Innholdsfortegnelse for March/April 2021 i The European Business Review

Leading a business in the post-pandemic world means shifting not only your management methods, but your mindset about what it means to be a collective business team. Coming to the first-year anniversary since the entire world simultaneously shut down to the crippling virus, we are now only beginning to see slow movements towards reparations the pandemic left in its wake. Along with new normal societal guidelines and radical changes in the workforce, this re-opening of the global market is sure to come with its own set of learning curves. In light of these changes, The European Business Review has spoken with notable figures from Cedar Rose, Form3, MobiDev, Academy of Executive Coaching, and TimeXtender who excel tremendously in navigating through the steep slope of their respective industries and have generously…

Q What key qualities set Cedar Rose apart and will help guide the company through this uncertain future? A I’m proud to say that Cedar Rose is a proactive, dynamic, innovative and agile business. For the past 20 years, my team has gathered and transformed data while building quality, reliable credit and compliance solutions for our customers. We love being provocative market disruptors by merging hard-to-reach data with artificial intelligence and machine learning to create new markets and services. We will keep investing in top-end translation technology and data standardisation to give us a unique multilingual, multifunctional database covering the Middle East, Africa and Asia. All this means we offer accurate global coverage for automated credit and compliance assessments. This combination of innovation, future thinking and agility along with years…

Studies show that the vast majority of knowledge workers feel they do not have enough time to do their actual jobs, let alone step away from their desk for formal training. Over 40% of employees’ time is reportedly spent on tasks that do not tangibly help them achieve their professional responsibilities. Their workflow is frequently disrupted – often, ironically, by a notification on one of their multiple collaboration tools. As a result, 1% of the working week is all they feel they can devote to professional development.i Meanwhile, digital disruption and increased automation has created an unprecedented skills gap in the global jobs market.ii In these changing times, engaging in career-long learning has never been more vital. Consequently, ambitious young managers are increasingly taking their professional development into their own…

This research project started with the state of the art of academic research, which tends to lag behind the times but has great theoretical rigor, and then investigated reports by consulting companies, which tend to lack theory but are rich in noteworthy and cutting-edge case studies. From these sources, critical case studies were chosen. For CLEVER over seventy of multinationals, startups, and family businesses in multiple industries around the world were analyzed in depth. Finally, the findings were validated through discussions with people ‘in the field’ (corporate clients, executive education delegates, and students in MBA courses of strategy, innovation, foresight and future mindset), to gauge what stands in their way of making sense of the incoming change and to make sure the results aligned with authentic and pressing concerns of…

Jean-Marc Ollagnier is the chief executive officer of Accenture in Europe, with management oversight of all industries and services in Europe. He is also a member of Accenture’s Global Management Committee. Sybille Berjoan leads the Accenture Research European team and drives the European Thought Leadership agenda. Dr Jacques Bughin is a strategic advisor to multiple companies and boards; he is retired from a 28-year career as senior partner and director of the McKinsey Global Institute. Yuhui Xiong, research manager of the Economic Modelling and Data Sciences team of Accenture Research, is responsible for driving and developing data-driven analysis for Thought Leadership projects.…

Dr. Peter Lorange is a successful academician, entrepreneur and owner of a diversified family business (S. Ugelstad Invest). Educated at the Norwegian School of Economics, Yale University and Harvard Business School, Lorange is the recipient of a doctorate from Harvard and six honorary doctorates. Lorange has board experience from several listed companies, including Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, Kvaerner, ISS, Seaspan and Globalpraxis, as well as with Copenhagen Business School. Lorange is the former president of IMD in Lausanne, Oslo Business School, and founder and owner of the Lorange Institute, which was later sold to CEIBS. He has been a professor at MIT (Sloan) and at Wharton, and has also been head of the Lauder Institute. He has authored/co-authored some 20 books and more than 150 articles.…

Michael Chaskalson is a Professor of Practice at Ashridge Executive Education at Hult International Business School and associate at The Møller Institute at Churchill College in the University of Cambridge. A pioneer in the application of mindfulness to leadership and in the workplace, he is founding Director of Mindfulness Works Ltd. and a partner at GameShift. Helen Sieroda is founder of Wise Goose school of coaching and a partner at GameShift. She has been coaching at senior levels for over 25 years and brings significant psychological expertise and emotional intelligence to her work. She was a U.K. Council for Psychotherapy registered psycho-spiritual psychotherapist and trainer of therapists for over 20 years. Chris Nichols is co-founder of the specialist systems change consulting firm GameShift, Over the past three decades he has…

