Executive Education has been recognised for its offering by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB).

We have been recognised by the world’s largest business education alliance for our pioneering ImpactLab™ – an experiential approach to learning which uses lab settings from across the College.

These experiential approaches take managers and executives out of their comfort zone and into unfamiliar environments in which they can experiment with new ways of thinking and working.

The ImpactLab™ takes place in settings across the College including the Carbon Capture Lab in the chemical engineering department, a performance simulator housed in the Enterprise Lab and a sequential simulation in partnership with the Centre for Engagement and Simulation Science.

These environments are used to help participants manage uncertainty, time constraints and stress. In the Carbon Capture Lab leaders are divided into two teams and given a 30 minute task of transporting carbon across the North Sea with the aim of focusing on decision-making under stress.

The performance simulator is a virtual reality simulator which allows business professionals to build their confidence in public speaking by giving a presentation to a virtual audience. The simulator, which was developed by the Royal College of Music, was originally designed to help musicians overcome their fear of performing in front of a large audience.

The association singled out Imperial in the category of schools that ‘Enhance Approaches to Leadership Education and Development’. This is for business schools who are creating non-traditional and sometimes cross-disciplinary opportunities for students to hone their leadership skills both inside and outside of the classroom.

Imperial College Business School was one of 30 global institutions recognised by the AACSB which connects educators, students, and business to achieve a common goal: to create the next generation of great leaders.

David Brown, Director of Executive Education at Imperial College Business School said: “We are delighted that our ImpactLab™ has been recognised as an industry leader in enhancing approaches to leadership education by AACSB.”

He added: “We believe that the experiential method to discovery in Imperial’s STEM background has a lot to teach the world of executive development. The ImpactLab™ combines an enquiring consulting approach with high-impact learning to help change culture on a large scale. International awards such as this continue to endorse Imperial College Business School as a global pioneer in innovation.”

A business executive uses the performance simulator

The AACSB’s third annual Innovations That Inspire challenge recognises institutions from around the world serving as champions of change in the business education landscape, with a specific focus on innovation in leadership development, a key pillar of the accreditation process and one of five opportunities identified in the Collective Vision for business education.

“The biggest risk to business schools is not the rapid pace of change. It is in failing to prepare the next generation of business leaders to cope with that change,” said Thomas R. Robinson, president and CEO of AACSB. “Through its best-in-class leadership development program, Imperial College Business School’s ImpactLab™ is ensuring that the business leaders of tomorrow will be ready for whatever lies ahead.”

Beate Baldwin, Director of Open Programmes, Marketing and EMBA at Imperial College Business School said: “Our ImpactLab™ takes its roots from the scientific research that Imperial does: we begin by challenging our participants’ assumptions. We then test their ideas in a safe environment and invite them to think about their behaviour.

The solutions they validate are integrated in the work place and enhance the business. We are not here to prescribe nor “teach” but to inspire and support senior executives in this fast paced technology driven world.”

For an overview of all the featured innovations in this year’s AACSB’s Innovations That Inspire challenge, visit the AACSB’s website.

Professor Nelson Phillips delivers a webinar on how leaders can adapt their skills in the technological age. 

By Dr. Omar Merlo

A friend of mine told me that your milkshakes have wood pulp in them. Is that why they are so thick and tasty…?

What’s the real story about pink slime in chicken nuggets?

Why do you no longer care about peanut allergies?

These are a few examples drawn from the thousands of questions sent in by McDonald’s customers as part of the food chain’s ‘Our Food. Your Questions.’ campaign. Launched in 2012, the campaign invited customers to ask McDonald’s any question – either on social media or on their purpose-built website. The company convened a dedicated team tasked with giving honest answers, available for all to see online.

