Management Today's Leadership Lessons

On this week’s episode, MT’s editorial team discusses what chatbots think of your brand and how humans and AI agents might work together in the future. The traditional customer journey largely consisted of touchpoints that businesses could control, such as website content or paid advertising. The rise of social media and proliferation of influencers has upended this – a challenge for brands that i...

It’s 5pm on a Friday and you’re still in the office. In just two short hours, the CEO is scheduled to have dinner with a major supplier. This meeting is not merely a social occasion, but a strategic briefing. Preparations for events such as this are typically protracted processes, however you possess a unique advantage. By submitting a prompt to an AI program, you have effectively completed 90% of...

On this week’s episode of The Debrief, MT’s editorial team discusses how to get employees behind your AI transformation and the six steps you need to nail when selling a business.  When orchestrating a transformation it can be tempting to focus on the strategic, operational and financial dimensions of the change – the why, the what and the how – at the expense of the who. Objectives can be ne...

2025 has so far been a year of high profile M&A deals, But Trump’s trade war, armed conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, and, on a more local scale, the UK’s various trade agreements with the US, EU, and India, have all contributed to business leaders delaying investments, according to the latest EY-Parthenon CEO Outlook survey. Chief executives are always looking for ways to increase...

On this week’s episode, MT’s editorial team discusses the pros and cons of AI avatars and whether our consumption habits are hurting British business. Swiss-based bank UBS is using AI to create avatars of its experts that will appear in video content for clients, in a move it claims will be a win for productivity. The technology, while not a new phenomenon, raises significant questions about AI’s...

“Any idea you can think of for a new product, I guarantee you that somewhere in the world there’s six other people thinking of the same thing.” If those words from L.E.K. Consulting vice chair Stuart Jackson come as something of a reality check, consider also the challenges involved in achieving superior functionality to existing offerings, defining a market, and gaining those consumers’ trust. An...

On this week’s episode, MT’s editorial team discusses whether businesses are burying their heads in the sand when it comes to cybercrime and some common traps that risk undermining your international expansion efforts. It’s been a torrid time for Marks & Spencer as it continues to battle a cyberattack that according to one estimate is costing the retailer £43m a week. And it’s not the only one to...

In 2019, the Center for Aging Better predicted that by 2025 there will be one million more people aged 50 and over, and 300,000 fewer people aged 30 and under, in the workplace, with one in three of the working age population aged 50 and over. But as we creep towards to halfway point of 2025, was this prediction correct? Lyndsey Simpson, founder of 55/Redefined, certainly thinks so. In fact, she s...

On today’s episode, we discuss whether businesses are backtracking on their environmental commitments and Boston Consulting Group’s tips for cutting supply chain costs.  Despite media reports of corporate backtracking on sustainability, the news on the ground is more complex. We discuss a piece by Paul Simpson, who argues that many companies are quietly advancing their environmental goals – n...

“We as humans can remember three things,” says Sheila Rohra, CEO of Hitachi Vantara. It is this rule of three, then, that is central to her formula for “staying focused”, as well as her approach to devising a strategy the whole company can “rally around”. Rohra was appointed to her role in November 2023 after joining the data storage systems firm earlier in the year as chief strategy officer. As t...

On this week’s episode of The Debrief, MT’s editorial team discusses Unilever’s recent CEO change and how to keep driving your business forward even in unfavourable market conditions. The ousting of Hein Schumacher after little more than a year and a half in Unilever’s top job seemed to many to come as a bolt from the blue. “We are gobsmacked,” was how one analyst at RBC Capital summed up the reac...

Business wins and losses are part of life for a media agency, but sometimes the losses can start to outpace the wins and – for whatever reason – negative momentum takes hold. This was the difficult backdrop against which Kelly Parker and Katie Lee were appointed as Wavemaker UK CEO and COO respectively in 2022. In Parker’s words, the agency had had a “really bad year” in 2021, losing a “large numb...

