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.

Subscribe to Arthur D. Little's Culture & Leadership Newsletter

Insight

For an organization to flourish, different people must take on leadership roles at all levels of the hierarchy: from frontline staff and managers who must lead small groups of direct reports, peers, or projects through various processes and decisions; to middle managers who lead senior staff, other managers, their peers, and their own management; to upper-level managers and executives who lead larger groups of people, entire departments, and substantial corporate-wide initiatives.

We know that stakeholders are those individuals who are actively involved in our projects and/or have a valued interest in the outcome of those projects. However, if you've ever managed a project, I'm sure you know that even though those stakeholders may be involved in our projects or are interested -- be it financially or otherwise -- in the outcome or success of our projects, that doesn't mean they will be involved or engaged along the way, even when it may be in their best interest to be so.

This Executive Update is designed to help with some of the more common tricks and traps for the commercially unwary to prepare for the upcoming cloud burst. Every organization's cloud experience has been different, but there is enough collective experience out there now that we can start to learn from those who bravely went before us. These early adopters were willing to take a punt, and we are all the better for it.

Decision making is greatly aided by visual systems because we can't ignore a huge physical artifact that is showing us a need for change or action. In this article, Jim Benson looks at the kanban board as a tool to see work and gain insights into how to make work better.

There is no simple answer to decision making in project management. It comes down to striking the right balance among exercising logic, avoiding the biases of System 1 thinking, leveraging intuition, and sometimes just being lucky.

In a global setting, culture is an important facet of the decision-making process. To become a great decision maker, it behooves an individual to become educated about practices, values, and beliefs that are dominant in a culture and to understand others' frames of mind before making a decision. This recommendation inevitably suggests adopting an interdependent mindset.

This article will explore the mechanics behind various decision-making models and examine the boundaries and use cases for each. It discusses the qualitative value that experience or intuition can add to data-driven quantitative analysis, thereby providing the best approach to decision making. It is an attempt to understand the science of the art of decision making.

Every software executive that faces the decision whether or not to ship code must answer the question, "Do the economic benefits of shipping outweigh the economic risks?" To decide, the executive must have a view of each. The hoped-for benefits are clear in that they are up front in the decision to build the software. They can include revenue, meeting contractual obligations, enterprise efficiency, or supporting some enterprise initiative such as a new service offering. The economic risks can involve exposures resulting from software failures, leading to the following: