today to the future will take place, many companies are lost. A methodology for working with both present, future and the time in between is Three Horizon Methodology for Innovation.
Applying the Three Horizon Methodology for Innovation
To become increasingly alert to market challenges, social shaping, emerging technology and other discoveries that might lead to new horizons, we need to connect what we do (or not do) ‘today’ with ‘possibilities’ in the future. Opportunities and challenges, often emerging, can be difficult to handle in existing organizations as they offer both conflicts and uncertainties. The way to counter concerns and handle the situation is to build an ongoing dialogue across the organization and to frame your innovation needs across the entire innovation / business portfolio.
Water scarcity on islands: how to stage and navigate collective learning
There I was on the island Vis far out in the Croatian archipelago, surrounded by beautiful turquoise water to participate in a workshop about water shortage on small European islands arranged by the Water Saving Challenge Project. Once again the same ingredients; a wickedproblem, a diverse group of knowledgeable actors and the tension between holistic ambitions, and specific and localized solutions – they seem to attract my attention. Collaboration, cross-sectoral dialogues and broad participation are argued for as key measurements in almost all sustainable development policies. This seems logical given that the present complex challenges require combination of a diversity of knowledge, and multi-scale and multi-sector approaches. However, I think we have all been participating in too many workshops, discussing challenges, barriers and potentials, with a nagging feeling that it is not enough for the needed societal transformation. I was curious to find out if the workshop at Vis could be different.
Foresight and avoid painting yourself into a corner
Did you know that the average CEO only spends about 2% of their time on long-term issues? Maybe you expected it to be more since factors like volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA) has made it so much more difficult to make decisions that leads to success in the markets of the future?
Profiting from Future Orientation
All our decisions are about the future and therefore they have to tackle the fundamental problem of its unpredictability. To make matters worse, the unpredictability increases exponentially with the length of the timeframe due to two drivers:
- The number of factors to consider and the number of interconnections between them simply grows too large, creating so called “wicked problems”.
- The long series of interactions make minimal changes in initial conditions cause very different outcomes due to the so called “butterfly effect”.
This may discourage investing more effort into future thinking, but at the same time research is showing that this is exactly what is needed! The positive effect of future orientation has been confirmed in several studies. One research project, for example, finds that only 6% of firms have a time-horizon longer than 5 years, but nearly all of these ranked high in business performance.
