Innholdsfortegnelse for November/December 2022 i The European Business Review

Q Good day, Mr Tanase! It's lovely to have you with us again. What do you most love about email? A Thank you so much for having me back. I'm honoured to be welcomed. There's so much to love about this communication medium that unquestionably connects the entire world. Pretty much wherever human beings roam, email goes with us. It's personal, professional, informative, instant and - what I love most - it's not intrusive. Social media channels rise and fall, but nothing keeps you in the loop quite like email. Even social media channels send us alerts and notifications via email. Our inboxes are great. Email puts information and interpersonal communication right in front of us, one message at a time, in a linear fashion. What do I love just as…

Artificial intelligence (AI) is being touted as an effective human resource management (HRM) tool. AI deployments in HRM issues such as recruitment and selection are becoming increasingly widespread and have drastically reduced the time and cost of performing these functions. AI's potential usefulness as a tool to improve and transform HRM strategy and performance is being increasingly recognised not only in developed countries, but also in the Global South. While many AI-based tools used in HRM in the Global South have been developed in Global North countries, it is encouraging to note that a number of high-profile, Global South-based HRM companies with AI capabilities have emerged. For instance, the Chilean company Artificial Intelligence Recruitment Assistant (AIRA), which was identified by Forbes as among the ten most customer-focused companies in South…

A personal take on the Water Aid strategy process of2020-22 Above all, it is about working with an organisation's actual habits and structures, which can't be short-circuited by external experts carrying out their own process. Culture does, after all, eat strategy for breakfast, especially when that culture is rooted in a deeply held sense of organisational mission. Based on the experience of Olga and Will, the co-leads of the WaterAid strategy process, these are what made this participative strategy process work: ✓ Being clear and transparent about the approach, what's going on, when, and who's involved ✓ Laying out the key areas of contention and tension upfront and the parameters of how they will be resolved or debated. Committing to open and honest conversations about them ✓ Trusting the wisdom…

The 21st-century workforce is changing and companies must now adapt their recruitment strategies to attract, retain, and nurture women. This is the result of the environment, social, and governance (ESG) movement, which encourages corporate accountability for the effects their operations have on people and the environment. While the breadth of ESG is vast, senior executives are most interested in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) assurance, according to Deloitte. There is a particularly strong interest in women in the workplace — but we cannot meaningfully discuss women at work if we are not considering their entire professional lifecycle; that is, how they are acquired, trained, and moved up the ladder. The ideal ESG programme should reflect this, collecting and disclosing nuanced metrics about how professional women are attracted, nurtured, and retained.…

NEW RULES OF THE GAME The COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine have accelerated the drivers of geopolitical change, entrenching the bipolar confrontation between the US and China, the reconfiguration of international supply chains, and the declining commitment to international law. An increased focus on sustainability and climate change, rising inequality within and across nations, and the dominance of big tech are rapidly shifting the global balance of power. A McKinsey (2022) report indicated that geopolitical instability poses a threat to both domestic and global growth. An Edelman (2022) Trust Barometer Report indicated that 59 per cent of executives believe that responding to geopolitical issues is a top priority in business. For multinational corporations, the impact a single event or policy shift can exert on their operations is…

FINANCE Capital expenditures are at the heart of any company's future. Unfortunately, almost all industrial companies get capital expenditures (capex) wrong. Why? Because capex projects aren't considered within a broader perspective of the company's long-term strategy, its total production footprint, customer expectations, and the overall marketplace. In this article, we explain the right way to create a long-term capex strategy. THE PROBLEM STARTS HERE Different companies have different ways to measure the value of a capex project. Some use net present value (“NPV”) or an internal rate of return (“IRR”) while others may simply use payback periods or some mix thereof. Regardless of how they gauge performance, every company we've ever worked with or heard of uses metrics based on one common principle: the difference (or “delta”) between a production…

