Leadership Beyond Borders

"Show me your friends and I will show you your future" Mark Ambrose. We all have friends, peers and associates that are part of our everyday life. Very often they provide us with support, they motivate us and give us a sense of community, but if we do not surround ourselves with the right people, it can also affect us negatively and hold us back. Speaker Jim Rohn says "You are the average of the 5...

If we really want to break down the boundaries and have diversity in all industry sectors, we had better start reversing the trends, and one of the most difficult sectors to do this in is technology. The number of women that tech companies employ has declined from 37 percent in 1995 to 24 percent in 2016, and this trend should really be going the other way. There are many reasons why this industry...

Influencer marketing has gotten big in the past few years, but what is it about? It is the process of leveraging existing social media influencers—people who carry a strong reputation with a large number of people in a given niche—by having them endorse your brand, support your content, or co-create content with you and your brand. In 2017 research showed that 39% of marketers were increasing thei...

Powerful partnerships are the key to improving sales revenues, margins and profits. They are also the best way for you to exponentially increase your business success and grow you company. Partnerships help you increase market share, get more qualified leads, give differentiation & a competitive edge, gain and Close ratios and margins. But partnerships are also difficult to form. Finding the right...

The world is no longer obsessed with the Millennial Generation. Today we are more concerned about understanding Generation Z, and the two are different. Although the two generations share the same affinity for technology, a better understanding of Global culture and both generations have endless opportunities, they do not always share the same concerns and values. Understanding this is important f...

In 2015 CBS news reported-- according to a government study-- 1 in 10 adults in the workforce have either an alcohol or drug addiction problem. In 2016, Quest Diagnostics analysed 10 million workforce urine test results and noted an increase across the board for cocaine, marijuana, and methamphetamines meaning employees were using more drugs. The Drug Testing Index statistics in 2018 are constantl...

Small and Medium size businesses (SMBs) want to stay ahead of their competition, but do not always understand how to do it. Digital marketing, although very effective, is confusing and time consuming for the SMB. While most local businesses have some kind of presence on the web, they seldom understand that poor presence is almost like having no presence at all. And because SMBs do not have huge ma...

Today's organizations and leaders are focused on doing things effectively and producing good financial results. We have created a competitive world where only business counts and the individual is lost in the process. The result is very often dysfunctional behaviour by leaders, a lack of respect for business partners and customers and certainly no sense of deeper purpose at both the individual and...

Privacy is dead, right? Facebook knows everything about us, LinkedIn has our entire careers documented and consumer behaviour shows, that people just don't care about privacy, no matter how much they complain about it. Research shows that most U.S. adults — 60 percent —claim they care about privacy but will barely lift a finger in an effort to preserve it. Regulations such as the EU's General Data...

State of Women-owned business reports that in the USA alone, there are an estimated 11.6 million women-owned businesses that employ nearly 9 million people and generate more than $1.7 trillion in revenues. Even with the growth in women owned businesses, these businesses are having difficulty competing for corporate and government contracts and earning less than 1% of the money spent by these organ...

Communication is not just about the words we speak, it is also about the questions we ask, how we listen and the body language we use. We give off thousands of unconscious signals through our body language that help others learn instantly and instinctively something about ourselves, which normally ends in a judgement, very often what we call a first impression. A huge part of the judgments we make...

Unfortunately, fewer women are interested in participating in the digital sector, be it higher education, jobs or entrepreneurship. The recent study conducted by the European Union demonstrated that only 24 out of every 1000 female graduates study ICT related subjects - of which only six go on to work in the digital sector, therefore widening the gender gap in digital. The statistics in the USA an...

According to OECD Better Life report, the Danish have a better work-life balance than any other country surveyed. Danes also rank above average in other areas like environmental quality, civic engagement, education, skills, jobs, earnings and general well-being. And when it comes to Gender Diversity, they are in the Top 5 for Gender equality, with both men and women working, and very often in high...

We are moving from an industrial era to a pure digital era where AI will play a role and these changes are coming at us so fast and furiously that we do not have time to think about them. In such a short span of time, technology has created new social norms, new human behaviours, new business models and new ecosystems. We as individuals, have also developed digital profiles, defined by the technol...

The UK, Germany and the US are leading the percentages of online retail sales. For consumers around the globe the most well-known form of eCommerce is business-to-consumer, which includes online retail or online shopping. It is predicted that online commerce will reach to 4.48 trillion US dollars by 2021. In Asia e-retail sales accounted for about 13% of all retail in 2017. As more and more busine...

In the business and cultural world, individuals and organizations create, innovate, come up with new ideas and create new experiences for us every day but this Innovation and creativity would not happen if we did not have intellectual property laws. Intellectual property protection (IP) is important to fostering innovation and encouraging creativity. Without the protection of ideas, businesses and...

Today, even though we are seeing more and more women starting businesses, there continues to be a shortage of capital for women when they do. In 2017 only 2.2% of the Venture Capital money available went to women, even though women founded 17% of the start-ups. But even the number 17% is too low a number, we need more women starting businesses. But the struggle is not only in entrepreneurship. Whi...

The late Millennials, and Generation Z, are shaking up the workforce, they are changing purchasing channels, customer service expectations and they have developed what we call a sharing society, but at the same time, they have the reputation for making some of us from other generations crazy. There have been numerous books written about the new generations, seminars how to integrate them into the...

The hiring process has transformed dramatically over the years, in large part due to technological advancements. Beyond just the rise of the internet, tools like video interviewing and interview scheduling software have helped to streamline the hiring process, saving both time and money and making a hiring manager's life much easier. Before social media and the internet, a person looking for a pos...

You're sitting in a meeting or conference staring at the face of someone and you want one thing and they want something entirely different. It occurs to you that neither party is going to get what they want. Negotiating is not getting what you want or giving in to what the other party wants. It's not an 'either/or' situation. It's about having both parties walk away satisfied. You really need a pr...

Artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things is changing everything and it very often raises more questions than it does answers. Our guest in this episode is convinced that asking the right questions will help us adapt to this changing world. As leaders are aware of many of the opportunities technology changes are bringing us, but we also recognise the challenges. . In 2014, a Pew Research...

We live in a digital world and businesses are taking advantage of the increasing marketing channels available, such as mobile, but at the same time we are seeing stricter controls with ad blockers and data privacy regulations. Marketing departments are also facing new challenges. Maybe what is happening today is a result of the media misuse in the past, or are we finally making digital marketing a...

Men hold the overwhelming majority of positions in IT leadership, where women fill less than 17% of CIO. The lack of diversity remains an issue and the numbers are unlikely to improve a lot right away but there is hope. Initiatives like Europe's 2020 legislation, which has the goal of reaching a 40% gender diversity on the Boards of publicly held companies, has boosted the initiatives for more CIO...

In 2016, an estimated 163 million women were starting or running new businesses in 74 economies around the world. In addition, an estimated 111 million were running established businesses. These statistics are more impressive when we consider that women's entrepreneurship rates increased by 10% on average vs 5% for men. But one thing which has been shown is there is a distinct gap between men and...

In 1956, the term artificial intelligence was used at a conference at Dartmouth College, in New Hampshire, and in the years after that government, corporate and public interest had waned and risen until in 1997, IBM's Deep Blue became the first computer to beat a human at chess when it defeated world champion, Gary Kasparov. This brought to light the question of what else could we teach a computer...