Innholdsfortegnelse for March/April 2023 i The European Business Review

FRONT COVER Q It’s great having you around again, Mr Crandell! In our last interview, you mentioned that a common challenge for teams and enterprises is also a great opportunity - to empower employees to improve their personal security practices. What has Bitwarden done in 2023 to achieve this? A It’s wonderful to speak with you again as well. We’ve focused on two areas: ubiquity, and convenience. Ubiquity: Digital security, for most of us, spans both our professional and personal lives. We’ve addressed this for a long time at Bitwarden by providing everything from a fully featured free version of our password manager for individuals up through an enterprise version for large organisations that includes, as a perk, a free family plan for every employee. We also keep adding to…

CHATGPT WITH CHATGPT THE QUESTION IS NOT, “IS THIS TECHNOLOGY READY FOR US?” BUT, “ARE WE READY FOR IT?” Water, Water Everywhere, but Not a Drop to Drink In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1834 poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, sailors lost at sea and dying of thirst lamented that there was “water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink”. In a cruel twist of fate, they were dying of thirst, yet drinking the ocean water all around them would only hasten their demise. Those of us living in the digital age are suffering a similar fate. We are inundated with information when what we truly thirst for is understanding and knowledge. Flash forward two centuries from Coleridge’s time and we once again find ourselves in unfriendly waters in…

INVESTMENT Malta is inviting non-EU entrepreneurs to launch their new ventures, or scale up their existing ones, using Malta as their base. The new Malta Startup Residence Programme is intended for third country nationals who are willing to use Malta’s attractive and lucrative startup ecosystem for their highly innovative startup or scale-up venture. The Programme grants a 3-year residence permit to founders, co-founders, core employees and their respective immediate family members. The permit may then be renewed for a further 5 years by founders and co-founders, and for a further 3 years by core employees, given that the business is still ongoing and on track, and that the applicants still meet the Programme’s eligibility criteria. Malta is an ideal breeding ground for new businesses to flourish. Its strategic location and…

LEADERSHIP In today’s globalised and digitalised world, leaders need to be equipped with a number of veiy different skills to lead their teams towards success. Especially in post-pandemic times, there is a lot of uncertainty and hesitation in the global business world, where leaders have to come up with various solutions to guide their co-workers towards a common goal. These are truly challenging times, where rapid decisions have to be made, targets have to be met, and goals have to be achieved. Nonetheless, a good manager/ leader should also be an empathetic one and understand the emotions of their employees, since this very tiny skill may help them to understand the behaviour of their subordinates and support them to excel in their task of leading their team towards a common…

Despite growing concerns around Europe’s business competitiveness, it is perhaps surprising that there is a growing sense of optimism among European executives in 2023. Accenture’s recent researchI found that just less than two-thirds (65%) of European executives think the current business environment is the most challenging, a smaller proportion than their US and Chinese counterparts (74% and 81% respectively).1 European executives are feeling confident. Nearly nine out of ten of those Accenture surveyed in October through November 2022 believed their organisation was on track to achieve its annual growth goals - and four-fifths reported their organisations are well positioned to capture future growth.2 And this is despite the economic challenges which have hit Europe harder than other geographical regions. The economic fallout from ongoing geopolitical instability, including the war in…

CHATGPT ChatGPT is the disruption that higher education needs. In case you have missed it, ChatGPT is a deep learning platform running on the large language model, GPT3.5, which is operated by OpenAI technology. It was released free to the public on 30 November 2022, and within five days it had over 1 million users. Two months later, it is reported1 to have over 100 million monthly users. It uses a natural language processing (NLP) model that generates responses based on a conversation with the user. It is iterative and learns from the conversation to fine-tune answers. It can write any structured language - poems, PowerPoint decks, recipes, essays, code, and translate across languages. It can summarise texts, produce an outline, and edit your writing. The sophistication and convincing nature…

We may all know the story, but let’s take some time to go back into mythology. In ancient times, the Israelites were fighting against the Philistines but had a huge handicap: a gigantic and strong fighter called Goliath (according to the Book of Samuel, Goliath was 2-9 metres tall1). The Philistines were so confident of Goliath’s power that they challenged the Israelites to a one-onone encounter. The winner of the fight would win the war. Over 40 days, Goliath comes out between the lines and challenges the Israelites to send out a champion of their own. A poor young man named David finally accepts the challenge. David, concerned by starvation in his family, supposed that if he won, he would be able to change the destiny of his family. Once…

