Insights

Of course, anyone can recognise great strategy after the fact – be it Netflix, Uber or Virgin Atlantic. But corporate development of impactful strategy is both extremely difficult and highly uncommon. By embracing a set of fresh approaches to planning, which take the organisation out of its comfort zone, executives can build strategy that is more unique, more resilient, and hopefully more likely to get them to where they want to go.

The Gold Coast has relied for more than half a century on a sun, sand and theme parks offering to bring tourism dollars to the city. While successful in the past, this approach limits the city’s appeal to an increasingly sophisticated and diverse travel market. Embracing the cruise industry has the potential of securing future tourism revenues as well as facilitating the development of a more comprehensive, diverse and resilient tourism offering.

Recent multi-year research programs at Harvard and Google are calling into question everything we thought we knew about team dynamics. It turns out, counterintuitively, that traditionally structured teams focused singularly on error-free task completion are not particularly high-performing.
New empirical evidence suggests that the teams who are most successful have an important difference – they are open to admitting mistakes and discussing them with one another. These teams display a unique openness to and culture of constant learning and improvement.

For Australian CEOs facing the challenge of juggling urgent operational needs with strategic imperatives, there is limited opportunity to devote headspace to contemplating the ramifications of Artificial Intelligence on their organization. Not only is the pace of AI development incredibly fast-moving, but the concept of AI is extremely diverse, covering everything from analytics to automation, machine learning to natural language processing. Moreover, the AI sector does a great job of keeping out non-technical people – complex mathematical and programming-based concepts mean that even the most determined business leader can quickly be dissuaded from wading into the technical swamp of AI.

With unemployment rates at an all-time low and resignations at an all-time high, business leaders are facing a labour crisis which is negatively affecting profits, service levels and even their ability to keep the doors open. To address these market shock businesses must take an aggressive and proactive approach to ensure they are not left at the back of the long queue for workers. In this article, we set out three approaches that can mitigate the impact of labour shortages and set businesses apart from their competitors in attracting and retaining talent.

Culture is back on the leadership agenda as organisations struggle to adjust to the rapidly evolving priorities of their workforces, stakeholders and customers. Executive teams are finally embracing culture not as a soft, nice-to-have element but as a hard and measurable component of their business that directly drives performance, reputation and retention. This thought paper explores the ways in which organisations are acquiring a new understanding around how values can differentiate their business from competitors over the long term and give them a winning edge in the race for talent.