Innholdsfortegnelse for January/February 2016 i The European Business Review

Free Speech, free for whom? Free speech: If free speech is free to consume, free to seek, free to impart and disseminate and free to gather, then who is paying, because there is, as yet, nothing free in this world. To borrow from the ubiquitous world of the Internet, ‘If you are not paying for it, you are the product…’ being bought and sold over and over again. In the matter of free speech, who gains, who loses, who pays? We start the year with that most sacred of all concepts – the freedom of speech and expression. The tragic incident in January last year, brought Charlie Hebdo new exposure, recognition, an army of supporters and millions of subscribers which catapulted it to the role of leader of free speech…

It is possible to identify executives who are likely to act with consistently high integrity and who demonstrate sound, timely judgment when they occupy positions of power. These executives – as distinct from others who have similar backgrounds and temperaments – have specific underlying motivations and coping tendencies. Understanding ‘active coping’, as I define it and measure it, is central to predicting leadership.1 Executives can also learn how aspects of their personalities and particularly their coping styles might adversely affect how they work and use that knowledge to make themselves (and their colleagues) much more effective. Effective leaders must meet challenges and resolve them productively, day after day, for many years. They must constantly adapt to the unforeseen – and must mobilise, coordinate, and direct others. But when hiring executives, how…

In this article, Alexia Vernon provides actionable strategies for organisations to develop their next generation female leaders. Grounding her recommendations in research and real-world examples, she demystifies what holds women back from positioning themselves for senior leadership opportunities and what companies can do to ensure that qualified women do not leak out of their pipelines by making significant shifts in how they develop their high potential women. While there is ample evidence that companies across industries and sectors do better when there are women in senior leadership positions, unfortunately in Europe, and even in the United States, the lack of female corporate leaders is staggering. Only 3% of the largest publicly listed companies in the EU have a female CEO, and only 7% have a female chairperson of the board.…

Entrepreneurship is the key to economic growth, and right now, Europe’s economy difficulties need solutions. This article discusses the challenges that businesses, particularly those in the Eurozone, face in a collaborative innovation partnership, and how to overcome these challenges in order to form the most beneficial partnership. The idea of collaborative innovation in Europe takes its cue from the World Economic Forum’s long-term studies on entrepreneurship and drivers of entrepreneurship. Europe in particular has been a region of interest for increasing entrepreneurship-based activities because the continent has experienced significant difficulty in getting out of the financial downturn that began in 2008. Whereas the US has slowly but surely been improving its unemployment rate and productivity, countries in the Eurozone have struggled, especially countries such as Italy and Greece, where the…

Effective structures bring clarity so that everyone can quickly understand how they are to act and relate to others, internally and externally. In the world of structural design, one size does not fit all. It pays massive dividends to get the structure fit for the purpose and strategy of your very specific business. In this article, John Sutherland discusses the seven structural archetypes and the six guidelines for structural design to make organisations more effective and capable of delivering your strategy. Brian and his team had come up with their new strategy, after several months of vision setting, market analysis and detailed feasibility studies. Now he needed to ensure he had a structure that was capable of supporting the delivery of their new business plan. At this point many firms…

Humanity has followed a strategy of Discover, Infiltrate, Exploit (DIE) for much of our history, and this is the basis of much of our success as a species. In part three of the series on The Rationality of Risk, Chris Surdak gives some guidance on making friends with risk. Loss, failure and disappointment are a fundamental part of risk, and they are the part that most of us don’t particularly care for. But, if you aren’t facing the real possibility of negative outcomes, are you really taking any risk at all? And further, if you never take real risks, what is the likelihood that you will generate anything of real value? In this third installment I’d like to address why certain leaders are willing and able to take risks even…

In our research, we found that women leaders need to be even better at active coping than men to be seen as effective in their roles3 because a female leader faces certain higher barriers to reaching any goal than a male leader does, and active coping is about overcoming barriers to goals. Specifically, a woman will have a harder time getting and keeping followers than a man will. Here's why: A woman's followers will have mixed thoughts about her when she is strong and directive, and mixed thoughts about her when she is collaborative and interested in others. A man's followers, on the other hand, will laud him for being strong and directive, and give him a pass when he is collaborative and interested in others. It's not fair, but…

Managing the attitudes of team members is an entirely different challenge. It’s the difference between share of mind and share of heart. Managing remote teams is tricky. If attitude is the icing, function is the cake. In this article, Drew Gurley discusses why we should manage attitudes within remote teams and not their activities. In its most simple form, managing a team has two components: functional and attitudinal. Managing the functional components of a team is simple: It is smart people following good process to meet clear goals. There are work plans, status meetings, face time with team members, ongoing critiques and so on. I’m not saying this is easy, but results are pretty predictable if you follow this approach. Managing the attitudes of team members is an entirely different…

The Internet-of-Things essentially enables mass data collection and analysis, to the benefit not just of businesses, but individuals and society too. However the question is, are businesses behaving ethically when collecting, storing and leveraging this data? The Internet-of-Things (IoT) revolves around interconnected devices, systems and services within the existing Internet infrastructure. The IoT’s value lies in it being able to capture and analyse the data obtained from the sensors at the endpoints of the connected devices. The ability to put all of this data together means that IoT can bring considerable benefits to individuals, businesses and society. Take a look at the following examples: • Acts of integrating IoT into the health care system can be the implementation of a chip into individuals, for instance with wearable technology, allowing for…

Investors need to be informed and convinced of a company’s ability to continue to innovate far into the future. Developing innovation capabilities is no longer enough. For organisations, innovation marketing is the next frontier. Appearances are important. Look at leadership. How a leader looks and behaves in front of followers is key to the successful practice of leadership. But, while we accept the importance of appearances in a range of business disciplines – marketing and communication for example – in some it is strangely under-valued. Consider innovation. Companies invest in innovation to foster growth and competitiveness. This hopefully results in a higher Innovation Premium – the difference between the market cap and the NPV of cash flows. But, we were surprised when our research into the Innovation Premiums of major…