Many people say they value authenticity at work. They want to be themselves and express their real emotions. And they want all others to do likewise, particularly their boss and colleagues. The word “authentic” implies that one always gives a faithful, honest, and accurate account of personal beliefs, preferences, and desires. It means genuine, bona fide, and honest, while the antonym implies dodgy, dishonest, and insincere. We are told by the gurus that “authentic” leaders have all sorts of virtues: they tend to be more self-aware, more disciplined and inspiring, and more liked and trusted by all stakeholders. Thoroughly good egg; very desirable type. Being authentic with others always and everywhere seems like a good idea, even a fundamental right. But is this possible in business, particularly the service industry?…

THE PANDEMIC AND THE IMPACT ON WORK The transition to remote work during the pandemic was both significant and unprecedented. Fortunately, researchers have been exploring the adoption and use of remote work and virtual collaboration for decades. Prior to the pandemic, research of virtual team adoption found this type of transition to be challenging to implement at a large scale across organisations.1 However, the pandemic left little room for other options, and a swift transition was necessary. As organisations emerge from the pandemic, it does make sense that some employees continue to prefer face-to-face work. It is also reasonable that some employees have had their eyes opened to a new way of work (i.e., remote work) and cannot envision completely losing this ability. Hybrid work offers a solution, but hybrid…

FUTURE SERIES After several years of trying, only 27 per cent of companies have successfully transformed to become Future Ready. Transforming a company to succeed in the digital economy requires a vision and a playbook to help leaders deliver on that vision, regularly communicating with markets, constantly motivating and enabling employees, and keeping everyone focused on a common goal as they work to create new value in an increasingly digital world. In our recently published book, Future Ready: The Four Pathways to Capturing Digital Value1, which is based on more than five years of MIT CISR research2, we identified five actions that we recommend companies take to ensure that their transformation journey to Future Ready is successful. These actions are the playbook of what a company must get right in the…

ChatGPT is a game-changer. The AI bot released in November1 writes sonnets like Shakespeare2 and lyrics in the style of the Beatles,3 all in a matter of seconds. And each can be carefully tailored to a user’s unique needs with incredible specificity. Imagine what it can do for journalists investigating a story, physicians seeking a diagnosis, and those who write manuals for products - let alone for students writing papers. The development of this powerful hot by OpenAI presents a watershed moment for those who thought that pattern-making and cogent information synthesis were crowning achievements of our species and beyond the reach of current computing. If this sounds like science fiction gone awry, stay tuned as ChatGPT hurls humanity forward into the Age of Creativity — forcing us to contend…

INNOVATION CORONA HAS INVIGORATED DIGITALISATION AND THE DEMAND FOR AI-BASED SOLUTIONS Finland’s strength in the rapidly developing field of AI is the agile business environment that enables and supports collaboration between companies, research and education organisations, and society at large (Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment 2017). Finland’s roadmap for AI (Technology Industry of Finland 2020) brings forward four building blocks. First, it calls for responsibility to be built in at all stages of development and highlights that AI is not a value in itself. In Finland, AI is there to solve challenges relevant to a socially and ecologically sustainable society, which fuels positive discussion and promotes the use of AI solutions. Furthermore, encouraging companies to develop digital web-based service solutions in addition to physical products helps to safeguard business…

Traditionally, organisations would select specific workers on occasion to work in a globally distributed virtual team project as organisations became more global. It would be primarily those with the required skills - such as being technology-savvy, proficient in English, and comfortable working in multicultural environments - that would qualify to work in this fashion. In March 2020, many organisations around the globe switched to virtual working overnight due to the COVID-19 lockdowns. This time, most workers were unprepared to work virtually. And yet, despite ongoing debate, there is strong evidence suggesting that, for many, productivity remained high and even exceeded expectations1. However, this was often found to be at the expense of workers’ well-being, generating new types of challenges we had not seen before, such as technology fatigue, isolation, and…