TomorrowToday launches our own TV channel: TomorrowToday Business TV

In partnership with our business television friends at yourBusinessChannel, we’re pleased to bring you TomorrowToday TV.

On this channel, we feature a selection of short video clips from business experts to get you thinking further about various aspects of the new world of work. The experts featured on this business tv channel are from a diverse range of specialist fields and are at the leading edge of the industry they’re in – either at the forefront of change, or driving it into their industries.

The channel will feature regularly updated content, including contributions from our own panel of experts and the TomorrowToday team.

Bookmark TomorrowToday Business TV now, and visit us regularly!

For even more insights, specifically on the role of digital in the new world of work, see Dr Graeme Codrington who is being featured on yBC’s Digital Transformation TV channel.

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Required: a revolution in retail

The retail sector has undergone immense upheaval over the last 20 years as sales have moved online and new, hugely successful entrants have changed the way we shop. Add the impact of the recession to this and the result is familiar high street names disappearing and many of the rest under extreme pressure. Retailers need to radically rethink their strategies for survival in a world where customer expectations, methods of transaction and supply chain relationships are all changing.

Ron Johnson, who created The Apple Store, said “A store has got to be much more than a place to acquire merchandise. It’s got to help people enrich their lives. If a store just fulfills a specific product need, it’s not creating new types of value for the consumer. It’s transacting.”

It sounds like a lot to ask – but if a store doesn’t offer more than product, why wouldn’t a customer just stay at home and buy online?  Of course, most retailers have to develop a strategy that works across both online and bricks-and-mortar – and an experience that is aligned for the customer.

A few are already doing it well.  One great example is C&A in Brazil, which has found a way of bringing online and offline experiences together by displaying Facebook ‘likes’ for products in-store. See how they do it here. In the US, JC Penney’s giant in store findmore touch screens allow shoppers to view the retailer’s full online offering, check stock levels in stores, share products with friends and scan product bar codes to access additional information and recommendations.  And take a look at the awesome Nike FuelStation recently opened in London, which takes customer experience to a whole new level.

New and innovative methods of payment are being launched across the globe that will alter the way we transact with retailers and offer a huge opportunity to build loyalty. Starbucks, for example, has introduced a sophisticated mobile app and payment system that lets customers load cash onto their mobile phone, which then displays a barcode baristas can scan at the register.

Amazing developments – but perhaps not yet our day-to-day shopping experience.  There is a great deal of ground for a lot of retailers to catch up – and they need to do it quick.

This is such a dynamic sector that TomorrowToday’s has asked its Strategic Insights team to delve deeper into everything retail so that we can get a fantastic understanding of what the future looks like.. If you have any great examples to share with us, please do!

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The CEO’s guide to strategy

What is “strategy”? This is a question that numerous executives, academics and scholars have asked. Countless books, papers and dissertations have been written about the subject. S+B Magazine recently wrote a short article on the subject titled Strategy: An Executive’s Definition and they have devised one of the simplest and yet best summaries of what strategy is. They define it using an easy to remember framework based on three parameters.

Strategy is the decisions that executives make about 1) Where to play 2) How to play 3) How most effectively to play (How to maximise value)

This is a simple and powerful way to think about strategy. Strategy is different from vision, mission, goals, plans and tactics although these need to be interlinked for a cohesive organisation to function.

As a leader are you asking yourself the questions:

1. Where are we playing?
2. How should we play?
3. What is the most effective way to play?

These are three questions an executive team should be asking and sense checking each month because in a world that is constantly changing where, how and what you play should change as markets, competitors and customers around you change as well. As Booz & Co the arthurs of S+B Magazine put it:

In the end, to define the fundamentals of your business strategy, you need only to answer three questions:

1. Who is the target customer?

2. What is the value proposition to that customer?

3. What are the essential capabilities needed to deliver that value proposition?

Without clear and coherent answers to these three questions, you may have an exciting vision, a compelling mission, clear goals, and an ambitious strategic plan with many actions under way, but you won’t have a strategy

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How to attract Gen Y into engineering – a case study from MOL

I am sitting in a presentation by Gabor Varjasi, Head of Competency Development and Strategic HR at MOL Group. This is at Stamford Global‘s Talent for Tomorrow conference in Vienna.