On this week’s episode of The Debrief, MT’s editorial team dissects the Spring Statement and takes a look at some of the AI-driven innovations that are disrupting industries.  It’s the economy, stupid. James Carville’s immortal (and loosely quoted) words must echo in the ears of every Chancellor, charged with the most knotty and important brief of them all. Last week, we asked leaders how wel...

UK businesses are failing to adapt the skillsets of their teams in response to the rapid advancements in the technology sector, contributing to a nationwide digital skills gap. This is the view of Sarah Walker, UK & Ireland CEO of the digital communications conglomerate Cisco, who believes that it is crucial to engage individuals at the outset of their careers, as well as normalise reskilling thro...

In this week’s episode, the team discusses whether British businesses are becoming too reliant on the US, the link between more women on boards and higher returns, and the elephant in the room during conversations around AI adoption. A key concern that is often left out of conversations around AI is its impact on the environment, particularly its energy and water consumption. Claire Warren and Éil...

Timing, as the saying goes, is everything – and for Kimberly-Clark UK&I MD Dan Howell this principle is central to the art of business transformation. In Howell’s view, the companies that exceed the standards of good performance to make it into the ranks of the great, and stay there, are those that “have this knack of knowing when to transform”.  A so far two decade-long career working at CGP...

In this week’s episode, MT’s editorial team discusses some common traps in M&A deals and whether consultancies should be held accountable for the actions of their clients. This week a mega-deal was unveiled in the food delivery market when we heard that tech investor Prosus had agreed to acquire Just Eat Takeaway. While at €20.30 per share the offer represents a 22% premium to the company’s recent...

The entrepreneurial journey is famously a bumpy one and Planet Organic founder Renée Elliott’s story is testament to that. For her, seeing the vision for the business she founded interpreted (she prefers “eroded”) through other people’s priorities over the years has been “excruciating, infuriating…and exhausting”. But in 2023, Elliott returned to Planet, more than a decade after she and her husban...

In this week’s episode of The Debrief, MT’s editorial team discusses whether Elon Musk is jeopardising the Tesla brand and what’s in store for the M&A market in 2025. It’s official: the richest man on the planet is now the United States’ – and possibly the world’s – most powerful unelected bureaucrat. Twenty twenty-four was a key year in the ongoing metamorphosis of Elon Musk, as he threw his supp...

Negative feedback is a gift; it provides the “gems that make sure you improve what you're doing and take it to the next level”, says Zurich Insurance’s Conny Kalcher.  The chief customer officer of the more than 150-year-old company should know, having spent the last few years focusing on driving customer-centric business transformation at Zurich and, before that, at Lego, where she was instr...

On this week’s episode, MT’s editorial team discusses which Big Four firms are on course to miss UK female partner goals, what CIOs want from consultants in 2025, and how a once-powerful name in consulting is making a comeback. We kick off this bumper consultancy episode with discussion of a story originally covered by the FT, which found that of the Big Four accounting firms, both EY and PwC are...

Despite continuing to saturate the technology sector, AI investments remain a small percentage of overall IT spending, according to CGI's UK president Tara McGeehan, but gen AI adoption is helping businesses achieve faster and smoother transformations. On this week's episode, she speaks to MT how traditional AI, like machine learning, continues to grow alongside generative AI, how gen AI is accele...

In this week’s episode of The Debrief, MT’s editorial team discusses new research into large language models’ creative capabilities and what consultants believe CEOs should be focusing on this year. The new year is advancing at a frankly scary rate. But if like us you’re already drowning in a sea of immediate priorities, our first segment might provide the opportunity to step back and remind yours...

Indian cuisine aficionados will be no stranger to Cobra Beer, but many may not be familiar with how the brand came to be - or the man behind it. Lord Karan Bilimoria created the brand in response to a lack of appropriate beer to have with spicy Indian food, but his journey to success was paved with challenges. We discuss how he almost lost the business three times and his decision to step down as...

In this week’s episode, MT’s editorial team discusses when a brand should make a break with its past identity and what two leading companies can teach us about organic business growth. Jaguar has been having a time of it recently – or has it? Certainly, the company has had to face a barrage of negative headlines, even as publicity for the carmaker has swelled to seldom-seen levels. But, as time go...