Industry observers predicted that this unorthodox initiative would backfire. However, McDonald’s proved their critics wrong.  Campaign reported that in Canada, where the question platform was first launched, the ‘Our Food. Your Questions.’ campaign accumulated 10 million interactions online, McDonald’s food quality and brand perception measures increased and monthly store visits grew by 50% in the second half of 2012, when compared with the first. [1]

McDonald’s food quality and brand perception measures increased and monthly store visits grew by 50%

‘Our Food. Your Questions.’ is an example of performance transparency – a marketing strategy which seeks to provide customers with a clear and objective view of what they might expect from a company. You might have noticed performance transparency when online shopping for example – a common approach is to show unfiltered customer reviews next to product listings. The goal is to give customers a complete picture of what they can expect from a product or service, including identifying limitations as well as strengths.

There is strong evidence that performance transparency strategies have significant business benefits. I recently published a paper on performance transparency with my Imperial College Business School colleagues Professor Andreas Eisingerich and Jaka Levstek and with collaborators at the Thunderbird School of Global Management. We found that transparency increases the level of trust that customers place in a brand and, perhaps most significantly, makes them more likely to pay a price premium for that brand’s products.

We found that transparency increases the level of trust that customers place in a brand

Performance transparency can benefit service firms as well as suppliers of goods and retailers. Andreas and I found that customers are more willing to do business with a service firm which they feel is transparent and pay a price premium for its services.

We also found that the positive effects of transparency persisted even when customers perceived a service firm’s ability to deliver their promised service to be low. So for a company new to market and yet to build a reputation for quality, or for a company going through a tough time, transparency could be a particularly effective strategy to address customer concerns.

Despite growing evidence for the business benefits of performance transparency, I still find that many executives are reticent to implement transparency strategies.

I still find that many executives are reticent to implement transparency strategies

In our research we conducted a survey of managers working in a variety of industries and found that eight out of ten had not considered ways of proactively employing transparency to enhance their company’s competitiveness. Managers described to us how transparency initiatives like sharing negative information can feel counterintuitive and contrary to their instincts to focus only on the positive aspects of their products.

To help managers who are yet to consider performance transparency, my colleagues and I have developed best practice guidelines. You can find out more about these in my next article: 5 strategies to leverage transparency.

 Dr Omar Merlo is Assistant Professor and Director of the MSc Strategic Marketing programme in the Imperial College Business School. His main interests are in the areas of strategic marketing, services and relationship management, customer engagement and customer management. With Professor Andreas Eisingerich he also teaches on the School’s Executive Education programme  Digital Mindset for Customer Value.

[1] https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/mcdonalds-honest-approach-fast-food/1343221

Richard Watson, Futurist-in-Residence at the Tech Foresight Practice at Imperial College London

I stumbled upon a Wikipedia page recently about disruptive technologies. While the page provided a good summary of what’s coming next, it failed to excite me for a number of reasons. First, although the technologies were grouped by industry or sector, which was useful, there was no chronology or ranking of potential force. I thought Imperial’s Tech Foresight team could do better, so here, for your delectation and delight, is a table of 100 emerging technologies ranked by both time and disruptive potential put together by Anna Cupani and I, with the input and feedback of many academics and brilliantly brought to life by Lawrence Whiteley at Wond.

The technologies are divided into four groups. Horizon one technologies (green bottom left on the table) are technologies that are happening right now. If they are appropriate to your business, you should be integrating and executing these technologies right now.

Horizon two technologies (yellow) are probable near-future technologies (10-20 years hence). Experiment and discuss if appropriate.

Horizon three technologies (red) are technologies that are likely to emerge in the more distant future (20 years plus). Keep an eye on developments in these areas and explore if appropriate.

The outer edge of the table (grey) contains what we’ve termed Ghost Technologies. This is fringe thinking with some examples bordering on lunacy. However, while each example is highly improbable none, or very few, are actually impossible. There was some debate as to whether to include this section on the basis that many of these ‘technologies’ are pseudo-science, but if the history of science & technology tells us anything it’s surely that what starts as impossible or implausible often ends up being obvious or inevitable.

Finally, on the far right of the table are examples of companies active in each of the technology areas.  We are grateful to Gaby Lee for her help and extensive search on the internet. We excluded Imperial College here because it felt like we might be blowing our own trumpet a little too much. Also, because a planned future version is proposed that will highlight where Imperial is active.

So, here’s a billion-dollar question.

Assuming this table is roughly correct, how might you spot the companies or organisations that will succeed commercially? Which companies might you invest in or acquire? To my mind, this is roughly the same as asking what are the rules for innovation or how might you make your company more innovative and better positioned to succeed in a competitive and volatile environment?

My own particular background is in innovation working with the likes of Virgin, Toyota, and Unilever and I’ve been an expert blogger on innovation for Fast Company magazine in the US too, so I think I may have acquired some useful perspectives along the way about what makes some companies world-famous while consigning others to the dustbin of obscurity.

The first of my lessons learnt is that being roughly right is often better than being perfectly right. ‘Perfect’ can take a very long time, creates a lot of arguments and quite often the world has moved on by the time you are ready with ‘perfection.’ With many products, being roughly right and quick (ironing out any imperfections after launch) is often better than endless deliberation. This is more or less the Facebook motto of ‘Move Fast and Break Things’ or the Silicon Valley idea of ‘Failing Fast.’ There are plenty of exceptions to this. With art, perfection is worth the effort, but if you work in pharmaceuticals, being roughly right might actually kill someone.

My second lesson learnt when it comes to innovation, especially radical innovation, is that Peter Drucker, the management guru, was right. When it comes to innovation, culture eats process for breakfast.

If you’ve got the wrong culture no amount of process or management consultancy can save you. You can change a culture, of course, but in my experience, this takes many years. In contrast, if you’ve got the right culture, innovation will, up to a point, naturally emerge through osmosis.

What constitutes the right culture? That’s tricky to pin down, but I’d say a company that’s curious, questioning and playful. Also, one that’s nimble and is not strangled by bureaucracy. One that tolerates failure and gives people the freedom to experiment too.

Being on a mission and having a well-defined enemy helps too. Think Apple and Microsoft in the early days or perhaps Virgin Vs. British Airways before Virgin’s David turned into another Goliath.

However, great cultures don’t just emerge. They generally come from the top of an organisation and are usually created by a charismatic CEO with a well-articulated vision of the future or, better still, a founder with something to prove.

A third thing I’ve learnt is that you never really know. What I mean by this is that nothing is 100% certain and nothing is guaranteed to work. There are no fool-proof rules. Things that should work often don’t and things that shouldn’t work often do. The only way to find if something really will work is, again, to experiment.  That’s the mindset you’re after. Keep exploring, keep adapting, keep evolving, keep trying.

Specific and practical tips

1. My first tip is to get to know as many young people as possible and hire as many as you can too. These people are more invested in the future than you or I, and they tend to be more closely aligned with change too. But don’t get too carried away. Young people tend to drive disruption, as anyone that’s read Thomas Kuhn’s classic book on the structure of scientific revolutions might remember, but you need to get the right balance between old and wise and young and energetic. Both must respect the other too.
2. My second tip also comes from Thomas Kuhn. New discoveries and ideas are often happy accidents and while the creation of such serendipitous events is difficult, keeping your eyes and ears wide open to interesting anomalies isn’t. This idea links to weak-signals in scenario planning lingo and perhaps with ethnographic research and design thinking too. As someone once said, the most powerful phrase in science isn’t “Eureka!” it’s “that’s interesting!”
3. Tip three is cross-fertilisation. New ideas are often novel combinations of old ideas, so mix things up a little in terms of the diversity of everything from people attending meetings and workshops to office seating plans. Or take an idea that works in one context and think about how it might be combined to work in another.

Only this morning I was playing around with a bottle of cough medicine that featured a label that could be peeled back to reveal a second, hidden, label containing further product information. What if you took this principle of hidden information and applied it to another product?

