“Gamechangers” at IE Business School’s Talent Management Forum

January 25, 2018 at IE Business School, Madrid

Disrupt or be disrupted … the global leadership challenge

Download summary: Peter Fisk’s “Gamechangers” Masterclass

Across the world, new ideas, new businesses and new solutions are transforming every market. “Gamechangers” think and act differently. They innovate every aspect of their brand and marketing.

From Alibaba to Zipcars, Ashmei to Zidisha, Azuri and Zynga, a new generation of businesses are rising out of the maelstrom of economic and technological change across our world. These are just a few of the companies shaking up our world.

Gamechangers are disruptive and innovative, start-ups and corporates, in every sector and region, reshaping our world. They are more ambitious, with stretching vision and enlightened purpose. They see markets as kaleidoscopes of infinite possibilities, assembling and defining them to their advantage. They find their own space, then shape it in their own vision. Most of all they have great ideas. They outthink their competition, thinking bigger and different. They don’t believe in being slightly cheaper or slightly better. That is a short-term game of diminishing returns.

We asked 1000 business leaders to nominate the companies who they believe are creating the future in each different sector. The top 100 innovators are big and small, spread across every sector and continent, from Asia to the Americas, finance to fashion. And then we wanted to understand what they did differently.

They range from well known innovators like Amazon and Apple – the magic Dash buttons creating a direct link between consumer and brands, the ecosystems that go beyond devices – to new brands like Brazil’s Beauty’in fusing the world of food and cosmetics, or even Zespri redefining the obscure Chinese gooseberry as the superfood Kiwi fruit.

They capture their higher purpose in more inspiring brands that resonate with their target audiences at the right time and place, enabled by data and technology, but more through empathetic design and rich human experiences. They fuse digital and physical, global and local, ideas and networks. Social media drives reach and richness, whilst new business models make the possible profitable. They collaborate with customers, and partner with other business, connecting ideas and utilising their capabilities. They look beyond the sale to enable customers to achieve more, they care about their impact on people and the world, whilst being commercially successful too.

As they say in the GoogleX moonshot factory, in seeking to reinvent everything from cars to healthcare, “Why be 10% better, when you could be 10 times better?”

Do your leaders have what it takes to create the future?

Thought starters:

Inspiration 1: World Changing … making sense of the future

The next 10 years will see more change, than the last 250 years
How will you seize the opportunities fast-changing markets?
Which mega trends will most effectively drive innovation and growth?
Future forwards … Are you stretching the past, or shaping the future?

Inspiration 2: Changing the Game … rethink, refocus and reinvent

Alibaba to Bitcoin, Sophia to Zespri … inspired by the world’s 100 most disruptive innovators
What do the most innovators do, learning from corporates and entrepreneurs?
How will you innovate your strategy, business model and customer experience?
The new toolkit … future scenarios, design thinking, lean development, market multipliers

Inspiration 3: Inspired Leaders … creating tomorrow, delivering today

Growth v fixed mindset … tomorrow’s leaders need a new mindset to be winners
Finding a better balance – purpose and profit, human and tech, today and tomorrow
Leaders amplify potential – being the communicator, catalyst, connector and coach
Be bold, be brave, be brilliant

A new program to develop your next business leaders

Peter is currently developing a fantastic new learning experience for IE Business School, their new flagship program for senior executives. It’s called the Global Advanced Management Program. And it’s all about preparing executives for the C-suite … in four intense, incredible and inspiring weeks.

The program has been designed specifically to prepare current and future leaders, and their businesses, for the challenges which they face now and in the coming years. Focusing on leadership in a world of disruptive change, the Global AMP will help you understand the underlying trends driving the future which are already shaking up your industry, explore the threats and opportunities these bring, and respond accordingly.

Divided into 5 core academic modules, each designed and orchestrated by expert faculty, the program will lead you through the challenge of understanding mega-trends such as technological change, our role in a world where AI and robotics make many traditional jobs irrelevant, scarce physical resources and changing demographics.

How will you shape the new markets formed by these trends to the advantage of your business? Where will you focus, and how will you compete? How will you engage with the future customers – Asian, millennial, female – and those in markets that do not even exist today? What are your new business models to drive speed, agility and profitable growth?

The program focuses on devising new solutions, delivered by the right organisations and strategies, to succeed in such a brave new world. Energising and aligning the business to the strategic needs of the future will require that it becomes faster and more agile and we will learn how to use areas such as finance and operations, partnerships and networks, as levers for growth.

Most significantly, we will help you develop yourself as a leader of this dynamic world – to build a leadership platform, and exploit it skilfully to implement change that builds organisations that are themselves a source of competitive strength.

Alongside these academic modules, the program also includes practical application, with each participant developing a Gamechanger Project from they will create a blueprint for the future of their industry, a plan for how their business can reinvent itself, and define their own role in leading their company or division towards this future successfully.

Finally, the Leadership Development Plan helps each participant, along with an individual advisor, focus on their own specific strengths and weaknesses and actions that they can take to become an effective leader, and to sustain high personal and business performance.

World Changing: Making sense of change, exploring megatrends and their medium and longer-term implications, and choosing your future direction. The rise of emerging markets, new technologies and next generation audiences, is matched by the increasing scarcity of resources, social fragmentation and climate impact. The “fourth industrial revolution” heralds a new era for business and society, from digitalisation and automation, to 3D printing and machine learning, artificial intelligence and robotics. Philosophically, we will also look back to the age of genius, and the lessons for the future.

