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

Something that differentiates consumer devices from business and enterprise devices is the impact they have on the manner in which people live, their concerns, and how they occupy their time. The ability to immediately monitor a wide variety of characteristics and behaviors on an everyday basis and feed that back to a repository in the cloud inevitably creates an opportunity for control. This control may meet the objectives of the consumer, or it may be targeted to meet the objectives of a vendor. The opportunity for control is likely to become more significant as the IoT develops. Aspects of behavior become a part of a conversation.

Within minutes after the New York Mets -- a baseball team that was legendary for its haplessness -- clinched the World Series on 17 October 1969 against the favored Baltimore Orioles, a spontaneous and wild ticker-tape celebration erupted across New York City's financial district.

As we explore in this Executive Update, changes in processes and markets mean that businesses should reorganize to meet new demands for agility and access to special skills. This has led to increasingly modular-, workgroup-, and project-oriented organizations. We see this strongly within the IT industry, but it is becoming more common in other areas as increasing digitization brings larger amounts of work within range of digital manipulation and sharing.

I've been spending a lot of time with social media analytics and exploring how organizations are adopting and applying the technology. There are a number of obstacles confronting organizations seeking to implement social media analytics. These include technical and organizational considerations, as well as dealing with societal or consumer concerns when it comes to privacy. The latter appear to be particularly troublesome for end-user organizations.

"This mirror will give us neither knowledge nor truth."

So says Dumbledore in J.K. Rowling's book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, commenting on a mirror that shows us what our most desperate desires want us to see.

Prof. Richard Nolan predicts and elaborates on the eight kinds of transformational corporate initiatives we'll see in 2015. In this Executive Update, he implores executives to move away from the "old" 20th-century ways to the future ways of 21st-century leadership and corporate structures.

It's Not New ...

Janet Gregory and I have been sharing our success stories of the whole-team approach to testing and quality for almost 15 years. So why isn't everyone doing this? Well, even good ideas can take a long time to catch on. Look how long it took to convince medical doctors to wash their hands. We continue to hear success stories from people embracing collaboration.

This Executive Update invites you to reconsider a process-driven business process management methodology despite vendor training and previously conceived notions of how you plan and design for a BPMS.