RESEARCH ON ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND DISABILITY Entrepreneurship is embodied in a variety of women and men, with a variety of backgrounds, situations, and resources. Disability contributes to enriching the figure of the entrepreneur, who must inevitably create compensatory skills to exist in the professional sphere. Therefore, the roles and characteristics of entrepreneurs with disabilities need to be highlighted, as little research in management sciences has been conducted on the subject, either in France or internationally. Although conducting research on entrepreneurship and disability is of scientific interest, it is not easy. Entrepreneurs with disabilities are not really visible in the intellectual, political, and economic spheres. This makes it difficult to identify them in order to carry out research on their activities. So how can one develop a strategy to meet these specific…

The questions asked included: “How should we best prepare the next generation of students for a world that is unknown and for jobs that may not yet exist?” “You mentioned that tech companies such as Google, Meta, and Apple are developing their own academic institutions to train their future workforce. How do we as public educators compete?” “How do I inspire my students and motivate them to realise the danger and take action to learn these skills now? I have students whose grandad was a plumber, dad was a plumber; and they assume they will just become a plumber, too. How do I get them to aspire to be more?” “How long do we have before we are replaced by machines?” What are the skills needed to become entrepreneurial? How…

It is time for those of us at the beating heart of business to make a choice. Do we want to stay committed to the increasingly unpopular paradigm of “management?” Or are we ready to go all-in on co-creation, a more multifaceted system that can reshape economic organising and bring a greater sense of purpose to all those involved in the cooperative efforts of value creation? DO WE WANT TEAM PLAYERS OR PARTNERS? Oftentimes, when management gurus talk about cooperation, what they really mean is managing subordinates into self-sacrifice. Cooperation in this paradigm is contingent on repression. A common refrain is that only through sacrifice can we achieve together what cannot be achieved alone. Being acknowledged as a “team player” who takes the bench for the sake of the larger…

Open innovation is often viewed as the panacea to all sorts of innovation challenges. And this is for good reason. Building on innovation partners' novel, diverse and complementary perspectives should help organisations to find breakthroughs in their innovative endeavours. Yet, open innovation initiatives often fail to live up to these promises. Consider the initiative of the Verband Deutscher Maschinen- und Anlagenbau (VDMA)—a mechanical engineering industry association representing over 3000 European companies. The association launched an open, global call for solutionsto several unresolved challenges that are faced by its members1. Despite receiving a wide range of feasible and promising solutions, VDMA's members did not adopt any of these solutions at all—not a single one! Why do so many open innovation initiatives return underwhelming results? My research on open innovation over the…

With increasing turmoil and turbulence, important infrastructure and technology need to be able to withstand changes from all angles. The investment philosophy of Nordic Alpha Partners is to identify and support industrial “cleantech” businesses that are sustainable and can either contribute to or accelerate a green transition. We believe that private equity firms have a responsibility that is far greater than the returns we create. The sourcing activities and the economic support, as well as the operational value creation that the alternative investment community provides, are vital for the global commercialisation of the green technologies of the future. In 2021, McKinsey1 estimated that if Europe is to reach net zero emissions, it would require €28 trillion of investment over the coming 30 years. McKinsey also identified that half of the…

The UK was the first nation in the world to industrialise. By the mid-nineteenth century, seismic, ground-breaking advances — from Arkwright's water-powered cotton spinning mill and Watt's steam engine, to the macadamisation of roads and the passenger railway — had powered the country far ahead of any of its international rivals. The opportunities afforded by this economic revolution also had a transformative effect on its people. In the mid-eighteenth century about 15 per cent of the English population lived in urban areas. By 1900, following the extraordinary expansion of various mass-employment industries, it was 85 per cent. The eventual twentieth-century deindustrialisation of the UK not only involved the decline of heavy industries such as coal mining, shipbuilding, and steel manufacturing, it also saw a vast number of supporting supply-chain operations…

THE PROBLEM: CSR IS UNDER SIEGE. Is CSR simply a management fad? Ask business leaders this question and many will answer yes. Scepticism toward CSR is increasing for two main reasons. Some question its practical legitimacy: is its economic impact positive? Others question its moral legitimacy: is it genuine or just another marketing tool? What underlies these attacks on CSR, and how can business leaders and researchers effectively respond to them? This paper is inspired by two commonplace observations, which lead to the two overarching research questions I seek to answer. The first observation is that CSR is under siege. While CSR has gained fame as a buzzword, it has lost credibility, as its economic impact is difficult to measure, opportunistic managers are incentivised to distort information they provide to…

Can you turn a brilliant technical person (accountant, engineer, lawyer) into a manager and a competent, even inspirational, leader of that function? This is a simple question but one which has exercised many in business, most of all those responsible for helping select, promote, and assess leaders (often HR), as well as those who work out costs and return on investment (finance). In short, is it really a waste of money? Hence there are enthusiasts and sceptics. The former believe that leadership, like anything else, is perfectly learnable and trainable. They are to be found, of course, among the many groups offering this service, especially business schools, coaching academies, consultants, and trainers. They used to quote the 10,000-hours idea that anyone can be “super-proficient” at anything with enough practice. The…

During this time of great stress and economic uncertainty in Europe, artificial intelligence is shaping up to be a vital tool supporting much-needed gains in efficiency and innovation—in the region and across the world. Yet even in the past few years, we've seen glimpses of AI's huge potential to influence society and business. We witnessed AI's influence on public health: Mainz, Germanybased BioNTech harnessed AI to develop life-saving Covid mRNA vaccines in a fraction of the time that it takes to produce traditional jabs. We saw AI's impact on corporate revenues: our research shows that the share of European-headquartered companies' revenue that is Al-influenced more than doubled between 2018 and 2021 (from 10% to 23%, on average). We observed the positive signal that AI sends to investors, too: our research…

Even before the pandemic-caused disruptions, performance reviews were generally considered an overall unpleasant activity1 for managers and employees alike. The often once-a-year task of filling out performance appraisal forms and then sitting for that dreaded performance review meeting, in which supervisors explain what ratings their appraisees received and why, has almost never been seen as a fun or rewarding activity. Sure, some employees enjoy and benefit from having that one-on-one time with their managers during which the topic of discussion is how they performed and how they can improve, but the overall sentiment was mostly negative2. In addition, the bulk of the literature on performance appraisals suggests that the ratings are usually not based on actual observations by managers but their overall impressions of each employee or, worse, their perceptions…

After more than a decade working in the intersection of technology and the food service and hospitality industries, I have witnessed change that ranges from specific, limited, and local to broad, sweeping, and global. One of the most striking global shifts I've observed in this space is social, and governance (ESG) initiatives — once thought to be aspirational, perhaps even fringe initiatives — are now moving firmly into the realm of essential and central to long-term business strategy and growth. ESG initiatives can have significant ramifications: done right, they can increase brand affinity and consumer trust, drive corporate transparency and business growth, and align business and social/environmental goals. When they are neglected or ignored, businesses can face liabilities across each of those areas. And today, merely stating that ESG and…

[FOOTNOTE: This is a topic which I have studied, contributed to, and written about for well over a decade, with varying degrees of accuracy and efficacy. My record here stands on its own merits, with fans and detractors often in equal measure.] The only remaining question to ask is this: what are we, collectively, going to do about it? As always, history gives us many guides as to what we will see in the coming years, so let's revisit the past in order to pre-visit the near future. YINPAL? It has not gone unnoticed that technologists, business people, and bureaucrats focus on using technology to solve a problem at hand, often missing the unforeseen negative consequences of its use. Only later, after we have opened a new Pandora's box, do…

CORPORATE GOVERNANCE AND THE DUTY OF CARE Looking into risk from the perspective of the boardroom demands a note on the concept of corporate governance itself and the resulting implications. Shareholders are the principals and need to have their rights protected; management is nominated and put in place to implement the strategies demanded of them, and take care of the business on a daily basis. However, the well-known “agency problem” may arise between the shareholders and management, typically due to a number of reasons: (1) shirking - inadequate duty of care on the part of the executive management; (2) self-dealing - the use of company assets for personal benefit; (3) taking perks - management taking non-legitimate advantage of the position they hold; (4) management entrenchment, or (5) so-called empire-building, not…