Innholdsfortegnelse for January/February 2017 i The European Business Review

NGOs and Millennials – a blinding love affair? As we start 2017 we look back to 2016 to consider some of the interesting events that will continue or influence the New Year. The Trump election and Brexit in the UK promise to dominate much of 2017 and beyond. Interestingly the youth involvement in these events cannot go without mention. 2016 may go down in history as the year of the political awakening of the Millennial generation. The oft perceived general lack of interest in politics by this generation changed during the presidential election in the USA and political upheaval in the Labour Party in the United Kingdom, when young people positioned themselves in a political face off with established political demagogy. In the UK, young people were visible in their…

Values impact strategy, and that this impact happens regardless of the industry in which the firm operates. Values are at the core of the organisation. A firm’s Identity – its core values, enduring aspirations and distinctive competencies – is intended to guide management’s decision making. This article discusses the effective methodologies for translating the values, aspirations and competencies embodied in a firm’s Identity into a decision framework. Many businesses today find themselves in situations where industries are converging, disintermediating, transforming and dying. Products are ephemeral, markets are transient, and technology is dynamic. Organisation boundaries are unclear and consciously made permeable. Businesses are now facing problems that are so complex, intractable, and threatening to organisations – or entire industries – that they are best described as “wicked”. To the fascination and…

If you want to transform your business with current, emerging or disruptive digital technology, you need to invest in all 15. DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION PROJECTS INCLUDE THOSE PROJECTS THAT REPRESENT CHANGE THROUGH THE APPLICATION OF EXISTING, EMERGING AND DISRUPTIVE TECHNOLOGY. Digital transformation is about efficiency and competitiveness. It requires a deep understanding of current and emerging business processes and models and a similar understanding of current, emerging and disruptive digital technology. There are 15 capabilities that companies must master to achieve digital transformation that include specific technologies, new business-technology management best practices and soft skillsets. Introduction Your business is changing but your ability to respond to shifting markets, demographics and aggressive competitors is constrained probably because you’re not properly leveraging current, emerging and potentially even disruptive digital technology. So your digital…

It’s essential to ensure that you’re accurately represented , and that your strengths shine through . Adapted from Stand Out: How to Find Your Breakthrough Idea and Build a Following Around It (Portfolio/Penguin 2015), this article discusses how networking and business development and professional development can all be efficiently done online. Building your brand online is one of the best investments you can make because, in a global economy, many people – including potential clients and employers – will research and judge you based on the information they find online, without ever having met you. It’s essential to ensure that you’re accurately represented, and that your strengths shine through. But many professionals hesitate to become active on social media because they imagine they’ll need to devote endless hours to “brand…

Ensure that you are well rested and not sleep deprived before your trip . A large homeostatic (sleep) pressure will exacerbate jet lag effects. If possible, try to sleep on the plane – and so make your body tired before travelling by doing some exercise. As we begin a new year and return to work a fairly typical professional activity may include a look ahead to time spent on the road. I made a call for mindful flying through the simple act of choosing the window seat on the previous outbound article. Here we move from the reflective, perhaps philosophical, to the pragmatic, looking specifically at eating, exercising and jet lag. These are simple behaviours I’ve experimented with over the years, which have also helped our clients. I hope they…

The article argues that leadership is not a person – it is a system. It is a system in which three parts are of equal importance: leaders, followers (or others), and contexts. The article focuses on the importance of incorporating contextual awareness and contextual expertise into programs presuming leadership development. Leadership education, training, and development are, generally, relentlessly, excessively leader-centric. They fixate on growing the individual at the expense of others who pertain – particularly followers – and at the expense of knowing the contexts within which leaders and followers necessarily are located. Most leadership pedagogies are, in other words, solipsistic rather than holistic. Leadership, though, is not a person. It is a system. It is a system that consists of three parts, each of which is equally important, and…

