Kevin Hart, mega-star comedian, entrepreneur, philanthropist and entertainment mogul, just boosted his unparalleled resume with a new venture in education.
How the finance function can harness the power of AI
In this episode of the Better Finance podcast, Noah Barsky, Professor at Villanova University, joins host Myles Corson to explore the impact of AI across finance function.
All ventures must innovate to remain competitive. However, the harsh reality is that most innovation initiatives fail despite massive investments in methodologies, organizational structures and human capital. Substantive innovation requires far more than inspirational quotes about change and irrelevance, aspirational task forces, dedicated funding and other forms of stagecraft. This paper synthesizes research on why innovation falters and how courageous leaders can try to fix it by disassembling its teams, structures and perhaps, over time, its culture.
Digital era opportunities and dangers challenge traditional approaches to risk man- agement. For decades, organizations vested risk oversight in legal, compliance, and HR functions. Despite the fact that tech-driven business models demand far more dynamic and adaptive approaches, entrenched corporate behaviors, incentives, and bureaucracy often stall strategy and thwart innovation.
As technology becomes central to business models, executives are increasingly challenged with maintaining operational excellence while also accelerating digital strategy. Yet, the C-suite and frontline both know that more often it’s technology’s operational requirements that consumes most of the air in the room – especially when projects flounder, falter and fail. Ultimately, however, strategic competitiveness will not be determined by how well or poorly companies upgrade their “systems,” but with how well they reimagine their digital futures.
Note from the author: While I often write about organizations and technologies, this Advisor is a bit of a (related and important) tangent, as it focuses on career advancement. Invariably, in working with executives and rising leaders, particularly technology professionals and consultants, conversations turn to career challenges. I have long wanted to author a piece that captures an effective approach that, over many years, has resonated well with business professionals aiming for a promotion and meaningful career advancement.
This article identifies resilience as the most prominent and lasting lesson of the pandemic. The authors point to the ingenuity, adaptability, and perseverance of the human spirit during times of challenge as a hallmark that can bolster organizations in the future. The piece explores the value of boosting employee resilience and includes detailed actions leaders can take to invest in employee well-being, enhance workplace culture, and drive performance.
Companies have been scrambling to respond to the upheaval caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. More than 18 months since it began, many organizations still wonder what the post-pandemic future holds. The challenges are far-reaching, ranging from resolving daily employee work modalities to existential digital business model transformation.
Innovation doesn’t always mean grand invention. Sometimes reimagining the supply chain can yield big results and redefine a company’s future.
Even before the pandemic, online retail and rapid food delivery struggled to service “the last mile” to the doorstep. Surging demand from “stay/work/live-at-home” consumers compounded the problem and stressed even the most reliable delivery services.
On Cyber Monday last year, UPS imposed shipping restrictions on Gap, Nike, Macy’s, and others to cope with record deliveries and capacity shortages. Restaurants and grocers faced similar challenges in disrupting kitchens and straining margins to process, prepare, and deliver small orders.
However, in crisis resides opportunity. Repurposing failing or abandoned malls as mini-distribution hubs stabilizes both overextended supply chains and troubled commercial properties. As companies blur c-suite lines, micro-fulfillment also fast tracks tech leaders to the nexus of strategy, operations, and technology. Execution discipline is always paramount to innovation success.
Digital transformation is the hottest trend and spend in technology circles these days. But how can employees possibly transform a business that they don’t fully understand?
Companies may have ample tech skills, but functional experts often fall short when asked to be strategic difference makers. That is a major problem with most grand-scale initiatives.
Digital transformation risks being the latest, frustrating “IT project” remembered for inflated promises, cost overruns, and few results. Executives and tech leaders can rewrite that narrative by realizing that success depends far more on how they develop people than how they deploy technology.
Noah Barsky explores some key shifts in mindset that effective risk management will require, such as making risk management the responsibility of all, avoiding silos, looking at issues that are important but not urgent, and building a culture that can ask, “Why?” Barsky focuses on the need to not only connect the dots between different risk areas, but also between risk management and other corporate planning and monitoring activities.
Imagine that you’re reporting to the best supervisor you’ve ever had — the best manager you could imagine having. Now picture this person looking up from a list of goals you’ve proposed and saying in all seriousness, “I worry that you’re going to fail at these. We should set our sights lower.”
It sounds mildly absurd. But in all likelihood, you’ve had a version of this conversation. It’s the subtext of any goal setting process that prioritizes the criterion of attainable (or achievable, or realistic — whichever version the HR department has selected). Can you think of any other management “technique” that so encourages people to throw their hands up in surrender?
SMART goals, one of the most used management tactics for setting goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timebound, are in reality not so smart. What works or fails in goal review is rooted in planning.
The talent marketplace is experiencing enormous turmoil. Now is the time to stop exacerbating that tension with ill-considered management practices. The eventual return and recovery from COVID-19 is a collective opportunity to move from SMART goal setting to intelligent accomplishment pursuit.
The COVID-19 pandemic has quickly accelerated and actualized the technology-driven “future of work” expectations widely predicted for the coming decade. The current economic upheaval threatens many companies’ existence and longstanding commonplace industry assumptions. As executives grapple to sustain business operations, meet financial obligations, explore renewal and reinvention alternatives, they must somehow also inspire, motivate, and guide the workforce to prepare for a highly uncertain and unpredictable future. An opportunity and challenge hide in plain view – elevating business acumen across the organization.
Growth should be exciting, but, if not properly governed, can generate much apprehension, tension, and noticeable reluctance. The antidote to organizational inertia, unmet goals, and related career plateaus hides in plain view – business acumen. While most employees are adept at tasks and responsibilities, many often cannot articulate why their work is important. Enhancing business acumen about how the organization competes, performs, and utilizes key resources holds the key to maximizing employees’ talents and functional expertise. Knowing more about the business sparks curiosity, illuminates job relevance, builds a success culture, and can motivate commitment to previously unimaginable levels of achievement. For those who expand, hone, and renew business acumen, results follow and career trajectory soars.
High-impact entrepreneurs stand out on almost all aspects: they grow faster, create more jobs, contribute more to society and transform industries to a greater extent than their peers. This gives them outsized importance for the economy and society – and critical mass for policy makers to consider them as a special class. But what do they do that outshines the rest?
The World Economic Forum, in collaboration with EY, Endeavor and Purpose, analysed survey data from over 600 entrepreneurs in EY’ Entrepreneur of the Year program with the goal of better understanding how successful entrepreneurial companies accelerate access to new markets and become scalable, high-impact businesses. Our research shows that the founders of these firms marshal their forces along very different paths of growth. The report further highlights the differentiated strategies high-impact entrepreneurs take depending on their life cycle stage and the industry they are in.
When most people hear the word innovation, they think of a creation or invention. In fact, the Merriam Webster Dictionary defines innovation as (1) the introduction of something new or (2) a new idea, method, or device: a novelty. The word is being used a lot these days as changing marketplaces, emerging technologies, financial crises, and the recession have increased the demand for business innovation.Managers are being told that they have to be creative and innovative, yet most are uncomfortable with this mandate since they haven’t been trained as engineers or scientists. Realistically, how can managers be expected to invent something? Is this what senior business leaders want when they call for innovation?
Check out Dr. Barsky’s latest Forbes articles!