Innholdsfortegnelse for July/August 2021 i The European Business Review

The "bottom line" is a long-standing measure of a business’s success (or otherwise) in financial terms. But is it now time to revise that concept to take into account companies’ responsibilities to society? Should we be thinking about not one "bottom line", but three? Mickael Naulleau of the Audencia business school explains the philosophy that underlies their Chief Value Officer Executive MBA programme. Q Good day to you, Mr Naulleau. Thank you so much for sharing your time with us. First, can you tell us a bit about yourself? You have a PhD in organisational behaviour studies. How does your specialisation and expertise in this field help you in leading Audencia’s MBA & DBA community? A Thanks for the invitation. In a few words, I’ve been working for Audencia for…

The new era of leadership is asking for authentic leaders, which are purpose-driven and compassionate. Agne Nainyte leads with a purpose and has a thoughtful vision. I spoke with Agne about her leadership path and about how she experienced what she calls the ‘Millennial Crisis’1 leaving her corporate job to volunteer in rural Uganda and then coming back to discover her purpose. While many people still unconsciously relate leadership to a masculine behavioral style2 , this trend is slowly changing. The new era of leadership is asking for more leaders who also use feminine behavioral attributes, such as compassion, flexibility and sense of individual responsibility and impact on the community. Authentic leaders are purpose- and mission-driven3 and going beyond a simplistic understanding of what authenticity is4 . Millennials are currently, in…

Created in the 2000s by software developers, the Agile way of working is fast becoming the defining approach across industries and functions amid a fast-changing business landscape. Last year, 44 percent of some 2,200 companies surveyed by McKinsey had become fully or partially Agile. In Agile organisations, activities are planned around cross-functional, self-managed teams, each with a clear purpose and focused on specific customer needs. The reward is often improved performance and customer-centric innovation. But not every company, or every department in the same company, is cut out for such a decentralised, iterative way of working. Those who force it on themselves risk upending organisational culture with little payoff. GE provides a sober example. The company’s years-long, unsuccessful attempt to implement Agile under then-CEO Jeff Immelt ended in 2017, when…

For companies to keep pace with the current upheavals, good teamwork and thus the relationships between team members are crucial for team success. Following the Business Model Canvas, the innovation consultancy Strategyzer has now designed new tools that can make collaboration more productive, on-site and remotely. We must innovate collaboratively to overcome the challenges we face every day in our organizations and society. There is no alternative. A team that works and delivers is the new building block of any success; today’s challenges have become too complex to be tackled alone. But Stanford professor Behnam Tabrizi explained back in 2015 in a Harvard Business Review article that 75% of cross-functional teams are considered dysfunctional. According to an Atlassian report 50% of meetings are considered unproductive and a waste of time.…

Managers are about to face one of the biggest challenges of their careers as organisations start to gear up for a gradual return to the office. Compassionate, inclusive, and values-based leadership will be the key to post-pandemic business recovery. In the space of a year, as the pandemic has raged across the globe, our working lives have changed dramatically, and probably irreversibly. The world’s biggest (unintentional) remote working experiment has demonstrated that certainly for many of those in professional occupations, it is indeed possible to keep the wheels turning without vast swathes of staff crammed together in the same physical space. Spurred on by this, some organisations (Twitter, Nationwide) have adopted ‘remote first’ working policies, while others (Deloitte, Schroders) are shifting to hybrid arrangements. At the other end of the…

The Covid-19 pandemic has led many corporations to retrench in the short term—but the saying goes that no matter large are the turbulent times, companies must re-relaunch their going concern fast – and in particular, their innovation pipeline if they want to pre-empt long-term performance erosion. This narrative of « agile innovation » has proven right in previous crises such as the 2000 internet bubble or the 2008 financial crisis. It also holds at covid time, but with a twist : it has become second to the benefits of scaling a twin transformation of digitization and better sustainability practices. A fringe of resilient corporations is already operating at the frontier of this twin transformation and as a sign of time, are more often witnessed among Chinese than European or US…

Even before the advent of the global pandemic necessitated a rethink of leadership models, the world of work managed by old Newtonian paradigm which views people and organisations like machines (a collection of discrete parts) capable of operating with stability, controllable certainty and predictability was seen as unfit for purpose. This paradigm is largely responsible for many problems in organisations including low levels of engagement, productivity, performance, innovation, and bottom-line profit. The inadequacy of this old approach to managing and leading organisations has been augmented by the pandemic, where we have been propelled to a quantum age, requiring resilience, agility, adaptability and courage to make bold decisions to survive and thrive in this new volatile, complex and unpredictable world. In the quantum age, this complex and chaotic world is around…