Finally, I’d like to leave you with something that’s more of a mindset that a top tip. The world is becoming more complex, volatile, ambiguous and uncertain, which creates a craving for sense-making, stability, rules and logic.

It also creates a thirst for knowing what’s next. We are contagiously curious about trends, especially tech trends that we somehow think of as being fool-proof ways of being in the right place at the right time.

There’s nothing wrong with following trends. Indeed, they are essential for incremental innovation and continuous product improvement. But remember that trends bend and many eventually snap if used too often or stretched too far. Critically, if more or less everyone is more or less following the same key trends, doesn’t that mean that more or less everyone is thinking along similar lines?

Trends are what the really smart innovators break. Successful innovators don’t follow, they create. They don’t codify conventional wisdom, they smash it to pieces and jump up and down on the fragments shouting “I’ll show you.” They don’t let dogma and other peoples’ opinions smother their originality or intuition either.  In short, they are the architects of their future and you must be the same in your distinctive way.

Professor Nelson Phillips is Abu Dhabi Chamber Chair in Innovation and Strategy, and Executive Education Programme Director Imperial College Business School.

In his TEDx Hessle talk, Professor Phillips argues that we need to get as good at digital leadership as we are at creating and applying digital technology. Digital transformation is about fundamental changes needed in our organisations where we work, the society where we live, and, perhaps less obviously, in the nature of the leaders and leadership we need.

Frans Campher is CEO of Integral Leadership Dynamics and Co-Director of our Leadership in a Technology Driven World programme.

Imagine, for a moment, that you and the people you lead are perfectly equipped to deal with the relentless change, ambiguity and complexity of the fast-paced and ever-changing world of business we live in today.

Now, imagine for a moment that they are not only able to survive change, but that they thrive because of it. How might that be?

Quite simply put, adaptive leadership is exactly that: the ability, as a leader, to create an environment of collaboration, creativity and agility that delivers outstanding response to change and that understands how fundamental it is to you, your team and to the organisations success.

Adaptive leaders recognise that the “command and control” leadership style of yesteryear does not resonate with the highly networked and social work forces of today. It stifles the flow of information, demotivates teams and works against innovation. At its worst, it can erode trust and engagement amongst your people.

Change is often scoped in a very controlled, technical way – we focus on the process and systems. Sometimes, we even redraw organisational charts. All well intended of course, however the business impact of a highly controlled environment is that change is slow, results are not what they should be and there is lower engagement. Your teams exhibit very little creativity, they show very little ownership and will often put in discretionary effort to achieve the outcomes you and your stakeholders want.

Human beings are complex and paradoxical in nature. The reason so many change programs fail is because we assume our people will fold in, and unfortunately this is not the case.

Instead, take the adaptive leader approach and put the challenge to your people, ask for their input, notice the tension arising. In fact, the best will create and foster tension so that diverse views emerge. When we embrace diversity, we generate multiple possibilities that deliver better solutions and outcomes – a win-win for all stakeholders.

Here are 10 questions to ask yourself when you are facing an adaptive challenge:

1. What is the purpose and mission of your business or unit?

Frame the challenge and link it to your overall purpose and mission to maintain a consistent connection with what your team holds dear.

2. Who are you in this system?

How do you react to change, what biases do you bring into the situation? How does this impact your identity and the way you foster delegation? Being aware of your own biases will open you up to wider and often better possibilities.

3. What is the adaptive challenge here?

Scope the adaptive challenge by socialising your thinking and asking for input from your people and stakeholders. This will increase trust and engagement and foster greater creativity.

4. What is your capacity to telescope into the detail? Equally, what does the challenge look like from distance?

Being able to telescope out and look at the whole enterprise system is critical.

5. What are the essential values and capacities that has made you successful to this point?

Be sure to retain essential values and capacities. By holding onto essential values and capacities you will gain quicker buy in to the change you are seeking.

6. What have you done to ensure everyone’s input is heard?

It is imperative that all views are heard (even if you do not accept or use them). Once you have heard someone, they are more likely to accept the change you are proposing.

