This video includes highlights from The Future of Leadership Development Conference Series, held April 19-20 2018.
The current technology revolution is reshaping industries, making business models obsolete, growing new companies with a different set of capabilities and creating disruption and social change.
In a digital, big data, machine-learning, robotics and artificial intelligence-based world, the role of general managers is more important than ever. The competencies that they need are changing fast.
At the same time, there are some classical attributes of the general managers’ functions – providing a sense of purpose, developing a long-term perspective, and engaging people and making teams functional, among others – that are still relevant, but that may take new dimensions in this new, changing business world.
What companies, people and society in general will expect from senior managers in a few years’ time will be different from their current skills and capabilities.
At the same time, technology is disrupting companies and communities, CEOs, board members and general managers, as the ultimate stewards of a company, need to reflect on how to manage this process and help come up with constructive solutions.
The purpose of this conference was to discuss these relevant issues for leadership, governance and management with an inter-disciplinary perspective. Speakers include leading management and leadership scholars, AI experts, CEOs and senior general managers, and deans of leading international business schools.
Some of the specifics that were covered include:
What creates long term value? That would be customer-asset building and brand-asset building since, so far, computers cannot build brands.
The parts of business that will change:
1) What they make
2) How things are made, or how businesses operate
3) Who businesses will form alliances with
4) How the people work are organized and managed.
Businesses and be broken down into projects and processes.
Processes will become an algorithm
We need to teach people how to use data.
Data and AI are important to all business units.
Management needs to know the right questions to ask the technical guys.
Decisiveness wins out over building the perfect model.
The most important ingredient for success is the power of imagination, which cannot be substituted.
AI can augment human intelligence, not replace it.