Time is finite. We cannot produce more time for ourselves. We can only improve what we do with our time. This is the essence of business technology… helping us become more efficient during our workday. Becoming more efficient is a primary objective for companies when it comes to managing the plethora of data they possess and will gather in future years. But lots of companies really struggle and lose precious time trying to figure out the best course of action to manage their data volume. As the old saying goes, “time is money,” and this business maxim has never been more true than when it comes to the management of corporate data. As the old saying goes, “time is money,” and this business maxim has never been more true than…

For business Innovation is the secret of youth, and adaptation is key for longevity. Many companies face organisational dilemmas, which are seemingly irreconcilable dichotomies. The short term or the long term, embracing modernisation or maintaining traditions. Beretta family business, with its almost five hundred years seems to rely on permanent adaptation and managing dichotomies. One could say that this elderly “Lady” has found the secret of youth. A company that excelled all over the world by being a pure representation of elegance and technology, always up to date with the latest trend and innovation in all the sectors in which they were present, never afraid to adapt their core business. PRUDENCE AND AUDACITY AT VILLA BERETTA Primarily, the company only marketed firearms used for military purposes, but Pietro Beretta (1791-1853)…

Great talent propels a company’s success. It sets businesses apart and drives innovation. Yet far too often leaders relegate hiring to their recruiters, paying scant attention to the various techniques needed to attract the right people for the right positions. If you want your company to be great at hiring, then you as a leader must get involved. Start by educating yourself about the techniques that can be tapped as part of a structured hiring process that will set your company apart from your competitors. Remember, the competition is searching for great talent too. If they’re willing to invest, cultivate candidates, and try multiple techniques, then that level of effort becomes the price of admission – and an important reason why leaders need to be involved in this critical process.…

Accenture’s recent survey of 700 C-suite executives of large businesses in Europe reveals confidence that new global leaders can emerge from this region. They also identify the primary barriers to that end—and the ingredients needed to succeed. Europe’s large companies need much more than a return to pre-pandemic strategies to be competitive in the coming years. That’s not a negative statement, though. It’s a challenge, which, if accepted, could lead to significant market wins over the long term, in addition to an estimated net job creation of 5.7 million across Europe by 2030. But there’s not a lot of running room. Large companies in Europe are recovering more slowly from the pandemic than their peers in the US and China. In a best-case scenario, according to Accenture’s new global survey,…

The first article in this series introduced Team Mindfulness using the AIM model and explored how the application of the model in practice addresses important areas of organisational life, including purpose and the quality of participation, both of which impact performance. A second article looked at how the AIM model helps to create organisations that are more fully human. This article takes another turn and addresses squarely one of the most pressing issues facing organisations today: how do we create organisations capable of acting both wisely and successfully on our fragile and finite earth? The Earth is in distress. This fact is no longer seriously contested. We refer here not just the problem of global warming, with its detrimental climate consequences, but also the wide range of earth systems science…

This article presents seven actions to owner-managers of SMEs about what they should do on the sales side to get their companies and their customers through the crisis. The overarching theme is not to wait but to get into action! To let your business survive the COVID-19 epidemic, you must be a true friend to your loyal customers. Covid-19 has hit hard on our society. And to say the least, Small- and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) worldwide are not spared in this (Cowling, Brown, & Rocha, 2020). Although governments in western societies are financially supporting SMEs, business failures are unavoidable during the coming months and after the epidemic. How fast and to what extent owner-managers will overcome this crisis is influenced by their attitude and behavior on the personal selling role.…

The approach to corporate risks is a growing concern within corporate governance. Excessive attention to compliance and too much focus on financial risk is a risk in itself. There are several categories of strategic risks, which can collapse or seriously harm organisations, stressing the importance of addressing the risk subject in a multidisciplinary and systemic way. The current pandemic effort illustrates how human organisations, even States, are not well prepared to deal with risk. A holistic approach backed by business policy principles, ensures better identification and management of potential risks. Starting with risk taxonomy helps in classifying several relevant categories, increasing awareness and visibility of critical areas, and helping to steer efforts towards a better approach to them. Current approaches to corporate governance suggest that a normative approach, while necessary,…