7. Who are the key people you need to engage on a one-to-one basis?

Make sure you have effective conversations with key stakeholders to understand where they are and what their thinking is in the situation. The greatest fear that people have in change is what they are losing, how their identity, autonomy or status is being impinged. What can you do to mitigate this?

8. What processes will you put in place to ensure that rigorous debate is fostered?

Generate creative tension and discussion so that there is rigorous debate and the best decisions are forged.

9. How will you keep your people focused?

Create clear outcomes with your people, ensure accountabilities are understood and accepted, follow up with regular discussion. Keep them focused with regular check-ins.

10. How will you hold accountability?

Hold individuals and teams accountable to deliver and for results down the line.

Professor Bart Clarysse & Dr Jana Thiel

Are you an analytical, experimental, or visionary innovator? Knowing may help you write your next business case.

Faced with challenges like technological disruption and changing patterns of consumer behaviour, big corporates know they need to innovate or be left behind.

Across the world corporate incubators and accelerators are being established, innovation teams expanded, projects launched, and startups founded and funded. Leaders and investors have high hopes and companies such as Google, Amazon.com, and Tesla are setting the benchmark. However, innovation initiatives often fail to live up to sky-high expectations.

We have studied how companies approach innovation and can suggest three models used by companies when developing business cases for innovation initiatives: analytical, experimental, and visionary.

We hope these models will help you decide which innovation strategy (or combination of strategies) is right for you given your tolerance of uncertainty, timescales and desired outcome.

Analytical

Analytical innovators develop business cases using methods familiar to executives and business school students. They analyse market trends to identify unmet customer needs and build investment proposals which aim to achieve breakeven typically within a few years. Their analytical approach requires supporting data. This data is often drawn from similar projects in different industries or regions of the world. Therefore, the innovative project that emerges might be unknown to the company or its industry but is unlikely to be new in the world.

This approach can lead to successful and sustainable new enterprises in a short time.

Experimental

Experimental innovation happens in environments with higher levels of uncertainty. Experimental innovators work on concepts where a future market can be anticipated, but is yet to be activated.

In the absence of data, experimenters take action. Using agile methodologies (for example approaches inspired by Lean Startup or real options reasoning) they introduce ideas to the market by funding, testing and refining prototypes through small proof-of-concept projects. Over three to seven years successful businesses and new product lines can emerge.

Experimenters need patience and the ability to pivot in response to market feedback. They must build a community of supporters to sustain their ideas over time. Corporations that encourage experimentation need mature processes to stop projects that fail and to redeploy resources.

Visionary

Visionary innovators lead whole movements often inspired by grand challenges like addressing climate change. Perhaps building on past success, visionaries have the confidence and resources to overcome the highest levels of uncertainty and be agents for economic, technological and social change. For example, when Richard Branson started his space program in 2005, everyone was very sceptical. Today the idea that in a few years spacecraft could fly passengers rapidly from one big city to another is no longer surprising.

Richard Watson, Futurist-in-Residence at the Technology Foresight Practice at Imperial College London

Why is it that the average lifespan of an S&P 500 company in the US has fallen from 67 years in the 1920s to just 15 years today? And why might 75% of firms in the S&P 500 now be gone or going by the year 2027 or thereabouts?

These figures come from a study by Richard Foster at the Yale School of Management and echo another from the Santa Fe Institute that found that publically quoted firms die at similar rates regardless of age or industry sector. In this second study the average lifespan of American companies was cited at just 10 years. The reason given for most of these companies dying or disappearing is a merger or acquisition.* A third US study** of S&P companies reports an average company age of 61 in 1958, 25 in 1980 and around 18 today, but the trend toward shorter lives remains regardless of which study you read.

In the UK it’s a similar story. Of the 100 companies in the FTSE 100 in 1984, only 24 were still breathing in 2012, although average corporate lifespans in the UK were somewhat longer. However, with start-ups it’s back to bleak, with almost 50% of SMEs failing to celebrate their 5th birthday.

