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Five Current and Emerging Barriers to Business Performance

Command and Control in Global Operations

How do governance, commitment and actions occur in a multi-cultural, global, virtually connected team?

Management by global directives from HQ faces serious challenges from the realization that experienced talent lives in different countries nurtured by different cultures. The face to face style of management, in conference rooms, committees, project teams, cannot be sustained with reduced travel budgets nor the greening of corporations.

Talent "Management"

What transformations of the talent function are required for business and leadership growth?

If Talent Management were actually talent management – it would be the strategic tool of choice for executives. Few HR and Learning and Development functions have moved beyond their foundational activities and have the respect of their business peers to prepare, engagage, and integrate a very mobile and connected talent pool into the design and delivery of business outcomes.

Management Inertia and Innovation

How will the time be found for mindful reflection of business, with resources and funds for innovation?

With few exceptions, heads down, more sameness pervades our business (busyness?) culture. Innovation has been outsourced to startups, and an internal lack of time to think and reflect, the oppression of back to back meetings of questionable value, force leadership succumb to the inertia of current practice and ideas.

Next Generation Technologies

How will business-IT be re-architected taking into account collaboration and employee power?

Online social media, virtual worlds, mobility, peer technologies, and cloud computing are stressing locked-down and budget conscious IT departments. The move into these technologies is inevitable, as consumers have already integrated them into their lives; and as it happened in the consumer world, the balance of power will then shift toward the employee.

Process Engineering

How is the “engineering” of process balanced with the fuzzy “art” of human values and ambition?

So much energy has been expended on the engineering and effectiveness of processes, that we have applied detailed process design to areas where human intelligence, empathy, and knowledge could deliver better results. Nicholas Negroponte once noted: “we ask machines to do what people should do, and people - what machines should do.”