Wim Kok Economic, social and demographic time-bombs looming for Europe: a time for action!
C.K. Prahalad Our new age of innovation: driving co-created value through global networks
Vijay Govindarajan Strategy as changing the rules of the global game: creating the future
Rod Beckström The starfish and the spider: the unstoppable power of leaderless organizations
Gro Harlem Brundtland Climate change and human development: no time to lose!
Fons Trompenaars Creating more out of less: servant leadership across cultures
Anne Ruddy Economic uncertainty and the impact on total rewards and talent management
Lynda Gratton Creating lasting value: what it takes for you to be energized and innovative

Economic, social and demographic time-bombs looming for Europe: a time for action!

Europe has had a great past. Can it have a great future? Is Europe loosing out competitively to the faster growing economies of the Asia and South America, and to the more innovative Americans? Can Europe preserve its “social model” and still be an economic force in the future? How can we become more agile and use innovation to stimulate growth? Has the Lisbon Strategy - aimed at making Europe the world’s most dynamic and competitive economy by 2010 – helped or failed?

In Europe we have an ageing population and our birth rates are too low to sustain either our businesses or our social benefits and pensions structures. Retirement ages need to rise to fund pensions. Social pressures are building up against inward migration in many countries; but is the only way our economies and social systems can survive will be if Europe actively embraces in-bound labour migration – as America has? The “war for talent” is taking on new dimensions: does our very economic survival depend on it?

Income inequality has risen, driven by the forces of globalisation and competitiveness. Incomes for many are being pushed down and those for afew are being pushed even higher. There are calls for curbs to top executive remuneration in the interests of social cohesion. But what is the right balance, if any?

Wim Kok is uniquely qualified to address these issues. Wim Kok was Prime Minister of the Netherlands from 1994 – 2002. Wim Kok has been a pivotal member of the European Employment Taskforce and a lead member of the high level group recommending a revitalisation of the Lisbon Strategy. He is a Member of the Supervisory Boards of Shell, ING, TNT and KLM.

Our new age of innovation:
driving co-created value through global networks

CK Prahalad is rated as the most influential living management thinker. He helped reshape corporate attitudes to the developing world in his ground breaking book: The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid.

His latest research focuses on the Future of Competition and The New Age of Innovation. In Valencia he will argue that we need to re-think how we create value. Cost cutting can only go so far in creating value.

The key to creating value and future growth is through accessing a global network of resources to ‘co-create’ – or create collaboratively – unique experiences with customers, one at a time.

According to CK, no firm is big enough in scope or size to satisfy the experiences of customers; what is required is a shift in mindset from one of resource ownership to one of accessing resources. Companies must obtain the resources they need by sourcing globally; and flexible systems are a prerequisite. Organizations have to think about how they access and use talent globally and they must make more strategic use of IT.

In a nutshell: they must treat all customers individually, but source globally.

While web based companies have an advantage here, CK argues, all companies must focus on these challenges or lose their customer base. For ‘traditional’ companies this poses enormous challenges – but also opportunities. IT and HR in particular need to act far more strategically.

Companies must embrace the challenges of building genuinely diverse, international teams. What’s more, countries have to view migration of talent as a strategic opportunity rather than a cultural threat. It provides access to vital, and often scarce, skills. Indeed, openness to diversity and migration may be a national competitive advantage.

CK Prahalad is professor of business administration at Michigan Business School. He is co author or author of many books and articles, including Competing for the Future and The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Future of Competition and the New Age of innovation.

Strategy as changing the rules of the global game:
creating the future

We now live in an era of almost constant change. New technologies continue to emerge at a rapid pace. Globalization brings with it new markets, new customers, new competitors and new challenges and the internet has created greater transparency to any company’s strategy, actions and performance.

As a result of these forces, companies find that their strategies require almost constant redefinition. Either the old assumptions are no longer valid, or the previous strategy has been imitated and neutralized by competitors. Often too, technological developments and globalization offer unanticipated opportunities.

Against this backdrop, the strategic challenges for organizations center around market discontinuities such as fundamental shifts in technology, customers, competitors, lifestyle/ demographics, globalization, regulations. These have the power to transform our industries.

The trick is to analyze the opportunities and risks that result from identifying and understanding of market discontinuities. How can we create new growth platforms with a view to exploiting them? What are our core competencies and how can we use them? How do we allocate resources to support growth?

In this session you will have the opportunity to explore your potential role in the future of your company. What kind of organizational DNA is required to anticipate and respond to change? How do you execute breakthrough strategies?

At the end of this session, participants will be able to develop a framework to answer the following questions:

1. Why do companies need to be constantly innovative with regard to strategy?
2. How can firms identify the market discontinuities that shape the future of the industry?
3. How can firms exploit the global opportunities that result from these shifts in the marketplace?
4. How can firms build the requisite organizational DNA to create the future while managing the present?
5. How do you execute breakthrough strategies?

Vijay Govindarajan is professor of international business at the Tuck School; he is the professor in residence and chief innovation consultant to GE. He is the author of many books and articles which include, ‘Building breakthrough businesses within established organizations,’ a collaboration with Chris Trimble which has been published by Harvard Business Review.

The starfish and the spider:
the unstoppable power of leaderless organizations

Rod Beckström, former Director of the US National Cyber Security Center; successful CEO, business catalyst and author of ‘The starfish and the spider’.