The reasons UK start-ups fail are said to include cash flow issues, a lack of bank lending, too much red tape, high business rates and competition.

With larger enterprises in the UK and elsewhere the situation can be somewhat different. The main reason that big companies die – beyond being consumed by larger or more aggressive companies – is that they fail to anticipate or react to new technology, new customer demands or competitors with new business models, products and services, all of which are often linked and can cause considerable disruption and disturbance.

This is Darwinian evolution applied to capitalism and the only solution is to keep your eyes and ears wide open for predators and to continually evolve what you do through a process of constant adaption and occasionally accelerated mutation.

The list of corporate casualties is certainly long. Most people are aware of how things developed at Kodak, but the list of companies killed off or seriously injured by new technologies, new competitors or new customer behaviours includes a roll call of previously proud British names including Ferranti, Psion, Acorn Computers, De Havilland, British Leyland, British Steel, ICI, Marconi, Swan Hunter, Armstrong Siddeley, GEC and ICL.

Interestingly, in each case the writing was on the wall long before many of these companies went bankrupt or were taken over, but if there’s one thing that you can rely on with big companies it’s that, like super-tankers, they can take a long time to change direction and the view from the bridge is often partially obscured or heavily contested.

Deaths and disappearances

Acorn Computers, Apricot Computers, Armstrong Siddeley, BNFL, British Computer Rentals, British Leyland, British Movietone News, British Steel, De Havilland, Dunlop Rubber, English Electric, Exchange & Mart, Express Diaries, Ferranti, GEC, ICI, ICL, International Typewriter Company, Laker Airways, London Daily News, Lucas Industries, Marconi Instruments, Meccano Ltd, Our Price Records, Phones 4U, Plessey, Psion, Radio Rentals, Rediffusion, Rootes Group, Swan Hunter, Thornycroft, Vickers, Woolworths and…Psychic News (!)

Note: As with the Yale Study disappearances include the effects of M&A activity and government action as well as bailouts and bankruptcies.

Nothing recedes like Success

Putting to one side new technologies, new competition and new customer demands, a key point is geriatric corporate cultures. Bill Gates once said that “success is a lousy teacher, it seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.” In other words, nothing recedes quite like success and large companies can become delusional about their fitness, their intellect or the speed and energy with which new ideas and inventions can move.

If arrogance is one silent killer, another is that as companies grow and become bigger management can become distanced from both insight and innovation. Peter Drucker made this point decades ago, although he used the word entrepreneurship. Managing and innovating are different dimensions of the same task, but most large companies regard them as separate to the point of putting them in different departments or locations. As the urgency to stay alive financially evaporates the focus shifts away from urgent opportunities and threats to lethargic internal issues and a kind of corporate immune system develops whereby new ideas tend to be rejected by the corporate body the minute they form.

If you drop down the organisation chart to departments such as customer complaints this isn’t always the case.

People working in customer relations, IT, sales or even accounts can be extremely close to customers, and hence to the inception of new ideas, but senior management often writes off these departments as cost centres rather than hotbeds of insight and innovation.

With R&D it’s often much the same story with scientists and engineers being regarded as grey-suited bureaucrats offering up ponderous improvements rather than white-coated warriors fighting for discoveries that could transform the company.

The culture of organisations contributes to failure in other ways too. The dominant culture of most very large companies is highly conservative and quite rightly so. Publically quoted firms primarily exist to provide a regular return to shareholders and to keep workers in regular employment. But to do both these things they must also deliver constantly evolving products that create value for customers.

This is like a tightrope that’s not only swaying in the wind, but is being constantly moved and adjusted at one end while you’re still walking along it. Interestingly, Mark Vergano, an executive VP at Du Pont once made a similar point with regard to R&D saying that:  “Research and development is always a delicate balance between maintaining a long-term view and remaining sensitive to short-term financial objectives.”

To sum up, if companies wish to remain healthy and grow old they need to do two things.

