Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders
Leadership and teaming skills are front and center in times of rapid change. Meet today’s constant disruption head on with expert guidance in leadership, business strategy, transformation, and innovation. Whether the disruption du jour is a digitally-driven upending of traditional business models, the pandemic-driven end to business as usual, or the change-driven challenge of staffing that meets your transformation plans — you’ll be prepared with cutting edge techniques and expert knowledge that enable strategic leadership.
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Insight
The relationship between some IT departments and their business colleagues is adversarial rather than collaborative, resulting in mistrust and conflict instead of respect and cooperation. 1 One of the causes is the inability to agree on investment and project priorities, which leads to contentious or misunderstood decisions on schedules and resource allocation and almost inevitably to wasting funds on too many failed projects -- up to 70%, if surveys are to be believed. 2 Business colleagues believe their IT counterparts favor projects they want to do rather than those that are most important to the business, whilst IT people believe business "priorities" are not always based on sound justifications and change too frequently.
Two Fortune 100 companies are struggling to compete in this fast-paced world. Does this sound familiar? Both companies were lumbering along in blind arrogance when their world changed. Why such blindness? They both held the majority share of their respective markets and were resting on their laurels -- and soon the competition came nipping at their heels. Of course, they continued to lumber. "We know what customers want" was the constant refrain. "Of course, we could be more nimble, but we just can't get IT to deliver."
Rigidity in an organization can have a number of significant effects, including cultural as well as process issues. Without sufficient review, the organization can become brittle and less able to adequately respond to new conditions, while seemingly remaining in compliance with all imposing standards. The brittle organization will have problems in meeting changing business conditions, and it will also be less resilient and under greater threat from sudden problems such as natural disaster or catastrophic shifts in the market or in technology.
Taking advantage of social media insight requires integrating and analyzing social media in conjunction with enterprise data and correlating the findings. This Executive Report examines how social media analytics, when combined with traditional business analytics, can provide rich insights organizations can apply to a range of BI, CRM, marketing, product development, and other data analysis and performance management efforts.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is about more than just sensors and a lot of data and analytics (although these certainly are key components); it also involves the application of new technologies and practices like mobile devices, collaboration, and smart networks that are literally changing how businesses operate and people work. Lately, I've been examining how such technologies are having an impact in manufacturing, engineering, and other industrial environments.
The issue in negotiations is not about how we deal with senior executives or lawyers, accountants, or technical people. It is about how we deal with competitors, avoiders, compromisers, and so on. And there are many tricks and traps with each one. In this Executive Update, Dr. Sara Cullen looks at five styles that can affect negotiations more than expertise or seniority do.
At its core, leadership is an emotional process. To lead others, you must first develop self-awareness regarding your own emotional responses to situations and then the self-management skills to control those emotional responses in real time. After that, sharpen your senses so you can understand and manage the emotional responses of your followers. In order to strengthen people's ability to lead, help them develop greater capacity to understand and manage their own emotions, and then to understand and manage the emotional responses of those around them.
This Executive Update explains how leading enterprise architecture teams create EA governance by having a stronger focus on architecture.