Leadership Beyond Borders

COVID will be remembered as a time of tremendous upheaval and change. One that extends across industries and economies, as well as social and political structures and the impact, will be felt for at least a decade if not a generation or more. COVID has changed how we communicate, how we behave and also how we consume. If you have to point to one phenomenon that characterizes the COVID-consumer exp...

As the Coronavirus Escalates we are being asked to download tracking and tracking apps, fill out papers with personal information and supply our data to multiple organizations. At the same time, we are seeing a surge e-commerce. We are buying more online which ultimately leaves it easier for companies to target us online. In general, our personal data is in more places today than it was before the...

Over the last months we have sometimes witnessed the clashes of values and beliefs and many of them have revolved around our views concerning gender and roles. I heard an interview from a US voter, who clearly said that women do not belong in the White House, while at the same time political discussions concerning wage equality, the validity Roe vs Wade and many other gender issues are always in t...

Growing up, it was a Sunday tradition that my Dad would get up in the morning and go get a dozen Dunkin' Donuts . We could each pick one kind for ourselves, and the rest was a surprise mix. My brother always took the Jelly Stick ( with the illusion it was bigger ), my mother the chocolate glazed, and I always picked the mysterious Butternut. Back then, I thought Dunkin' Donuts was a neighborhood s...

Holiday parties, mistletoe, lighting the Menorah, 3 King Celebrations, children sitting on Santa's Lap or just meeting a group of friends in the pub for a pint are memories of holidays past as we adjust to 2020's new reality. Typically, December is a time of traditions, and part of its charm is knowing what's coming every year, but this year will be different. The torrent of shoppers in the run-up...

Prominent business disasters such as the collapse of Enron and Northern Rock, to such devastating events as the BP Texas City oil refinery explosion, are very often blamed on Company Boards and Governance. But many of these disasters happened in times that were not as turbulent as they are today. A recent report done by Deloitte on the challenges of Boards, states that "The way in which Boards do...

Companies today should have plans to grow their businesses while increasing sales and profits, but there is more than one way to do this. Some growth strategies include market penetration, market development, product development, diversification and even acquisitions. But all of these strategies require a full understanding of how a business is currently performing and then identifying the right s...

All business planning begins and ends with the sales forecast, and sales is a hard job. Not too many Years ago prospective buyers had limited access to buyer-related information and relied on salespeople to provide the information they needed. And then the world changed, buyers became more empowered. All of a sudden buyers became digitally savvy and had access to a wealth of information. A lot of...

If you walk into a room with ten people and two of them are entrepreneurs, how would you recognize the two on sight? You probably would not until you started a conversation with them. Once in a conversation, you may recognize certain traits or a certain mindset often associated with entrepreneurs, but this does not mean that those two entrepreneurs are alike. Not all entrepreneurs follow the same...

In December 2019 at the onset of COVID-19, we saw a wide array of responses form businesses and entrepreneurs. Many businesses moved their activities online while entrepreneurs sought out new opportunities in the crisis. But the one thing we did see was innovation. German Breweries started making hand sanitizers and tech companies developed tracking and tracing apps. Essentially innovation blossom...

There are many models and theories concerning organization culture and if you have attended university you may have been taught many of them. The issue is that most of the models are based on either economical or psychological foundations. In this episode we question what would happen if we looked at organizational culture form another angle? What about if you used cognitive science to look at org...

Everyone is talking about the new normal, and this new normal has changed our business practices, it also includes a flood of changes and new trends in tech. Software development has become more integral in every part of business and in every part of the world, meaning that new software development is having a great impact on our lives. While we cannot always predict what lies ahead for tech, but...

Business has certainly changed, today we are facing new challenge and new opportunities but even in the midst of this crisis business and negotiations must go on. We are operating in highly unusual and disrupted commercial environment today, therefore even the location of negotiations has changed, they may not be happening in the board room today but on virtual platforms. But no matter where discu...

Everyone knows the famous expression in English: When the going gets tough, the tough get going. But many people do not like challenges, they like predictability, and when we cannot inject predictability into our lives, we sometimes get frustrated and do not know how to cope. Today live in a time where there is very little predictability. In the last 3 months many people lost jobs, we have seen bo...

More now than ever we require a future perspective, which can take our discussions beyond current issues such as lockdown policies, social distancing, increasing and decreasing COVID-19 numbers, getting children back to school and everything else that occupies our minds daily. Individuals, leaders, and organizations must have a vision of what kind of world we will be facing - a month from now and...

Paul Van Der Merwe, author and engineer is known for the quote "Money makes the world go around; however, happiness greases the axle. Without this lubricant, life will seize." But most us only know the expression money makes the world go round which can be interpreted that that money is the most important or one of the essential things in life. We all have different attitudes toward money, and we...

Most people do not question rules because they are designed to protect the status quo and create a level playing field, but sometimes we need to bend them a little if in order to get a desired result. In the right context, this can be ok because rules are not static, they evolve and are based on the information we have at a certain time. Not to be confused with laws, which are in place to protect...

A business that is visible is also considered creditable. Visibility today means being present across all digital channels and using the right tools to make sure you stand out among the competition. With the decrease in foot traffic and increase in online traffic, if customers cannot find you, they will not know who you are, and they will give their business to someone else. As study by Riverbed f...

During the Corona crisis, tech has been a blessing in many ways. But the use of tracking and tracing apps in various countries have raised the question whether we are putting our privacy at stake. In this episode of Leadership Beyond Borders we speak with Juergen Weichert, CRO of Munich based ad tech company Usercentrics. We talk about the use of tracking and tracing apps in the wake of the corona...

As we start to come out of this crisis and things very slowly get back to normal, those companies that have shown strong leadership are the first ones to bet on. Some industries were impacted more than others, regardless of how strong the leadership is. Still, it is the companies that have shown innovation, flexible business models, excellent customer communication and strong leadership that will...

Luka Lucic, a Pratt Institute psychologist who studies the effects of war said "People, during times of prolonged, radical change, end up changing," The question we will pose in this episode, how have local businesses changed and what does the new normal look like. Until the Covid-19 is subdued either by a vaccine or by a global campaign of strategically coordinated lockdowns our lives will not lo...

As the world reaches COVID-19 exhaustion and we all realize that this crisis has already changed our daily lives, very often we do not recognize what else the crisis has changed including its impact on global opinions surrounding politics, the environment and technology. Our attitudes toward potential opportunities—and risks— of using Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to combat COVID-19 are va...

For the first time in history, we are working with six generations in one workforce but whether this multi-generational workforce is collaborative and productive, or challenging and stressful, is up to how we manage. Over the past months we have experienced a crisis making it more complicated to do business-as-usual. Remote teams and lockdown policies have changed how we communicate. Different peo...

Local Search is about 'near me' searches that were incredibly popular and based on intent, proximity, location optimization and relevance, the searcher was getting what they wanted in a very local sense. Given the recent restriction of offline movement, one could ask how this has affected Local Search? It would be natural to assume that it has dramatically fallen or even evaporated. Yet that's not...

Marketing practices are adapting to the corona crisis in both the B2B and B2C sectors. E-commerce is surging among SMBs, while business models are changing. Demands are shifting in online product orders. High-demand for new products and services in a world where everyone is shopping online creates new competition and makes channels such as affiliate marketing a logical choice. In this episode we t...