Leadership is the most critical core competency of 21st century corporations. Human capital is the strategic resource for leading change and improving performance. The complexities of globalization, shortening product life cycles, and the proliferation of information, among many other driving forces, makes decision making more challenging. The capabilities and qualities of executive leadership are among the most important variables in creating future value and sustaining long-term performance. While capital assets can be purchased or acquired, the growth of intellectual capital requires well-thought-out strategies for ensuring that a corporation has the strength and depth of leadership needed to manage innovative, leading-edge corporations. Creativity and strategic thinking are the hallmarks of corporate leaders who have the capacity and willingness to exceed customer and stakeholder expectations and shareholder and employee objectives.
Given the dramatic increase in the complexities of managing modern enterprises, large and small organizations are scrambling to discover, develop, and deploy the leadership talent needed for improving, expanding, and sustaining corporate performance. In a world full of uncertainties and risks, astute, knowledgeable, and competent leaders are the essential ingredients for achieving sustainable success.
This Leadership Seminar focuses on real-world, outcome-driven strategies, and innovative methods for leading change. It discusses theories, concepts, strategies, and practices for developing the leadership talent necessary to turn opportunities and challenges into extraordinary outcomes.
Continental Breakfast and Registration:
8 - 8:30 a.m.
Opening Remarks: 8:30 - 8:40 a.m.
Dr. Leonard J. Kelly
Leading corporations in the industrialized world are transitioning from ethnocentric organizational structures to highly interactive management systems framed in the global business context of the 21st century. Today, globalization; the rapidity of change; and social, economic, and environmental mandates make the global business environment less predictable and more challenging than it was just a decade ago. Customers, stakeholders, and society expect and demand superior products, services, and operations with reduced impacts and improved corporate social responsibility. Such expectations extend to the contributions and actions of supply networks, partners, allies, and others who are linked to the corporation. To meet the challenges, leading corporations are developing highly capable leaders in order to achieve positive results in the present, correct defects and burdens from the past, and invent powerful future positions.
First Presentation: 8:40 - 9:20 a.m.
Dr. David L. Rainey
Leading Change through Enterprise Thinking and Executive Leadership
This discussion focuses on sustainable business development and how enterprise thinking and executive leadership create innovative solutions to social, economic, environmental, and business challenges. The old notions of industry structure, market structure, and supply and demand are being transformed into richer, more elaborate constructs of enterprise thinking and management that include the direct and indirect relationships and transactions across the whole business environment. Sustainable business development and enterprise thinking encompass a holistic view of the business environment that includes all stakeholders, opportunities, threats, constraints, and difficulties facing corporations in today’s complex business environment. Enterprise thinking and executive leadership are the critical factors for achieving superior outcomes and exceptional performance. Leadership pertains to engaging people throughout the enterprise, permeating an awareness and acceptance of the goals associated with leading change. Effective leadership creates opportunities to improve the positive attributes of the enterprise, and to mitigate the negative aspects.
Second Presentation: 9:20 - 10 a.m.
Dr. Robert Albright
Managing Culture: An Essential Competency For Enterprise Leaders
This paper will further Professor Rainey’s discussion of the critical role played by leadership in the contemporary enterprise’s complex, “globalized,” and ever-changing business context. Specifically, the discussion will focus on corporate culture as one of leadership’s most effective tools in its drive to create dramatic organizational changes. An organization’s culture can and should be proactively molded and inspired by leadership in order to function as an enabler of corporate performance.
Thus an enterprise’s corporate culture is not a slow-to-change artifact stemming from the circumstances surrounding the firm’s early evolution; it is a dynamic process that involves constantly improving cultural characteristics which are essential to firms. Management must consistently lead and deal with radical change within their industry. Therefore, the ability to proactively manage a change-oriented culture is an essential component of leadership. An appropriate corporate culture can enable an organization to respond to and thrive on internal and external conflicts. It can also facilitate seemingly constant internal reorganizations as well as the development of the flexible external alliances and networks.
Simultaneously, culture can ensure the organization focuses on core values that allow continuity in the face of rapid change and uncertainty. Thus the corporate culture increasingly plays both a stabilizing and a disruptive role. It can provide a sense of stability by providing a recognized set of organizational anchors while it promotes rapid organizational evolution.
Coffee Break: 10 - 10:30 a.m.
Third Presentation: 10:30 - 11:10 a.m.
Randall G. Peteros, J.D.
Improving Investment Strategies and Mitigating Risks
This presentation extends the discussion of the essential role of leadership in managing and promoting a culture of change for the purpose of building and sustaining the wealth of the enterprise. Sustainable wealth creation requires leaders of any enterprise to make critical decisions involving the allocation of capital. Leaders who energize and inspire an innovative culture but lack capital allocation skills will likely destroy rather than create enterprise value.
The focus of this discussion will be on strategic investment decisions designed to create and enhance sustainable wealth for the owners of the enterprise over both the short- and long-term.
Creating or sustaining a corporate culture of wealth creation requires leaders who understand the long-term economics of the businesses they manage and the short-term external pressures from shareholders to produce consistent, quality results. Therefore, the ability of the leaders of the 21st century enterprise to deploy capital effectively will be essential in order to retain, attract, and reward the true owners and risk-takers of the enterprise: the shareholders.
Panel Discussion: 11:10 - 11:50 a.m.
Dr. Leonard J. Kelly
Round Table: Implications for Leadership Development and Sustainable Success
This final session convenes an open discussion about leadership development, enterprise thinking, strategy, and implementation.
Advance registration is required.
For more information, contact:
Donna M. Sirois
Rensselaer at Hartford
275 Windsor Street
Hartford, CT 06120
(800) 433-4723, ext. 7846
E-mail: siroisd@ewp.rpi.edu
To register online, click HERE.
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A Free Seminar Presented by Rensselaer’s Lally School of Management and Technology