“We need entrepreneurs who will come up and create businesses, yes; but not everybody’s an entrepreneur”. (Strive Masiyiwa: Founder & Executive Chairman, Econet Wireless Group) In a world that is plagued by many problems, “entrepreneurship”, as a topic for Global Fora, government committees and non-government organisations, has never been more fashionable – not more so…
“You support what you help create” (Alinda Nortje: Executive Chairperson, Free To Grow) In a world of increasing turbulence, including unpredictable financial and socio-political contexts, leaders are under pressure to transform their organisations towards achieving sustainable growth. This “transformation” may include the adoption of new technologies, major strategic shifts, process reengineering, mergers and acquisitions, restructuring,…
Over the past couple of decades, the acceleration of technology and other marketplace drivers have radically changed the very nature of change. Whereas change was once a contained transactional event (and far easier to control), it is now more fluid, open-ended, complex, personal and unceasing. “Transformation” is the latest change concept that has emerged and…
Millennials, those born after 1980 and before 2000 and representing well over 35% of the world’s population, are a largely talented and versatile group. For many companies with rigid structures and systems, this generation can be incredibly frustrating, illusive and highly challenging. In terms of employing millennials, the best are hard to find and even…
Shareholder greed and subsequently the “do or die” need for the CEO to perform year on year has become a pervasive illness in big corporates since the 1980’s. Robert Reich, Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, noted: “In the 1980’s, corporate raiders began mounting unfriendly take-overs of companies that could deliver higher returns…
They know their customers. They know what their customers want. They know how to present their products so that their customers will purchase from them. They know the ideal pricing for their products so that they clear their goods daily. ‘Fresh’, ‘freshly cooked’ and ‘relevant’ are the maxims by which they operate. These are the…
Executives and their governing boards, within the current financial turbulence that most companies are experiencing, are being forced to re-evaluate strategies, cut costs and re-deploy employees and other resources to provide some return for shareholders. These leaders seem to be seriously challenged with growing revenue organically and are finding it hard to demonstrate value and…
In a Harvard Business Review study (July 2012), the article “Why top young managers are in a nonstop job hunt” (Monika Hamori, Jie Cao and Burak Koyuncu) described research based on the analysis of international databases of over 1 200 young high achievers and concluded that many of the best and brightest are not receiving the…
Gartner Inc., one of the world’s leading information technology research and advisory companies, suggests that “enterprise architecture (EA) is a discipline for proactively and holistically leading enterprise responses to disruptive forces by identifying and analysing the execution of change toward desired business vision and outcomes. EA delivers value by presenting business and IT leaders with…
The word “entropy”, from a physics perspective, is the corollary of the second law of thermodynamics, the way in which energy flows from a hotter object to a colder one – entropy goes up as the range of possibility and action goes down. An example of this can be found simply in cooking – once…
From time to time, on account of market or other global business requirements and in order to achieve internal production and financial efficiencies, businesses implement strategic large-scale change initiatives for growth and sustainability. I currently have the privilege of consulting for a large multi-national company who is undergoing such a change. The company, in a…
Mary Kay Ash, founder of Mary Kay Cosmetics, once said: “There are two things people want more than sex and money … recognition and praise”. Repeatedly, the one motivating factor that heads employee lists is appreciation for a job well executed. Good work not acknowledged seems to be a “demotivator” and results in employees not…