MOL have a similar problem to many companies around the world who need to attract young people (often called Generation Y) to join their companies, especially those that need to recruit young people with skills and qualifications in natural sciences. MOL is in the oil industry, and needs significant numbers of engineers and scientists.

They identified that there were not enough science students qualifying from universities in Hungary, their primary country, but also across the whole region they work in. This cannot be fixed with better recruitment strategies or poaching from competitors. So MOL decided to do something about the source, and get involved in high schools and universities. They wanted to promote sciences as a viable and exciting choice for young people.

They did this by engaging with teachers, parents and students. They created resources for schools to use in the teaching of science (called Junior Freshhh), and made this freely available to use.

They then created an online competition in the form of a simulation game aimed at university students. See Freshhh EDU (http://www.freshhh.net). 35 universities entered in 2007, growing to over 200 in 2011 (the 2012 version is ongoing), with over 600 different 3 member teams participating in 2011. The competition is based on real oil and gas industry issues, and can be used as teaching tools by the universities. It is fully integrated with social media, and uses high quality videos throughout. Those videos and the game scenarios become available to educators after each year’s competition is over.

Is this just fun?

No! Over the lifetime of this graduate game, MOL has employed more than 900 of the participants in the game from 2007-2011, and these students have a 90% retention rate in the business (it’s worth reading that sentence again! MOL have won awards for recruitment and retention because of this!). Some of the people (close to 5%) who were employed in 2008 are already in managerial positions.

This is gaining momentum, with 200% growth per year for 2010 and 2011, and this expected to increase further. They have saved over € 500,000 in recruiting costs. And the cost of game has been € 65,000 so far. An unbelievable ROI.

The big lesson though is that it took four years to see any value from the investment. And it will take the rest of this decade to discover whether the long term objective of getting young people into engineering will bear fruit. At this stage, all the signs are good. MOL’s Facebook page has huge activity, and parents, teachers and young people are all actively engaged.

This is the type of long term thinking more companies need to engage in.

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BRICS: The Building Blocks for the Future – and five things smart leaders understand!

It was Jim O’Neill, Chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, who some 10 years ago, coined the acronym, ‘BRIC’ – a grouping of emerging economies namely, Brazil, Russia, India, and China. Then, in a more recent move in 2012, South Africa was officially added to the club and so ‘BRIC’ became ‘BRICS’.

A recent trip to India now means that I can cross off each of these nations as destinations. In fact I have been fortunate enough to visit both Russia and China on several occasions. While I was in India the annual BRICS summit was taking place very close to where I was staying and was the subject of a great deal of media attention. It helped to act as a catalyst to focus my thoughts on both BRICS and that of my own journey.

There is no doubt that these (and other emerging economic powerhouses) are forever changing the global landscape as a new world order emerges. There is some debate as to whether or not South Africa deserves to be included in this grouping as on the face of it there other nations who could better justify inclusion.  South Korea, Mexico, Indonesia and Turkey could all make strong cases for inclusion but try putting together an acronym for all eight – now there’s a challenge!

South Africa is somewhat dwarfed by the other four club members.  They have also each considerably out-performed South Africa when it comes to the rate of economic growth: For instance, China’s dollar value of GDP is creating the economic equivalent of a new South Africa every four months! O’Neill argues that South Africa justifies inclusion when considered as, ‘Africa’s representative’.  Debatable perhaps but it is a point taken.

The Goldman Sachs index referred to a the ‘Growth Environment Score’ – is a straight-forward look at the national variables necessary for sustained growth and productivity. The index was recently given a face-lift to incorporate a further five variables in addition to the thirteen that made-up the original index. The eighteen variables can be split into six different categories: macroeconomic stability (government deficit, external debt and inflation), macroeconomic conditions (investment rate, degree of openness to trade), political conditions (corruption, rule of law and political stability), technology (mobile phones, personal computers, internets users and secure internet servers), microeconomic environment (cost of starting a business, urban population, patent applications and research and development expenditure) and finally, human life (life expectancy and schooling). In the 2011 index statistics South Africa scores 5.08 out of 10 with South Korea scoring an impressive 7.7 – which places this nation fourth out of a total of 183 countries that Goldman Sachs rate. What is interesting is that South Africa scores higher than both India and Russia in the 2011 figures.

