My objective in establishing Chalmers Advisory is:
- to enable organisations to respond optimally to the long-term opportunities and challenges posed by new technologies, in the shaping of their strategy organisation and leadership;
- and to do so by combining contemporary research into this field with over thirty years of delivery, consulting and leadership experience in technology-enabled business change to generate practical action that helps organisations address their most pressing business transformation issues.
I am committed to sharing my research for the good of all. This blog is the principal channel through which I shall do so. That research is currently looking at four questions:
- Strategy: The physical, digital and biological technologies of what has been dubbed the Fourth Industrial Revolution1 enable profound change in what work we can do, how and where it can be done, and who can do it. We are seeing the rapid emergence of new business models such as platform businesses, and constant change as increasing automation and connectivity drive commoditisation and disintermediation. Against that backdrop, how do organisations map their possible futures and chart their best strategic course, disrupting before they are disrupted?
- People: New technologies are changing the nature of work. How do we shape the future so that people both have the capability – skills, knowledge – and opportunity to flourish?
- Organisation: This new environment demands rapid change that cuts sharply across traditional organisational lines. How do we best shape and lead our organisations so that necessary and urgent change is not frustrated?
- Real world effect: Turning the answers to the questions above into an effect in the real world is no academic exercise. It requires engagement with a world of immense human complexity and increasingly equivalent technological2 complexity. How do leaders acquire the best understanding of the reality of their world and engender lasting change within it?
The research will distill the best thinking of others in these fields, together with my own thinking and the fruits of experience. I am keen to hear from any who are grappling with these topics, whether just to learn from their experience and share ideas, or because I can offer practical help.
- Klaus Schwab, The Fourth Industrial Revolution, World Economic Forum, 2016 ↩︎
- Samuel Arbesman, Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension, Penguin, 2017 ↩︎