How Purpose Drives Performance  
by Jean-Philippe Courtois

“The two most important days of your life are the day you’re born and the day you understand why” – Mark Twain

Purpose matters to all of us: it’s a key factor in our physical and mental wellbeing. As humans, finding our ‘why’ is important. When we understand our purpose and live it, we make a positive difference to ourselves and to those around us, and we change the world for the better. It’s exactly the same for organizations.[…]

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Re-building business resilience through creative innovation
by Omar Valdez-de-Leon & Erica Moreti

After the recent events like the pandemic and conflict in Europe, with supply chains still recovering and ebullient inflation, the economic outlook for businesses has become more challenging. We’ve seen the direct effects on businesses: (1) higher operational and capital costs; and (2) weaker demand as consumers rethink their spending patterns. A key question for business leaders: Is it possible to innovate to build resilience in an era where cheap money is no longer available? The answer: Yes. […]

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Feeling our way through the changing world of work
by Alex Adamopoulos

This March, Emergn hosted an executive breakfast in partnership with the Global Peter Drucker Forum, featuring London Business School’s eminent Lynda Gratton and her latest book, Redesigning Work: How to Transform Your Organization and Make Hybrid Work for Everyone. It was nearly three years to the day since the COVID-19 pandemic took its grip, offices emptied practically overnight, and much of the world went into various degrees of lockdown.[…]

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In Trust, We Thrive
by Terence Mauri

The relentless twin demands of executing for today while reimagining for tomorrow, mean that leaders are grappling with an accelerated phase of business disruption, with more than $41 trillion of enterprise value at risk. But is enough being done to strengthen trust and creative resilience, which I define as the curiosity to learn and the courage to unlearn? Learning helps us evolve and unlearning helps us as the world evolves. […]

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Resilience and lean, just-in-time management
by Erhard Friedberg

In their well-known book A Behavioral Theory of the Firm, R. Cyert and J. March (1963) [1] proposed the notion of “organizational slack”, a notion central to their understanding of the firm as a coalition of competing and yet interdependent actors. This refers to (hidden) reserves (or redundancies) of resources which enable actors to escape the constraints that management imposes on their behavior in order to align and, possibly, optimize their performance with the overall objectives of the firm. […]

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