2006 Thought Leadership Residential Sessions


Advanced Strategic Analysis
Professor Mike Ryall

Strategic management is fundamentally about developing and deploying the firm's resources in such a way as to maximize profit. The mere creation of value is not sufficient for the acquisition of it. Rather, once created, value must also be appropriated. The ability to appropriate the value that one creates is, of course, often bedevilled by the presence of capable, highly motivated competitors.

The purpose of this session is to introduce managers to recent advances in the analysis of value appropriation under competition -- the issue at the heart of all strategic business decisions. These techniques provide a foundation for assessing a wide variety of strategic decisions, including market entry, new product development, organizational design, alliance formation, technology acquisition and merger evaluation. Participants will be exposed to both theoretical and applied tools that are useful in the design and implementation of corporate strategies.

Corporate Transformation - A new leadership agenda
Professor Patrick Besson (visiting from ESCP-EAP)

Merging two firms, developing a service offer solution within a product culture, introducing performance culture into a public administration, restructuring an industrial, logistical or commercial system, re-balancing global/local relationships within a matrix or carrying out an ambitious performance programme – these are the organisational transformation initiatives that lie at the heart of corporate strategic manoeuvring. What sort of tactical repertoire does a business executive require to be successful in this domain? Transformation initiatives’ surprisingly high failure rate makes this an exceedingly topical question. Participants will have the opportunity to examine these leadership issues within their own companies and will be encouraged to think about their impact on their own leadership agenda.

What is new in Negotiations - Ethics, Values and Mindfulness
Richard Searle

The topic for this session is both literal and ironic. Ironic because how could matters as important as values and ethics be considered new? Yet literal because recently there has been a professional rediscovery of the centrality of ethics, values and even mindfulness to negotiations.

Most business schools teach a brand of negotiations which is shaped by mutual gains theory and behavioural decision theory. For them and for the speaker, Ethics  often has not been an explicit part of the curriculum because the whole framework is considered “principled” and relationship friendly. After all, what could be more ethical than a “win-win” approach? Now this view is under challenge by those who argue that mutual gains theory and the exaggeration of the integrative potential in negotiation has provided a mask for not developing an explicit ethical code. Some of the sharpest advocates of the “bounded rationality” approach to decision making and negotiation now are admitting the need for a “sociology of action” ie understanding how to engage with people and groups, in order to deal with the pesky issue of value conflicts in organizational and ideological settings. And now the venerable Harvard Law School is sponsoring courses on mindfulness and negotiation, based on the premise that mastery is a product of “presence” not just skill.

Disruptive Innovation
Professor Mike Vitale
Most companies like to think of themselves as innovators, and indeed many companies are relatively skilled at producing new versions of their existing products to satisfy the needs of their existing customers. This session will explore, by way of a case study, disruptive innovation, that is, the introduction of a new product or service that eventually overturns the dominant product or service in the marketplace, even though initially the innovation is not as good as the existing product or service in the eyes of the most profitable customers.  The session will aim to develop a list of factors that promote disruptive innovation, as well as recommendations for both disrupter and disruptee organisations.

Disruptive innovation is not a matter of technology alone; disruptive impact also depends on the strategy by which an innovation is introduced.  Classic examples of disruptive innovation are the replacement of mainframe computers by minicomputers, and the subsequent replacement of minicomputers by PCs, and the replacement of phonograph records and audio cassettes by CDs.  A current example is the challenge to traditional telephone and mobile services posed by voice over IP (VOIP) services such as Skype. 

Corporate Culture
Professors Denice & Lawrence Welch

Denice and Lawrence Welch will explore and challenge many of the prevailing business views regarding corporate culture. They examine the concept from the perspectives of strategy, international management (including HRM), and organizational commitment and identification. The central focus is on the use of corporate culture as a soft control mechanism in the geographically and culturally (national) dispersed multinational enterprise. Participants will be asked to consider the questions: “Can corporate culture really be managed?” and “Is too much commitment to the corporate value system healthy?”

Performance and Development Conversations for High Potentials
Terri Mandler

Being a high potential / high performance executive means needing to access a continuous cycle of development.

Sometimes what is needed to facilitate the “right kind” of development is clear. At other times it is emergent, presenting significant challenge for managers in a complex non rational process. When “high potential” manages “high potential” those complexities increase.

Organisations hold in tension the needs of high potential and high performance executives and the talent they lead. For success, it is essential you navigate the organizational system with clarity and judgement.

This session will reframe performance and development conversations. It provides an evidence based approach to analysing and building capability, and can be used by managers of others, or by individuals who wish to engage their manager in purposeful development conversations.

Understanding Generational Differences and the building of Employer Brands
Jillian Barrie, Director – Sales Advantage Marketing Pty Ltd

In the "knowledge economy", companies must build competitive advantage based on the talents and innovativeness of their staff. Consumer brands are no longer enough to attract the best and the brightest from all three generations in the workforce – the Baby Boomers, the X and the Y Generations. Companies need to build strong employer brands and become employers of choice. 

Employer Brand and Generational Leadership specialist Jillian Barrie will share:

  • The definition of employer brands and its impact on staff attraction and retention
  • How the best employer brand companies are attracting and retaining highly skilled staff in a shrinking workforce.
  • The research on what the generational differences are and what is driving the behaviors and values of each generation.
  • What organisational cultures best support multi generational workforces
  • What HR policies need to be reviewed to reflect the emerging needs of the new workforce
  • What kinds of leadership and management do the different generations respond best to
  • How best to retain staff and what constitutes "employer attractiveness"