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Innovation and Technology in Banking

TomorrowToday’s Strategic Insights team is working on a new study of how banks are currently using “ebanking”, digital banking and social media. We’ve already found some great examples of how the world of banking and money is innovating – from mobile money in developing countries and Square’s cashless solution in the US, to a great app from FNB in South Africa.

We’re looking for lots more examples – good and bad – and would love to hear from you!

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Switching off the sun: Preparing for the next generation in the workplace

Hannah (the daughter of a colleague) was strapped in her car seat as her parents headed off for a weekend away. Hannah is a bright, engaging two-year-old and no doubt had thought plenty of thoughts from this particular vantage point, one that I might add she was well accustomed too – as are most two-year-olds.

On this particular occasion, bright early morning sunshine streamed in through her window. After a short while, Hannah’s voice was heard: ‘Mommy.’

‘Yes, Hannah.’

‘Please can I have the remote control?’

Allow for a quizzical parental pause here, familiar ground for any parent of a two-year-old.

‘Huh? A remote control? What do you want with the remote control, Sausage?’ (Parental term of endearment . . . an entire subject of its own!)

‘I need to switch off the sun, it’s getting in my eyes.’

Hannah’s request reveals a world view that believes that there is a remote control for everything under and including the sun. After all, in Hannah’s world there are remote controls for the gates, the garage doors, the car and house alarms, the TV,  VCR, DVD/MP3, the satellite dish decoders as well as remote phones, cellphones, mouses (should that be mice?), keyboards, toys and just about anything you can imagine.

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The Social Revolution: Embrace it… or face extinction

This blog is the first from a new contributor, Keith Holdt, Head of Global Sales at Swiss Post Solutions. Keith is a world leading expert on the digital revolution, and how digital data will transform the world of work. We’re thrilled to have him contributing on this blog.

Right now we’re in the middle of the Social Revolution, or as I like to call it ‘The Conversation Revolution’. The revolution taking place in the way we conduct our conversations, and interact with one another, online, through social media, is changing the world we live in, and the business world we work in. I want to highlight some of the things you need to thinking about related to this, and that will be critical to you if your business is to remain relevant in time to come!

Increasingly, and particularly over the last decade, one of the biggest global trends impacting our lives today has been the opening up of an increasing number of other ‘conversation’ social channels, such a Blogging, Instant Messaging, Texting, and one in particular that is now such a part of our daily lives most of us would probably struggle to live without it: social Media such as Twitter, Facebook, etc.

At the same time, two other massively accelerating trends and developments have literally caused the number of conversations we have each day to explode: the rise of ‘Smart Devices’, devices that are no longer simply just phones, but have access to the internet, our email, and the like. And, secondly, the spread of wireless connectivity, thereby enabling most if not all of us to be able to access the internet, and have multiple conversations, with many different people, around the world, all at the same time, from these self-same ‘smart-devices’. Just think:

• 5.6Bn mobile phones in use (world population 7Bn);
• Over 1m mobile phones are sold each day, 85% to emerging markets such as Africa, that’s 365m phones a year, mostly smart enabled!
• There are 750m people on Facebook, with over 250m of them accessing via their smart phones/devices. That’s nearly a 1/7th of the world’s population.
• 30Bn pieces of content shared on Facebook every month.
• In January 2009 there were 2m tweets per day on Twitter, in June 2011 200m tweets per day, 73bn per year! Each of these is effectively a conversation!

This rise in the number of conversations going on each day has major implications for us at both a personal level and even more importantly at a business level. It has dramatically changed the way information flows and how knowledge is shared and processed, and I personally believe that businesses that do not take these changes absolutely seriously, will not be around in years to come as they find themselves further and further removed from both their customers and the employees that work for them.

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Next steps for the future of women’s equality

I was watching some women’s sport last weekend, and then followed the controversy around women in the heart of golf at the Masters this weekend. There were a number of stories that intertwined to remind me again of how unequal our world remains. And I was encouraged once more to continue doing something about it. I need to declare an interest in this topic right at the start: I am the father of three daughters. Helping my daughters take their rightful place in the world, and being involved in changing the world so that it is more ready for them and their girl friends is very personal for me. It’s not a theoretical exercise or a nice thought experiment – it’s about the future for my family. It’s important.