Cut off the leg of a spider, and you have a seven-legged creature on your hands; cut off its head and you have a dead arachnid. Yet remove the arm of a starfish and it will grow a new one. What’s more, its severed arm can grow an entirely new body.

Starfish can achieve this feat because, unlike spiders, they are decentralized; every major organ is replicated across each arm. Starfish don’t just exist in the animal kingdom. Rod Beckström will provide powerful current day examples of how starfish organizations are taking society and the business world by storm, changing the rules of strategy and competition. How has Toyota leveraged starfish principles to crush their spider-like rivals, GM and Ford?

How did the upstart Napster cripple the global music industry? Why is free, community based Wikipedia crushing Encyclopedia Britannica overnight? Why is the tiny ‘Craig’s List’ crippling the global newspaper industry? Why is Al Qaeda flourishing and even growing stronger?

Rod will clearly identify the traits and business practices of starfish versus spider organizations. Spider organizations are centralized and are built around organization charts; starfish ones tend to organize around a shared ideology or a simple platform for communication and the internet has helped them flourish.

Moreover, starfish organizations are built on very different principles. Such principles, as Rod will demonstrate, are radical and vital to any business, organization or individual that wants to thrive in the new marketplace.

Climate change and human development:
no time to lose!

Climate change, population growth, mass migration, pandemic diseases, and the plight of women – particularly in developing countries: the policy issues confronting the world’s leaders are only increasing.

What kind of world do we want our children and their children to inherit? What’s it like being a woman at the top of the world’s major public bodies?

Theses are the issues that Gro Harlem Brundtland will address in her speech and she argues we have no time to lose!

Gro is rated by the Financial Times as the fourth most influential European in the last 25 years. She was prime minister of Norway for 10 years during the period 1981 to 1996, where she is known as ’landsmoderen‘ or ’mother of the nation‘.

Between 1983 and 1987 she chaired the United Nation’s initiated World Commission on Environment and Development, which initiated our focus on sustainable development. From 1998 to 2003 she was director general of the World Health Organization, and has been widely recognised for leading efforts that stemmed the outbreak of SARS. She is currently a UN special envoy for climate change.

A medical doctor by training, Gro’s career has combined her passions for public health, human development, women’s rights and the environment. In her speech she will challenge participants to wake up to the issues facing the planet, and will reflect upon some of the challenges she has faced as a woman at the top.

Creating more out of less:
servant leadership across cultures

In an increasingly global world, more and more businesses are expanding internationally and engaging in cross-national mergers and acquisitions. Globalization not only provides a platform for unanticipated opportunities, but also provides extraordinary challenges.

As the workforce becomes more diverse, people are operating from, and interacting through, different values across countries and companies. The consequence of such a diverse workforce will be a ‘clash of cultures’. Will dilemmas that arise remain unsolvable? Not for servant leaders.

Experience has shown that servant leadership is the most effective approach when dealing with the dilemmas that result from cultural diversity and integration. Using examples, Fons Trompenaars will demonstrate a path that leads to a better, higher value – dispensing with need for compromise. It is an effective process used to break the pattern of cultural stereotyping and counterproductive behaviors. At the same time it reconciles opposing viewpoints and thereby ensures that processes for globalization and M&As are successful – in effect: ‘getting more out of less’.

Fons Trompenaars will cover the essence of his books ‘Servant leadership across cultures’ and ‘Creating more out of Less: Cross-cultural due diligence.’

Fons is the author of more than 10 books including ‘Riding the waves of culture,’ ‘Riding the whirlwind – connecting people and organizations in a culture of innovation,’ and ‘Understanding cultural diversity in business’. Fons Trompenaars is founder of Trompenaars Hampden-Turner.

Economic uncertainty and the impact on total rewards and talent management

Businesses throughout the world are facing the twin challenges of economic downturn plus rising inflation. Only a few fortunate sectors and locations are escaping them. These pressures pose great challenges for businesses worldwide in how to manage total rewards, performance and talent management.

Employees are seeing their incomes eroded and want larger increases in pay, companies have less ability to pay.

How are businesses around the world reacting? In this session Anne Ruddy outlines joint WorldatWork and Hay Group research on what businesses are doing, and planning to do. How are they managing the dilemma of motivating and retaining the talent they need when their ability to reward is less?

How will the economic downturn affect pressures for greater work-life balance? Will this become just a boom-time dream as the pressures grow to do more with less? Will companies freeze pay and focus on incentives? What are they doing with often expensive benefits?

Anne Ruddy is President of WorldatWork.

Creating lasting value: what it takes for you to be energized and innovative

When companies are under economic pressure, it is easy to focus on short term costs and ignore the future. However Professor Gratton will argue that in economic downturns it becomes even more important to create lasting value – by bringing speedy and targeted product and service innovation.

Over the last ten years Professor Gratton’s award winning research with companies such as ARM, the BBC, Orange, Reuters, RBS and Unilever have pinpointed what is takes to drive innovation and the crucial role high performing teams play in innovation. In her book ‘Hot spots – why some teams and places buzz with energy and innovation – and others don’t’ Lynda showed what this meant for companies – whilst her newly released book ‘Glow: what it takes for you to be energized and innovative’ creates a blueprint for individual action.

In this session Lynda brings together these two strands to identify the 10 actions organizations and individuals can take right now to beat the recession and ensure they flourish through product and service innovation.

Lynda Gratton is professor of management practice at the London Business School. Her other books include: ‘The democratic enterprise’ and ‘Living strategy: putting people at the heart of corporate purpose.’ www.hotspotsmovement.com