Hear From The Experts

2020 and Beyond – Recover to a Winning Position through Sustained Innovation

COVID-19 crisis is a ‘virulent’ example of why SYSTEMS THINKING is a necessary competency for everyone, not just for leaders.  We all need to become GLOBAL CITIZENS of the world, beyond just our national boundaries.

We should take courage and see through this stressful time together.

Deploy AI to analyse customer data to find the right customer problem to solve, and in so doing, you will be better positioned to innovate and transform your business to meet your customers’ needs

A diverse workforce is needed to bring about better performance and business outcomes. Good intergenerational management at individual and team levels can foster greater communication and trust.

When leaders consciously shift to become more systems-inspired in the way they lead their teams, they adopt the practice of deep democracy with their teams.

Two-in-three small-and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) will see a risk of failure in the next three-to-five years.

There are several challenges that need to be considered as firms race ahead to jump on the digital bandwagon.

The continuous improvement approach of the Kaizen management technique might seem common sense; regrettably it is not a common practice.

Innovating across industries is key to move away from head-to-head competition and create new market space as recommended by the Blue Ocean Strategy methodology.

How can internal talent acquisition and HR professionals work with hiring managers to develop strong relationships with their stakeholders?

The New Normal after COVID-19 is Education without Schools, Health without Hospitals, and Banking without Banks. Embrace it.

Organisations are increasingly shifting away from the push-based model of learning which constitutes mandated training programmes for employees to attend, towards pull learning where employees get to choose their training and development needs at their own pace.

The first corporate universities launched over 60 years ago served primarily as ‘go-to’ places to educate employees about a company’s vision and business goals. Since then, thousands of top-performing organisations globally have launched their own corporate universities to meet organisational and employee demands for professional development and to gain an edge in an increasingly competitive world.

Few would argue that technology adoption and digital transformation are the way forward. Implementations such as artificial intelligence (AI) and Internet-of-Things (IoT) have the potential to boost organisational performance.

According to the World Economic Forum (WEF), automation will render 75 million jobs obsolete over the next five years. Yet, these same technological advances will create some 133 million new jobs that will not only deliver business value but also shape more fulfilling roles for workers. At large global firms, newly emerging occupations are expected to grow their employee base from 16% to 27% by 2022.

The current global pandemic, COVID-19, has disrupted all aspects of our lives and all sectors of our economy including higher education. In an effort to keep students, faculty and staff safe, universities around the world had to pivot quickly from face-to-face teaching and learning to online instruction in the middle of the 2020 spring semester.

In today’s market environment, it is interesting to note that the financial worth for many of the world’s largest companies are based on intangible assets (IA) such as brand, content, customer relationships and data, instead of fixed physical assets.

As digital transformation reshapes the future of work, Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) jobs are also growing exponentially faster than non-STEM jobs. The need to address the issue of gender disparity in the STEM fields has become a critical priority.

Nowadays, it’s common to hear of bosses trying to make their companies more agile. What exactly does agile mean though?

Sustainability is no longer just a buzzword but it has become a business imperative. Driven by market forces and changing consumer needs, more businesses are striving to adopt sustainable practices to create long-term value and to gain a competitive edge. But can these businesses remain sustainable and yet profitable?

The unabated march of the 24/7 x 365 e-commerce marketplace likely started with eBay’s launch in 1995. Over the next 25 years, e-commerce would steadily alter major industries - including retail, logistics and even banking - as well as business and consumer behaviours and expectations.

Supply chains are amongst the most complex parts of any business. Involving diverse lines of business and processes, they need to be continually synchronised to mitigate the impact of wide-ranging markets, customer and competitive forces.

After a year of learning to live and work with COVID-19, we have undoubtedly come away with many useful and valuable lessons. This experience has given business leaders the opportunity to take stock of existing business practices and strategies to see if they match up against the needs of the digital economy.

As we move on and recover, business leaders can glean these five important lessons from 2020 in order to build more resilient organisations for the future. After all, the world as we know it has changed. We live in VUCAH (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous, and hyperconnected) times, and organisations need to adapt fast for the sake of their business, their customers, and their employees.

To leverage this digital opportunity, SMEs need a new approach to decision-making that can help them see the bigger picture and better anticipate undesirable outcomes: a mindset called systems thinking.

We live in a VUCAH world: volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous, and hyperconnected. An environment like this demands adaptability. As such, business leaders need to throw out old notions of top-down management and bureaucracy, and be ready to respond to new challenges.

Talent is an organisation’s most valuable asset. This is especially true for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). With an employee count of no more than 200, the quality of each employee becomes significant. Thus, it can even be said that an SME’s success often hinges on how many highly skilled talents it manages to attract and retain.

SMEs do have plenty to learn from startups: the following actions by startups to achieve jumpstart growth can be adopted by SMEs to survive and scale amidst an environment full of large-scale uncertainties.

As organisational leaders debate how they could have handled the crisis better, one thing is clear: complex interwoven operations across multiple countries require detailed contingency plans against disruptions. This is where systems thinking can help.

In a world where interconnectedness and complexity hold sway, systems thinking offers a disciplined approach to make sense of the world and find innovative solutions to problems. How can a disciplined systems thinking approach lead directly to the ability to innovate?

Contrary to common beliefs, these capabilities can be learned and developed over time through the right exposure. SMEs need to embrace the different competencies that will make their business more resilient, innovative, and adaptable in the face of many unknowns. This is where the D.A.S.H+ framework comes in.

Keen to start your own digital up-skilling journey? Simply head over to SIM-RMIT Online and enter the future of learning with SkillsFuture credit-friendly short courses online.

Design thinking is central to how businesses can emerge from the COVID-19 fallout, due to its emphasis on adapting to market needs.

Should you choose to advance your professional development with SIM PDEL, an exciting array of executive programmes and Business Insights events await.

If you’re thinking of making a career switch especially in these COVID-19 times, read on to explore more about advanced manufacturing and how you can best prepare for it!

There is now a growing focus on Systems Leadership, which can be defined as a set of skills and capacities that any individual or organisation can use to catalyse, enable and support the process of systems-level change.

At the Singapore Institute of Management (SIM), we took an important step to fast track online learning in a post-COVID world by collaborating with one of our long-standing partners, RMIT University, to offer online courses.