Q There is an old saying that “there is nothing new under the sun”. Do you think that business managers are facing something fundamentally new in the post-COVID world, or can they tackle it using tried and tested approaches? A The pandemic shows that there are challenges out there that we have not thought about when we have been putting together long-term strategies. There has been a human cost, a financial cost, and a cost to how we live our lives and do business. We have seen in real terms just how vulnerable we are as humans to the disease and just how compromised our organisations can be structurally and financially. It has also highlighted how we have become ethically fragile, with more value placed on economic success rather than…

Jessica Letterman accelerated her career in technology when joining the Australian Federal Government championing a team to manage sophisticated computer technology to fight payment fraud in a politically driven environment. In 2008 she made the move back to her homeland, The Netherlands, to join a flourishing ACI Worldwide where she advanced her career by leading international teams across the globe under various channels. During her time at ACI she covered a range of solutions from omni-channel e-commerce retail propositions to core banking engines and real-time cross-border payments. Known to be a ‘positive troublemaker’ she was nominated for #EWNP award for Women in Payments in 2018. Further to this she championed inclusivity and diversity supporting GSMA’s FASG group. Based in Amsterdam Jessica and her team are responsible for high growth Sales…

Mandy Hübener joined ESMT Berlin’s executive education team as a program director in 2019. Prior to that, she was head of consulting for Germany at Gallup, a research-based consultancy, leading a team of consultants and account leads and managing a diverse portfolio of executive and organizational development programs for key accounts in EMEA. Her primary focus is on organizational culture and culture change. She is passionate about creating impact for organizations and helping leaders create exceptional workplaces where employees and teams excel and grow. She has a background in banking and holds an MSc in management and strategy from the London School of Economics. Bianca Schmitz is a program director at ESMT Berlin and has been one of the founding directors of the Hidden Champions Institute (HCI). She is also…

Dr. Alessandro Lanteri is Professor of Entrepreneurship at Hult in Dubai and London, teaches for Saïd Business School University of Oxford, and writes for Harvard Business Review Arabia. An expert educator, he helps executives and students navigate turbulent environments and seize the opportunities of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. He works with multinationals, governments and startups across five continents. His research has appeared on Harvard Business Review and MIT Technology Review outlets, World Economic Forum Agenda and Forbes. His latest book “CLEVER. The Six Strategic Drivers for the Fourth Industrial Revolution” became a no.1 Amazon bestseller. Homepage: www.alelanteri.com…

Gilles Paché is Professor of Marketing and Supply Chain Management at Aix-Marseille University, and Director of the University Press of Aix-Marseille, in France. He has more than 450 publications in the forms of journal papers, books, edited books, edited proceedings, edited special issues, book chapters, conference papers and reports, including the recent two books Images de la logistique: éclairages managériaux et sociétaux (2017) and La distribution: organisation et stratégie (2020).…

Anne Ouimet Human Rights lawyer educated both in Canada and in the UK (University of Oxford), I served the UN as a field Protection Officer in humanitarian crisis & armed conflicts before providing support to the UN as ONE initiative to transform its siloed operational agencies into aligned collaborating bodies, working in close collaboration with host countries. The expertise developed has since been deepened to support ambitious transformations – from a People-HR-Org perspective, in global and complex organizations including the EBRD, DisneyLand Paris and (currently) the Boston Consulting Group.…

In Business, everything flows from strategy. Strategy requires that organisations prepare detailed assessments of risks and opportunities, and then find the ways and means to achieve their business objectives in response to those risks and opportunities. Today, and for the foreseeable future, this will necessitate being able to identify and manage the risks and opportunities that arise from non-financial environment, social, and governance (ESG) issues. As the London Stock Exchange notes in its ESG Guidelines: “Issuers’ ESG performance on subjects such as resource use, human rights, health and safety, corruption and transparency is increasingly used to draw conclusions about the quality of their management, identify their exposure to business risks and assess their ability to leverage business opportunities.” They add that “it is becoming more and more important for companies…

Gina Lodge has over 20 years experience in management roles while employed by Shell International Chemical Co. Ltd and subsequently in IT and Education. During her career she gained significant experience in project and change management. Gina was directly involved in implementing Quality Management standards, Business Process Re-engineering projects, and IT applications. Gina managed a department of 25 handling the supply chain logistics for Shell Chemicals International Trading Co. Ltd, where she gained a detailed knowledge of International import and export procedures. The role included liaison and troubleshooting with global service companies. Gina joined the AoEC in 2008, became Marketing Director and Board member in 2010 and in 2015 was appointed CEO. She is an accredited Executive Coach and a graduate of the AoEC. Gina also sits on Editorial Board…

