Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

As a woman of color, it is important that when I consider employment with your organization, I see representations of myself in roles across the spectrum — including at the senior level. I’m not suggesting that job qualifications are irrelevant, of course, but I’m asking you to adjust your lens to look past gender and color for talent. Better still, look at women of color and recognize that your organization is in need of their talent.

In this Advisor, Avenga CEO Yuriy Adamchuk delves into repercussions from an actual, ongoing war — in Ukraine. Avenga has 11 offices and 1,300 professionals in the country, and, knowing the risks of an attack (based on the 2014 invasion and subsequent expert predictions of escalation), the company developed its Service Endurance Plan.

Agility prepares us for our turbulent future. But how do we achieve enterprise agility in light of the magnitude of that turbulence and the overwhelming number of failed transformation initiatives? In this Amplify Update, we suggest that growing agile-adaptive leaders who are adventurous, inspiring, and, of course, adaptive is critical to success. We then seek to validate that assumption by listening to the voice of a former CEO of IBM. By understanding this brand of leadership, digital and Agile transformations can be more successful. However, lurking in the shadows of even the best agile-adaptive leaders are the formidable obstacles of rigid cultures, financial myopia, and performance hacking.

A leader’s decision to leave a foreign country requires complex financial, operational, and ethical considerations. First, the financial analysis of the operation under scrutiny must be adjusted to account for losses incurred elsewhere in the global organization. This Advisor takes a closer look at this initial step in an exit strategy decision tree.

How can technology leaders accelerate the delivery of business value from the cloud? What inhibits cloud adoption and cloud projects? Myles Suer recently posed these questions to a group of CIOs; this Advisor shares the insights gleaned from that conversation.

This Advisor presents three rules that can help business leaders manage digital era risk: (1) question analytics, (2) don’t excuse technological glitches, and (3) promote business acumen, not digital transformation.

Eli Doster shares that having a broken culture was not only terrible for staff at his company, it was also costly and had a negative impact on business. Five years ago, the company lacked values employees could believe in, which affected their decisions and actions. Furthermore, the company lacked “diversity of cultures, ethnicity, and perspective.”

Jin Yoon provides an examination of financial data from a group of US and Chinese technology companies. Analysis spanning several years on price to earnings (P/E) and enterprise value to revenue (EV/Rev) clearly shows a negative effect on share prices from geopolitical risk: a 24% discount on a forward P/E basis and a 42% discount on forward EV/Rev. Yoon says the analysis demonstrates the profound impact that geopolitical turmoil can have on a company or industry’s market value and that this finding can guide investors and operators as they try to mitigate geopolitical risks.