Global collaborative networks strategic: Economist 15-year research report
Stumble It!Foresight 2020 is a new research report (downloadable free) written by the Economist Intelligence Unit and sponsored by Cisco Systems, assesses likely changes to the global economy, to eight major industries and to corporate structures over the next 15 years.
More than 1,650 senior executives, analysts and policymakers from across the globe took part in a survey and a series of in-depth interviews conducted especially for the report.
The report identifies 3 critical drivers: Globalisation, Demographics and Atomisation.
By Atomisation they identify the strategic importance of global networks and collaboration
"Network technologies and globalisation will enable firms to better use the world as their supply base for talent and materials. Processes, firms, customers and supply chains will fragment as companies expand overseas. As a result, effective collaboration will become more important. The boundaries between different functions, organisations and even industries will blur".
Peter Fryer of Trojanmice identifies some clips from the report to wet your appetite:
- "Knowledge workers will be companies’ most valuable source of competitive advantage in 2020, whether in outward-facing functions such as sales or inward-facing ones such as knowledge management."
- "The focus of management attention will be on the areas of the business, from innovation to customer service, where personal chemistry or creative insight matter more than rules and processes".
- “To be successful, companies have to invest in workers and technologies that can drive collaboration and interactions inside and outside the company across the entire value chain of customers, partners and suppliers.”
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Bioteams Books Reviews
Animal Instincts in the office
Just because we might have selfish genes it does not mean we have to behave selfishly; nature knows when to be nice as well as nasty and nepotism occurs in the biological world too with equal destructiveness as our world. This is according to Richard Conniff author of The Ape in the Corner Office and reviewed in the UK Guardian Newspaper (27 May).
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