Firstly, they need to remain young at heart. They need to remain mentally agile, constantly learn new things and question their own identity and reason for being.

This means repeatedly asking what business they’re really in and how best they can serve both current and future customers using current and future technologies, channels and business models.

Secondly, companies must look at innovation from a whole business perspective and make innovation truly cross-functional. If innovation exists purely at a departmental, product or service level it’s unlikely to proceed beyond incremental refinement. Continuous improvement is essential, but it’s merely a ticket to stay in the game.

To win the game companies must consider more radical developments including the ground-up reinvention of everything they do and also link innovation to strategy.

Three quick ways to extend the lifespan of your company:

1. Constantly look out for and test new ideas that could breathe new life into your company or fatally wound your company if applied by a competitor.

2. Similarly, don’t simply keep an eye on what your closest competitors are doing, also study what small start-ups outside your immediate market or geography are doing. Are they doing anything unusual? Are they doing anything that doesn’t immediately make sense? If so dig into why.

3. Keep a close eye on what your youngest customers and employees are doing. What are they doing that you aren’t? Could such behaviour be an early warning signal of change?

Footnotes.

* A merger or acquisition isn’t necessarily a business failure, but can nevertheless be a sign of weakness or long-term illness.

**Innosight study (US).

If you’re wondering, the world’s oldest limited liability corporation is Enso Stora, a Finnish paper and pulp manufacturer that started out as a mining company in 1288.

By Pedro Rente Lourenço, data scientist at Vodafone Group Data and AI Centre of Excellence and speaker at Imperial Business in the City: Innovating Through Big Data and AI

Vodafone is focusing on artificial intelligence (AI) and Big Data technologies to grow our business, improve internal efficiencies, and contribute to social good, while having as a first priority the privacy and security of our customers. Over the past three years, our Big Data and AI department has grown from a small start-up venture within Vodafone to have global presence in 24 countries.

As food for thought before the Imperial Business and the City event, ‘Innovating through Big Data and AI’, I considered three things I have learnt from our growth journey about how to create value from investments in analytics and associated technologies like AI and machine learning:

1. Create a compelling offer to attract and develop talent

A key barrier to innovation is the availability of knowledgeable talent with a combination of AI and machine learning skills, business insight, and strategic communication skills. With more and more companies realising the hidden value in their data, it is not surprising that data scientists with these skill sets are in high demand.

As a data scientist, what I value is the opportunity to make an impact through my work by solving meaningful problems with high quality data.

A country with a market size of 12 million people might generate over a billion data points per day on the Vodafone network. With this vast data lake, we address business issues like optimising our customers’ experience of Vodafone products. But we also use our data for positive social impact, through aggregations of large-scale pseudonymized datasets.

I recently returned from Mozambique where I was presenting my work on malaria epidemiological studies. We used Vodafone’s pseudonymised network data to model the movement of people across the country, generating insights about how the disease spreads, which the relevant stakeholders can then use to develop elimination strategies.

Companies should be careful not to neglect the people element of their strategy. What makes your company attractive to a data scientist?

2. Combine short-term wins with long-term vision

Our Big Data applications are delivering personalised offers to our customers across the globe, increasing sales and improving customer experience.

As of January 2019, we are using AI learning to underpin over two thirds of our proactive communications to customers, to drive a predictive, proactive, and personalised experience.

But what is this personalised experience? For example, by looking at the past experiences and interactions of customers who have opted in to share their data with Vodafone, we can recommend the best smartphone for their needs, or the correct data bundle based on their previous usage, which in turn improves customer experience.

As an example of the impact of our personalised offers, in 2018 Big Data applications contributed to the sale of 2.3 billion communication bundles to our South African customers, an increase of 51% from 2017.

Companies can focus too much on long term dreams and neglect the latent potential of existing data which, when exposed to the latest analytics techniques, can shed new light on current business priorities.