For many people outside the IT sector, the expression “artificial intelligence” is something of a mystery. Could you tell us what you understand by this term? There is a lot of history behind the term “artificial intelligence”, and it’s not new at all. This term started showing up in the 50s and 60s, and a lot of fictional literature is dedicated to it. But why is it popular right now? I think there is one main reason. In 2012, a new approach appeared in computer science. When I say a new approach, I mean AlexNet, which is the first convolution neural network. AlexNet was able to find patterns in images. It became possible because Nvidia created a technology called CUDA, and basically, it allows us to process significant volumes of…

This research consisted of two phases. Phase 1. Information gathering: systematic collection of relevant signals and trends, informed by academic knowledge and consulting company reports. Phase 2. Diagnosis is a three-step exercise: In-Depth Analysis of the potential and likely trajectory of the main trends; Clustering of the most relevant trends; Identification of the drivers connected with the most important trend clusters in the context of analysis. These two phases are more technical in nature and therefore can result in fairly objective replicable findings. Based on these phases, a third becomes possible. Phase 3. Strategy formulation to respond to the dominant trends, incorporating the main drivers. The third phase must reflect the subjective attitudes of key decision-maker. Therefore, this research does not recommend what individual business leaders should do, but only…

Nando Malmelin, Ph.D., works at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland as a Professor of Practice focusing on disruptive business. He is also an Adjunct Professor of media and communication studies at the University of Helsinki. Malmelin has published extensively on management, creativity, organizational renewal, and strategic thinking. Matti Pihlajamaa, D.Sc. (Tech.), is a Senior Scientist at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. He is an expert on innovation management and innovation policy. His work centers on strategic innovation, sustainable business, and cross-sectoral collaboration. Pauli Komonen, M.Soc.Sc., is a Research Scientist at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. As a researcher and advisor, Komonen specializes in strategic foresight and human insight. He is doing a PhD on consumer future orientation at the University of Helsinki.…

Leonardo Meeus is Professor of Strategy and Corporate Affairs at Vlerick Business School. He is passionate about the relations between companies, stakeholders and government. He helps organisations to take a broader perspective on strategy. Leonardo is also professor at the European University Institute where he contributes to the activities of the Florence School of Regulation. He works as an expert for European institutions, regulatory agencies, and companies via research contracts and advisory roles.…

Niccolò Pisani is Associate Professor of Strategy and International Business at the University of Amsterdam Business School. He holds a PhD in Management from IESE Business School. Among the topics of his scholarly enquiry are global strategy, sustainability, and offshoring. His research has been published in top-tier academic journals and practitioner-oriented outlets. Prior to entering academia, Dr Pisani worked several years for Sanlorenzo, one of the world’s leading manufacturers in the luxury yachting industry. He also worked as a researcher for Merrill Lynch in its San Francisco offi ce. Omar Toulan is Professor of Strategy and International Management at IMD Business School in Switzerland. Professor Toulan holds his PhD from the Sloan School of Management at MIT. His areas of expertise include strategic management, international business, growth strategies, and managing…

William S. Harvey is Professor of Management and Associate Dean at the University of Exeter Business School. He is an International Research Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Corporate Reputation and Chair of the Board of Libraries Unlimited. Will advises leaders on reputation, talent management and leadership. Sharina Osman is a Senior Lecturer and the Section Head of Tourism at the Universiti Kuala Lumpur Business School, Malaysia. She helps organizations in competency and capacity building through trainings and consultations particularly in Talent Management and Organizational Culture. Marwa E.A. Tourky is Senior Lecturer of Marketing and Programme Director of BSc Business Studies at Exeter Business School. She is on the Editorial Board of Journal of Marketing Communications. Marwa coaches business managers on how they can develop and enhance their corporate brand…

Tim Bovy has over 35 years of experience in designing and implementing various types of information and risk management systems for major law firms such as Clifford Chance; and for international accountancy firms such as Deloitte. He has also developed solutions for organizations such as BT, Imperial Tobacco, Rio Tinto, the Kuwaiti government, The Royal Household, and the US House of Representatives. Tim is an elected member of The Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House, an Independent Think Tank based in Central London. Tim holds a BA degree, magna cum laude, from the University of Notre Dame, and MA and C.Phil degrees from the University of California, Davis Ian Hodges has worked in a variety of information management roles over a twenty-year career. He has designed and implemented records…