Indice dei contenuti per 3/2022 in I by IMD

In IMD classrooms, both physical and virtual, disruption and upheaval have featured prominently this year. In conversations among executives and with faculty, the business- and leadership implications of geopolitical turbulence, supply chain disruptions, and the climate crisis have come up time and again. This was particularly true during Orchestrating Winning Performance, our signature program for 400 leaders that we were able to hold on our beautiful Lausanne campus for the first time since 2019. Despite the formidable tasks ahead, participants left both challenged and inspired to tackle problems, old and new, with fresh approaches and novel ideas. Of course, any list of disruptive forces in our world is incomplete without an examination of the myriad ways in which digital technology has opened up unprecedented opportunities, while also challenging leaders and…

[ Cyber-resilience ] For busy chief executives and board members, the lexicon of cybersecurity has in the past two years become increasingly littered with catchy names and a rich acronym soup that together describe the latest attacks by criminal hackers, and their tactics. In 2020, we had Sunburst, describing the massive breach of US company SolarWinds' software, allegedly by nation-state actors, to steal US government data. Then in 2021 we read about DarkSide, the suspected Russia-based perpetrator of a huge hack that knocked the US Colonial Pipeline offline for three days. And we increasingly hear about tactics such as RaaS (“Ransomware-as a Service”) and BGH (“big game hunting”). All of this can seem somewhat impenetrable - not to mention darkly mysterious - to those outside specialist circles. Yet behind the…

Cyberattacks are increasing in number and growing in sophistication. Organizations must develop a comprehensive plan, executed with great precision and consistency, if they are to protect themselves. The creation and sustenance of a high-performance information security culture is needed, and the drive for change must come from the very top. In my book Cybersecurity Readiness: A Holistic and HighPerformance Approach, such a culture is characterized by three key traits: commitment, preparedness, and discipline. THE COMMITMENT-PREPAREDNESS-DISCI RUNE FRAMEWORK This Commitment-Preparedness-Discipline framework (see the charts below) is holistic and recognizes that “technology alone will not mitigate information security risks”. There are several pieces to the complex puzzle of cybersecurity management, and technology is only one of them. Committed leadership, robust governance procedures, informed and motivated personnel are other success factors. Sustained commitment…

Sustainability has become a fundamental prerequisite for doing business. Companies' operations and business models depend on environmental and social inputs such as capital, natural resources, production equipment, and relations with the outside world. This includes a range of stakeholders, from legislators and investors to customers and employees. This means that sustainability is no longer just about compliance and ethics but rather should be a core part of business strategy. Placing it there will demand new competencies and skills from a company's top leadership, and the board of directors in particular. Unfortunately, however, for most companies sustainability is still not fully integrated in this way. Consultancy PwC's 2021 CEO survey showed that 60% of those interviewed had not yet made climate change part of strategic risk management. Instead, companies more generally…

Patagonia, the US outdoor clothing retailer, has won widespread praise for its cutting-edge environmental practices and milestones. Its approach offers lessons for other family businesses looking to improve their environmental performance. As a starting point, Patagonia's top management incorporated environmental objectives into the core DNA of the business early on, with an emphasis on preserving the natural world. In response to the urgency of the climate crisis, the company has since updated and simplified its mission statement. It used to focus on building the best product, causing no unnecessary harm, and using business to inspire solutions. It now concentrates on being in business to save the planet, according to Vincent Stanley, Patagonia's Director of Philosophy. This overarching mission feeds directly into, and shapes, the company's core business and activities. Patagonia…

When the pandemic shuttered workplaces around the world and sent millions to work from home, some of us imagined a faint silver lining: at least the boss would not be wandering the floor and looking over our shoulder. Perhaps at home we could get our work done in peace and on our own schedule. But while many more of us now are able to work in our pajamas, at least on some days, workplace surveillance has extended its tentacles into our homes, our cars, and our remote workplaces. Even non-employee contractors are monitored via surveillance tech on their phones and computers, or on mandatory microphones, cameras, and bracelets. A recent report by Coworker.org offers a compendium of over 500 new technologies created to monitor laborers and their work. The rapid…

1 YAHOO was hit by the world's largest cyberattack which involved several state-sponsored security breaches in 2013 and 2014, but were not announced until 2016 and 2017. All three billion of the web services provider's accounts were affected, triple the company's initial estimates. Russian hackers stole encrypted passwords and security questions and answers. The breach was costly: it led to Verizon agreeing a $350 million discount on its original $4.5 billion offer to acquire Yahoo's core business. Yahoo also agreed to pay $50m in damages to people affected by the breach, with the funds used to reimburse users who also received two years of credit monitoring and identity theft protection. On top of this, Yahoo paid up to $35m in legal fees. 2 MARRIOTT INTERNATIONAL, the hotels group, revealed in…

