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
Advisor
Security and the Enterprise
Security of information is a hot topic these days. That is probably because cyber crime has reached a level of popularity that far outstrips the drug trade in terms of ROI for everybody from old-fashioned Mafiosi types to any kid in the Ukraine with a computer. And given the fact that crime on the Internet is all about money, any CEO who does not take all of the steps necessary to secure their organization against cyber attacks is rolling the dice with their company's assets. At least that's what current doctrine would like you to believe.
Over the past year, business architecture crossed a major threshold in terms of standardization, industry awareness, and business engagement. It is now viewed as an important business discipline that executives should pursue. While early efforts emphasized capability mapping and value stream analysis, other aspects of business architecture are now being incorporated into more and more projects. In addition, business architecture in practice is currently being leveraged by a growing body of business professionals, such as planning teams, business analysts, portfolio managers, and management teams.
Tim Brown, president of the iconoclastic design firm IDEO, says that the question CEOs most often ask him is "How can I make my company more innovative?"1 It is a pervasive and frustrating concern driven by a marketplace that is demanding ever-higher levels of creative engagement.
Big initiatives require big thinking. Transformational initiatives magnify the struggles of a typical project: vague objectives, compressed timelines, scope creep, and communication issues. They also introduce their own unique challenges: vast stakeholder lists, extreme complexity, and unknown interdependencies. These undertakings require a different approach, a bigger type of thinking than for a traditional IT project.
Executive Update
What is Senior Management Really Afraid Of?
I am on the road about 280 days a year. During my travels, I collect over 500 business cards every five to six weeks. In fact, I've been called a "bow tie wearing sensing device" by my sharper-tongued colleagues. During the past two years, I have been going door to door with senior executives to determine what the "top of the house" is really thinking about.
In the first installment of this Advisor series (Reflections on Innovation, Part I: An Idea, 29 September 2011), I suggested that you can conceive the idea of something -- its perfect,
Executive Summary
Applying Decision Models to Resource Allocation in Network Security
Improving the effectiveness of resource allocation decisions for cyber security is an extremely important issue, especially since resources are constrained and organizations would like to have the best security they can for their budgets. The accompanying Executive Report discusses several relevant issues to such decisions.