At the same time, having a solid long-term vision for data science is crucial to fully unpack the value lying in a company’s data. I truly believe in this ‘double-geared’ strategy to power quick wins coupled with longer term, high-reward projects. Striking the right balance between short and long-term goals is hard, but it is something that, in my opinion, needs to be addressed from the start, to have iterative approaches aligned with a long-term strategy.

3. Integrate data scientists into the wider organisation

Data scientists should not be the smart nerds waiting for a specific request to develop a model. Embedding this function into the business is quintessential to properly drive Big Data transformations. At Vodafone, we believe strongly in integrating data science into the day-to-day business of the company.

To have maximum impact, data scientists need to collaborate closely with business units and have an in depth understanding of company goals to deliver work which adds value.

It is not enough to recruit a team of coders and ask them to play with a vast quantity of data, hoping that interesting things emerge.

By Frans Campher

It is 2005 and the chief operating officer of Delta Airlines, Jim Whitehurst, is in Atlanta airport at an impromptu meeting with several hundred of his mechanics. Delta has just filed for federal bankruptcy protection and is in a race against time to avoid collapse. Staff are fearful for their futures. Whitehurst is the self-styled ‘guy with the binders’: renowned for being on top of the data and with an answer to everything. But today he hasn’t been able to plan what to say.

Whitehurst realises that candour is his only option. He talks in detail about the company’s situation and then invites comments from the room. To his surprise, the mechanics ask questions, not about pay cuts, but about the turnaround plan and how they could help. In the following days, word spreads around the company about Whitehurst’s candour and similar meetings with staff are repeated throughout the turnaround process. In a short time, Delta rises to the top of service reliability rankings because staff own the problem and take accountability.

Whitehurst credits this experience for causing a fundamental shift in his leadership approach.

He realised that great leaders don’t need to have all the answers. What great leaders do is lead the conversation, pose the right questions and create a culture where everyone in an organisation is empowered to discover solutions. 

This shift in mindset led to him building upon the open leadership framework which he encountered at tech company Red Hat, recently sold to IBM for USD $34bn. You can hear Whitehurst tell his leadership story in his TED talk. You may also wish to read his book called The Open Organization: Igniting Passion and Performance.

Whitehurst developed what I like to call a coaching mindset.  I believe this mindset is vital for leaders today who are facing increasing complexity, ambiguity, and demands on their time. In our age of rapidly shifting business models and digital transformation, it is simply impossible to maintain a rigid command-and-control leadership style. Leaders must multiply their impact by engaging and empowering others.

From almost sixteen years of leadership development practice, I know that adopting a coaching mindset isn’t easy for executives. Executives can fear relinquishing control and this fear can have a paralysing effect on organisations.  I often meet executives who are stressed and not performing effectively because they are trying to do the jobs of their direct reports as well as their own. They are directing and managing rather than leading and neither the executive nor their team is doing their best work. I work with the executive to help them adopt a coaching mindset so they can expand from being managers who organise to leaders who inspire. I work with them to set vision and objectives which create accountability but also space and conditions for people to grow, develop and be creative.

When discussing the coaching mindset, I often point my clients to Benjamin Zander’s reflections on his role as an orchestra conductor in his wonderful TED talk:

``The conductor doesn't make a sound. He depends, for his power, on his ability to make other people powerful… I realised my job was to awaken possibility in other people. And of course, I wanted to know whether I was doing that. How do you find out? You look at their eyes. If their eyes are shining, you know you're doing it.``

For Zander, great conductors don’t have to be the centre of attention. They don’t even have to make a sound. But if they awaken possibility in other people they are still powerful. This message for me beautifully encapsulates great leadership.

Perhaps you have been on your own leadership journey or there are leaders who have influenced you? What do you think makes a great leader? I would love to hear from you.

Frans Campher is a leadership development coach and the founder and CEO of Integral Leadership Dynamics. He is Associate Faculty at Imperial College Business School and Co-Director of the Leadership in a Technology Driven World executive education programme.

Connect with Frans on LinkedIn and Twitter.