Liisa Välikangas on Quantum Leadership: Managing Business Uncertainty Amidst Big Data
Welcome to the Digital Transformation Roundtable with Professor Liisa Välikangas!
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A recently completed study with interviews of senior leaders including CEOs and Chairmen of the Board in leading Finnish global companies focused on leadership in the changing business environment. The resulting concept titled Quantum Leadership is positioned in-between measured knowledge – plenty of data and analytics being available - and deep uncertainty. There are less and less risks that can be identified and probabilistically evaluated, and more and more events and turns that are surprising, serendipitous or much more disruptive in their impact than initially thought. Uncertainty is thus pervasive despite all the information being available.
The presentation introduces Quantum Leadership in its managerial pillars and opens up the discussion as to where next. We talk about:
- Strategic Landscaping, or the discipline of mapping strategic events forward and following their unfolding and deviation; thinking about contingencies
- Leadership as an Empirical Discipline, or the practice, already known in scientific management, of measuring and analyzing, and furthermore acting on the flow of events and opportunities, now with the help of Big Data and AI tools
- Customer in the Core, or orchestrating the company’s resources and capabilities around specific customer opportunities and personalized service delivery fluidly and in real-time, rather than managing in terms of an organizational structure, process or functionality.
For further information in Finnish: See Talouselämä, November 16, 2017: "Johtajan on syytä miettiä todennäköisyyksiä ja seurata yllättäviä tapahtumia" by Olli-Pekka Lumijärvi and Liisa Välikangas.
About Liisa Välikangas
Liisa Välikangas teaches innovation management at Aalto University and Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki, Finland. Previously she has been affiliated with Stanford University, London Business School and Keio University in Japan. She has also worked for Strategos, a strategic management consulting firm, and SRI International in California's Silicon Valley. She is known for her publications in strategic renewal and resilience (including The Resilient Organization, McGraw-Hill, 2010 and The Quest for Resilience, Harvard Business Review, 2003) and innovation management (Strategic Innovation, Pearson/Financial Times Press, 2015).
She is Senior Editor of Management and Organization Review, a journal focused on China and emerging markets, published by Cambridge University Press. Her current research projects focus on the business and societal implications of digital technologies including blockchain and how to tackle very large problems, i.e., world challenges. Prof. Välikangas has consulted and worked with many small and large companies around the world and served in the board of the Finnish National Innovation Agency, Tekes.
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About Digital Transformation Roudtable
Digital Transformation Roundtable is a series of seminars organised by the Aalto Digi Platform and the Aalto Industrial Internet Campus initiatives. The seminars aim to gather people who are interested in the role of digital transformation in the broad scope of industry, retail, communications, finance, and media. The seminars are held every 3-4 weeks at A-grid lobby, Little Mordor space.
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