Power shifts: Economic, political and economic power shifts across continents, generations and businesses.
Technology futures: Harnessing the potential of new capabilities, from digital and big data, biotech and nanotech, to AI and robotics.
Resource scarcity: Changing sources of energy, the peak of rare metals, talent and creativity, high-tech components and patented technologies.
Human impacts: Rethinking work, education and employment, ageing and healthcare, urbanization and belonging, wealth and happiness.
Future shaping: Making sense of change, and making better choices. Harnessing value drivers and scenario planning to shape the future that you want.

Market Shaping: Competitive landscapes have become increasingly complex, competition can now appear from seemingly unrelated industries, new markets emerge and old ones disappear. Digital markets have no boundaries, allowing the smallest business to have huge impact, and accelerating the convergence of sectors and businesses. In this context, the market-shaping module will guide you in engaging with future customers, shaping markets to your advantage and ultimately developing a market map that can help focus your business to win in future markets.

Market spaces: How well do you really know your market? Framing markets and how they work, value drivers and emerging practices, challenges and opportunities.
Future markets: Finding and creating new market spaces, based on new customers, new geographies and new solutions.
Customer thinking: Understanding new and existing customers based on aspirations and behaviours, finding new insights and ideas, new needs and niches.
Engaging propositions: Rethinking value, how it created and captured, and then delivered in terms of engagement and experiences.
Markets as movements: Rethinking how to build brands and loyalty where customers trust each other, and seek personalisation, collaboration and community

Disruptive Innovation: Disruption comes from all angles – entrepreneurial start-ups challenging established giants, new technologies replacing inefficient processes, simplicity outperforming complexity, and customers challenging businesses to do better. The impact can be dramatic, reputations can be made and destroyed in days, whilst long admired companies are wiped off the map. The aim of this module is to learn how to turn the tables and become the disrupter by quickly developing insights and ideas, driving innovative strategies and business models, that can be delivered in fast and efficient ways.

Market Disruption: Transforming value equations by rethinking the way markets work, the sources of advantage, pain points and profit pools.
Design thinking: Gaining deeper insights into what really drives customers, to find the real problem, and solutions that are more relevant and valuable.
Fast Innovation: Turning ideas into impact faster through fast and lean innovation, from incremental to breakthough, managing portfolios to create the future
Business models: Rethinking how organisations work to deliver innovative propositions, from licensing to subscription, low cost to luxury.
Accelerating impact: Harnessing the power of multipliers, the network effect of social media to business ecosystems, spreading innovation faster, accelerating growth.

Energizing Organizations: Business thrives on an inspiring purpose, an alignment for action, and priorities and incentives that engage people to high performance. Organisations also need the agility to continually adapt and respond to changing markets, to develop new capabilities and partnerships, and reach new markets. The objective of this module is to help you energize your organization, develop a strategy, along with the metrics to constantly measure its implementation, and align financial and operational resources to deliver results effectively.

Winning strategy: Defining the right direction and priorities, guided by an inspiring purpose, and harnessing the drivers of value.
Smarter choices: Making better decisions, strategically and every day, matched by the right metrics and rewards that ensure performance.
Aligning organisations: Shaping organisations and processes to be agile and efficient, leveraging strengths and addressing weakness, inside and outside.
Energising people: Mobilising your employees to think and deliver the strategy in innovative and profitable ways, harnessing the power of teams and humanity.
Sustaining impact: Ensuring that the organization has the ongoing renewal and adaptability to deliver share value, short term and into the future.

Amplified Leadership: The best leaders amplify the impact of their people and their business. Developing a leadership that is relevant to them and their people, they inspire and engage, connect and support the business to deliver against long-term directions and short-term priorities. Leaders of the future, will need to be adept at leading and managing change in a way that unlocks talent and performance. The outcome of this module will be to a help participants lead themselves, their teams and their business. For this reason, the module works through all the other modules to connect ideas and future action.

Leadership matters: Business is obsessed with leadership, but how do leaders really add value, engage people effectively, and deliver better results?
Knowledge economy: Organisational hierarchies are a legacy of old economies. In today’s ideas-based organisations, leaders add value in different ways.
Authentic organisations: From corporate to personal reputations, how do you build trust and authenticity inside and outside the business?
Talent beacons: In an ideas-driven world, the best companies have the best people. So how do you ensure that you attract, motivate and retain the best talent?
Why should anyone be led by you? Fundamentally, why should you be the leader of the business. What do you have, and what will you give, to be successful?

Leaders are, of course, much more than functional managers. They see a bigger picture, work across the organization, and connect activities for more impact. The 5 Global AMP modules, rather than addressed in isolation will be carefully knitted together throughout the duration of the program, to demonstrate the opportunities and implications of every decision and action across the business.

Participants will work on an individual, evaluated project throughout the program. This “Gamechanger Project” is designed to draw on all of the materials covered in each module and will be applied directly to the challenges and opportunities of the participants’ business. It will deliver five specific outcomes, in the form of maps, that will be of value to you and to your company. Together they form a blueprint for the future.

Future Map: Developing a vision of the future of your industry. Define how you will shape it to your business’ advantage, to seize the best opportunities for growth.
Market Map: Shaping your markets, how you work, and your customer propositions to engage current and future customers.
Innovation Map: Reinventing your business model to deliver the future propositions in practical, efficient and profitable ways.
Organisation Map: Aligning your direction and strategy, your processes and people, metrics and performance to deliver results.
Impact Map: Defining your role in leading your company or division towards a bright, inspiring and successful future.

Progress on the project will be checked in peer to peer presentations and participants will have access to tutors to guide their work. This will be underpinned by the Leadership Development Plan which supports the individual in how they will develop themselves to deliver this effectively.

Find out more about the new Global AMP at IE Business School

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