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
As business problems become more complex, so do their associated risk. Organizations that once provided relatively simple services and products now engage in sophisticated financial transactions, increasing fragility and the potential for failure. Given the potential enormous losses organizations can face, it is hardly surprising that managers crave certainty, and one of the key ways they seek to achieve certainty is through the control of risk. Frequently, they look to achieve this through the application of standard processes, often supported by rigid structures of compliance.
As we move into the era of Big Data analysis and extensive use of unstructured data, it is time to take a closer look at data-quality issues. While there have long been procedures in place for ensuring quality of transactional data, unstructured data has been less well served. Unstructured data and data sources outside of the firm can be relatively opaque. Processes should be developed to ensure that data is maintained for future use -- adequately stored, accurate, and secure.
As a learning consultant, my service delivery and project manager clients often ask "How can we sustain high performance in teams?" It's true that building a high-performance team is one thing and sustaining its performance at a high level over a long period is quite another.
Organizations tend to develop far-reaching plans to describe their strategic ambitions, tactics, goals, milestones, and budgets. However, these plans in and of themselves do not create value. Instead, they merely describe the path and the prize. Value can be realized only through the unremitting, collective actions of the hundreds or thousands of employees who are ultimately responsible for designing, executing, and living with the changed environment.
From April 2011 to December 2012, I was in charge (initially as executive consultant and later as CTO) of the IT organization of Wolfe, LLC, the rapidly growing corporate owner of Giftcards.com and other brands in the online prepaid domain.
The concept of notice and consent pervades modern privacy law and regulations. The efforts are laudable, but our cognitive limits and the rapid pace of advancing technology are straining their usefulness.