 Though clients request our services for a variety of reasons, they show up with different forms of the exact same request: “Solve my problem”. This article based on the Creative Strategy and the Business of Design , discusses the importance of creativity in a business discussion’s final outcome’s success. At its best, what is inspired by the strategic entertains, educates, and resonates with its target on a deeper level than just buying and selling. Chances are that you’ve heard the quote “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” but that’s actually not what the Gestalt psychologist Kurt Koffka said. When this was translated into English from German, it turns out that the word “greater” was substituted for his original word choice, “other”. According to Dr. Russ Dewey’s…

Traditionally, many industrial enterprises gain their profits in “after-sales services” – i.e., repair and maintenance services as well as the sale of spare parts. The after-sales-based business models of industrial enterprises are endangered. Simultaneously, modern data-based technologies enable the development of complex service solutions – so called business models 4.0. Olaf Plötner, Dean of Executive Education at ESMT Berlin, describes the potential success of these models as well as the nine major cost traps that are impeding their success. In 2001 Siemens AG launched Soarian, a data-driven platform designed to revolutionise the inner workings of hospitals and other healthcare organisations. By constantly collecting and evaluating performance data, Soarian sought to improve healthcare workflow – better orchestrating patients, treatments, departments, and products while identifying systemic weaknesses and inefficiencies for optimisation. Despite…

Clashes between personalities are not just a problem for those involved, but often cause ripples of stress and anxiety to permeate across team, or even a whole department. Taking a lead in handling difficult situations and difficult people can be the hardest part of any management role. In this article, the authors outline ways in which to handle such people and situations to ensure a better outcome for all. Introduction What makes your workplace either heaven or hell? It’s the mix of personalities that makes a team effective and fun to work in – and work in a genuinely interesting place to be day in and day out. But these differences also provide the greatest source of challenges for a manager: the opportunities for misunderstanding, confrontation and relationship breakdowns. They…

In all, the recession forced COOs to truly become global citizens in order to properly understand ways to first manage costs and then exploit opportunities for growth. We focus on factors that have fundamentally changed demands on COOs: global recession, the evolving paradigm surrounding governance, threats to operations from natural disasters and terrorism, and the rise of big data. Each requires COOs to develop new competencies, to think about risk, and to become increasingly agile as a leader. Over the last ten years, leadership teams have found themselves facing many unusual and some unprecedented challenges. These challenges are, because of their nature and because of the way organisations were exposed, particularly influential in reshaping the work of the COO. In this article, we focus on four major factors that have…

If one word was used to describe the year we have just lived through my choice would be “change”. For most businesses, change is both inevitable and unnerving. Change is a New Normal, and our notions of reliability, predictability and poll-ability are coming to an end. According to legend, an ancient king of Persia once asked his wise men, “What thought can make me happy when I am sad?” After some consideration, these wise men came back with the reply, “This too shall pass.” Supposedly, this gave the king much comfort, until he realised that this axiom held true when he was happy, as well as when he was sad. And so it is in today’s business world. Global stock markets are approaching all-time highs, many economies appear to be…

Today and in our streets, we are witnessing the re-emergence of an old practice , where social activism, everyday entrepreneurship, informal economy, sustainability desires and cooperative venturing collide to create so far unseen social hybrid forms. Entrepreneurship, as a societal phenomenon, is not embedded in those abstractions we call markets, but rather in what we do daily, oftentimes unintentionally and even accidentally, simply as a result of just doing stuff. In recent years, we have witnessed an array of individuals and communities in the civil society, who are mobilising identities, extant resources and entrepreneurial spirits towards new organisational forms that enable improving their wellbeing and reshaping their realities. Entrepreneurs can always create ventures to help others in non-financial ways, their start-ups not only generate gains but also contribute to others…

Survey research from qz.com has found that the more people fly, the more they prefer the aisle seat while The Economist recently commented that the aisle seat was for cynics and the window seat for dreamers. As we near the year-end, a fairly typical professional reflection may include the number of business trips, and particularly flights, we have accumulated during the year. If you’re really lucky, a further flight or three may await for travelling home for the holidays! I write this article on my final business flight of the year, a short Lufthansa jaunt across the Alps from Frankfurt to Barcelona, while reflecting on a busy London Heathrow trip last week. I’ve done something for the first time this year (and indeed in recent memory) on the Frankfurt flights…