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• The 2008 Leadership Lecture

About the Leadership Lecture

Supported by Fons Trompenaars,Tom Peters will challenge leaders and senior executives to bring management innovation into the very core of their corporate strategy. He will argue that volatile financial markets, new technology, changing legislation, and the increasing demands of stakeholders are conspiring to undermine the effectiveness of traditional management practices. The result is an increasing list of companies experiencing unexpected and often severe performance shortfalls. In Abu Dhabi, Tom Peters will tell delegates that accelerating change demands an accelerating pace of strategic and organisational renewal.

What will you learn about Leadership?

Leaders Have to Make Innovation Everyone's Job
In a world where strategy life-cycles are shrinking, innovation is the only way a company can survive in a world of bareknuckle competition. Sector leaders must contend with ultra-low-cost competitors - companies like Huawei, the Chinese telecom equipment manufacturer that pays engineers a starting salary of just $8,500 per year. But not all cut-price competition comes from China and India. Companies such as Ikea, Zara, Ryanair, and AirAsia are just a few of the many others that that have radically reinvented industry cost structures. Given this, it's surprising that so few companies have made innovation everyone's job. For the most part, innovation is still the sole responsibility of dedicated units such as R&D, where creative types are kept safely out of the way of those who have to “run the business.”

Leaders Have to be Bold
If management innovation has been mostly incremental in recent years, it may be due to a lack of daring in the choice of problems to tackle. Ask yourself, has your company ever taken on a management challenge that was truly unprecedented, where you couldn't rely on the experience of others as a guide? If you don't already have such a challenge in mind, then maybe you should start to ask a few bold questions. What are the new challenges the future has in store for your company? What's the ‘tomorrow problem’ that you need to start working on today? What are the tough balancing acts your company never seems to get right? What are the biggest gaps between rhetoric and reality in your company? What are the frustrating incompetencies that plague your company and other organizations like it? What's the “can't do” that needs to become a “can do”?

Leaders Should Know How to Build a Nimble Company
There's little that can be said with certainty about the future except this: sometime over the next decade your company will be challenged to change in a way for which it has no precedent. There have always been companies that have failed to reinvent themselves on a timely basis and have paid the price. Yet in recent years, entire industries have been caught behind the change curve. Television broadcasters and newspaper publishers, record companies and French vintners, traditional airlines and giant drug companies - have all struggled to rejuvenate out-of-date business models. Many factors contribute to strategic inertia, but three pose a particularly grave threat to timely renewal. The first is the tendency of management teams to deny or ignore the need for a strategy reboot. The second is a dearth of compelling alternatives to the status quo, which often leads to strategic paralysis. And the third: allocational rigidities that make it difficult to redeploy talent and capital behind new initiatives. Each of these barriers stands in the way of zero-trauma change; hence each deserves to be a focal point for management innovation.

Leaders turn Innovation into Advantage
Management innovation tends to yield a competitive advantage when one or more of three conditions are met: the innovation is based on a novel management principle that challenges some long-standing orthodoxy; the innovation is systemic, encompassing a range of processes and methods; and/or the innovation is part of an ongoing program of rapid-fire invention where progress compounds over time.