The computer password was first presented at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1960 by Fernando Corbato, a computer scientist. Today, this basic security measure is ubiquitous, with the average digitally connected person having to remember or record multiple passwords. Yet there are two problems with passwords that may not have been evident to Corbató at the time. One is that they are easily forgotten, costing businesses when it comes to resetting them when tens of thousands of employees are involved. Indeed, the cost of resetting passwords for staff is up to $75 each time, according to the research firm Forrester, meaning that large corporations can spend more than $1 million annually on support costs for passwords. Another, more worrying, issue is that they are easier to hack than many…

For years, some of the world's biggest and most influential companies have been setting ambitious plans to cut their carbon emissions as part of humanity's biggest challenge in the 21st century: to reduce global warming. More than 3,000 such companies have now signed up to the Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi), a global partnership that includes the United Nations Global Compact and World Wildlife Fund (WWF), to reduce their emissions in line with climate science. But while every day brings new corporate pledges on cutting carbon emissions, how are companies doing when it comes to combating nature-loss and protecting and promoting biodiversity? According to a study led by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), a CEO-led community of over 200 of the world's leading sustainable businesses, the answer is:…

The debate between meritocracy and affirmative action has long simmered, and the arguments on both sides are familiar. But quickly to recap, let's look at an exchange between two people, each on either side of the argument. Vivek Ramaswamy is a self-made multimillionaire who founded a biotech company at the age of 28. He is a celebrity in conservative circles, having been a regular guest on Fox News and last year published Woke, Inc: Inside the Social Justice Scam, which takes corporations to task for - as he sees it - overstepping the mark in becoming involved in moral issues best left to society. Recently, he recalled a debate with Kenneth Frazier, the former chief executive of the pharmaceuticals company Merck. Frazier had said in the wake of the police killing…

During a brief period in 2020, business and its relationship with digital technology changed forever. The pandemic took digital tools, which for many companies had been a “nice to have”, and turned them into a core necessity. In the months and years that followed, embracing these tools has often marked the difference between corporate success and failure. But with the digital revolution now firmly established as a “must have”, how should companies be implementing it? And what role should leaders play in driving it? Having dedicated my career to digital transformation, I believe that there are six tenets that companies and their leaders need to adopt as they venture deeper into the digital decade - the title of a recent book I have written on the subject. But what exactly…

[ Cyber-resilience ] 'We will never truly know the value we create, but knowing the disasters we could be averting is motivation enough' The past year has been an exciting one for Mimecast, the cybersecurity company I founded nearly 20 years ago in London with fellow South African Neil Murray. After more than six exciting years trading on Nasdaq, Mimecast is private again, following its acquisition by Permira. Entrepreneurs set out to solve problems, and certainly, since founding Mimecast, cybercrime continues to be a large, ever-evolving problem, with growing recognition among business leaders that cyber-based threats are a significant business risk. Five years ago, only 58% of board members considered such threats a risk, according to our latest global report on the state of email security. In 2021 that figure…

[Cyber-resilience] In the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, there was much discussion about creating global regulatory standards to stop a repetition of the devastation wreaked on financial systems. Gordon Brown, the British prime minister at the time, argued in a landmark speech two years later for a “new global order”, maintaining that “only a truly international response - in policy and governance” could be effective in preventing future crashes. In today's digital world, it is tempting to make a similar case for cyber- risk: that creating a global governance framework would help to stop bad actors damaging government institutions and holding businesses to ransom. Pandemic weariness, geopolitical turbulence and inflationary pressures are palpable across the globe, and disruptive technological innovation offers promise and despair in almost equal measure.…

As a leader, you may be used to being the most competent person in the room — your functional expertise having played a major part in propelling you up the corporate ladder. But the rapid advance of new technologies – from blockchain to augmented reality – and increasing demands to solve complex issues and satisfy multiple stakeholders can make it impossible for one person to stay on top of everything. This can be a humbling experience. Yet the speed of technological innovation - and the risks that come with it – mean managers may well need to tap far younger employees for advice. This is particularly the case in the field of cybersecurity, where all leaders, not just chief information officers, must think about security across all aspects of their…

Amanda gets up and goes to her “bullshit” job as a hotel receptionist. Why the derogatory tone? Because she says she finds no personal meaning in her role, and she's not alone: when polled in a 2015 YouGov survey cited by the anthropologist David Graeber in his book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, 30% of working Britons found none in theirs either. Graeber defined this type of job as: “A form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence, even though, as part of the conditions of employment, [he/she] feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.” But Amanda is autonomous in the sense that she also pursues personal meaning – be it through playing, learning, moving, creating,…