Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

Why should business leaders develop strategies focused on biodiversity? First, businesses rely on ecosystems to produce and reproduce the variety of life that enables economic and social systems. Second, biodiversity decline (or collapse) poses reputation risks to businesses, and business leaders must anticipate and mitigate the risk of being targeted by activists. Third, life on Earth has inherent value that managers should help preserve rather than destroy. As we explore in this Advisor, biodiversity mini-publics can help managers successfully engage on all three issues.

Over the last four decades, there has been a proliferation of corporate diversity policies. By one estimate, more than 95% of organizations with more than 1,000 employees have some sort of diversity program. Generally, this push toward diversity has largely been prompted by a few interwoven factors. This Advisor takes a closer look at three of those factors.

Recently, Cutter contributor and data business leader Myles Suer asked CIOs some important questions regarding generative AI. This Advisor shares some insights gleaned from those conversations.

The world is changing rapidly, and we are witnessing a plethora of significant events, including the outcomes of a global pandemic, climate change and extreme weather, global supply chain disruptions, the war in Ukraine, the emergence of innovative technologies, and more and more smart products. These are all shaping the business environment, forcing organizations to adapt and change at unprecedented speeds. Consequently, senior managers are asking themselves how their organization should respond to deal with the technological storm and what steps they should take to prepare the organization for the future. As we explore in this Executive Update, the range of actions managers must take is broad and includes, among others, the development of organizational innovation processes, digital transformation, making the organization agile, adapting ways of doing business that meet new expectations of customers, and more. One theme runs through all of these initiatives — innovation.

Amid the 2008 US housing market debacle, I offered some insight into how ineffective risk-mitigation efforts contributed to the financial contagion that spread across the globe. Given the latest banking crisis involving SVB, it might be useful to revisit some of those ideas.

We conducted an empirical study in Malaysia with IT practitioners and confirmed that communication plays a vital role in project success. Our study probed the influence of five communication characteristics: content, method, velocity, process, and frequency, and how they can propel a team toward success. With the exception of frequency, the findings showed that the remaining characteristics influenced project success.