My point is simple, but vital: women have made many strides in equality in the workplace over the last few decades, with as many women in work now as men in many countries. But there are three vital issues that need to take priority now: (1) the number of women in senior leadership positions (and their influence on corporate culture), (2) the remuneration women receive for the same work as their male counterparts, and (3) society’s attitude towards and valuing of women’s contributions.

The world of sport helps to make my point. As I write this, I am watching the final round of a remarkable Masters golf tournament at Augusta, one of the most prestigious golf clubs in the world. But the biggest story of the week was taking place off of the hallowed green fairways. Augusta does not allow women members. They only allowed black members in 1990, a mere 7 years before Tiger Woods first donned their famous green jacket. But they still have no female members. This year, that is interesting. Traditionally, the CEO of their major sponsor, IBM has been given honorary membership. This year, the CEO is a woman, Ginni Rometty. And she won’t be offered a membership (here’s the best article on the news conference where they refused to even offer an explanation). One can only hope that IBM soon show Augusta and the Masters what they think of that.

A weekend or so ago, I was watching the finals of the World Women’s Rugby 7s competition in Hong Kong. It was a brilliant game, with all of the tactics, speed, fitness, physicality (one of the biggest hits of the weekend in the last minute if you get to see the replays), skills and endurance (and nerves, both good and bad) evidenced by the men’s game. And just last week, I was alerted to the most remarkable sporting personality. Can you name the sportsperson who has played in World Cups for their country in two different sports, and made the decisive play in the championship games of both competitions, and is the youngest person to have represented their country (only aged 16) in two sports? No, I didn’t think so. I am a total cricket nut, but only discovered Ellyse Perry yesterday. How is that possible? She is remarkable!

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The Magic Hill: Avoiding the optical illusions of leadership

They told me it was caused by the fairies who lived under the road. I don’t know about you, but I for one don’t buy that explanation at all. I mean, everybody knows that fairies don’t live under roads. Caused by the fairies, indeed!

The locals call it The Magic Hill and it is tucked away in the picture-postcard countryside of Ireland, a short drive from the town of Dundalk. And believe me, it is magic of an extraordinary kind. First of all, trying to find the magic hill without assistance from local navigators is practically impossible and has even led to some sceptics proclaiming that the location is a myth, likely conjured from having consumed too much Guinness.

But they are wrong. It does exist, I have been there myself and I have the picture to prove it.

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Africa’s Chance to Leapfrog the West

A few weeks ago, a Ghanaian entrepreneur wrote an excellent article in the Harvard Business Review blogs about Africa’s potential. You can read the full article here, or an extract below:

Africa’s Chance to Leapfrog the West

HBR Blog Network, February 10, 2012
by Bright B. Simons

You’ve heard about the African Renaissance, right? The Aid Bosses, once the unquestioned successors in Africa to the joint heirloom of Mother Teresa and Lord Clive of Chennai, are finding it harder and harder to get face time with the political grandees in our wheeling and dealing capitals. The Chinese are fawning all over our oil and copper, forcing once-aloof Westerners to write treatises about why China’s engagement with the continent isn’t all marshmallow candy. These concerns get polite nods here and there but, mostly, serious Africans ignore them and firmly redirect the conversation back to private equity, or franchise deals, or something along those lines. Bottom line: Are you game or are you out? And have you heard that we have more mobile phones than any other continent besides Asia?

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Hinduism Provides Business Model for Forward Thinking Leaders

What you don’t see online with HBR’s article The CEO’s Role in Business Model Reinvention is my favourite part of the article in the print version.  The online version provides a forward looking business model framework designed to “manage the present, selectively forget the past, and create the future”.  Authors Vijay Govindarjan and Chris Trimble are urging leaders to operate in these 3 distinct boxes simultaneously.

This might sound obvious but typically this is not practiced and even more rarely are they balanced in priority.  The most common pitfall I see is ignoring the need to “selectively forget the past”, it never ceases to amaze me how much of what falls into box 1 is sustained purely based on tradition, every company should have a VP of Why, validating the purpose and returns on present day products and services.

On to my favourite part of the article… luckily Infosys has posted the PDF print version which has “The Transformation Process in Hindu Mythology” on page 8.  The authors draw parallels to 3 hindu mythology gods and the symbolic relevance of their wives to this framework.  The analogy is incredibly relevant, too often leaders are focused on literal interpretation of all things business, forward thinking leaders reach beyond the world of business to find deeper wisdom.

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