Long Tail Leadership

The increased weighting of digital natives in a fattening long tail has added complexity to organizational leadership, particularly during the global COVID-19 pandemic. Trends affecting the individual come from social, economic, and technological sources and affect leadership behaviors, and this in turn affects society. In order to understand this interconnection, lower-level influences and how they affect the higher-level visible signs are discussed. These lead to influences on behavior. Influences are felt as intensity and embeddedness of engagement, decision-management, feedback ability, and motivators. This chapter begins with a discussion of causes for this phenomenon and concludes with ways to work with the long tail, either from within as a member or externally as a leader. The chapter ends with a brief comment on future research based on findings discussed in this chapter.

A Tool for Improving Decision Quality on Upstream Consortia

This article aims to provide a guideline to better decision quality on multi-company upstream projects. The scope is to provide a high-level overview of what should be included in a decision quality process, when companies with different levels of ownership and influence on the decision-making process naturally tend to have different approaches towards risks and decision management. It is well known in our industry that there is a predominance of multicompany participation in these projects and the paper will provide guidelines that will ultimately provide better decision quality and participant's alignment. Normally high-risk upstream projects have multi-company ownership. However, it has been noticed that companies tend to face decision management differently, which causes unnecessary delays on budget approvals and even operational timeline. Procedures to normalize the definition of an initial decision frame and creation of solutions based on a good set of alternatives are paramount to facilitate discussions and drive final recommendations. In summary, companies’ alignment on decision-making processes is key to quality, speed, and effectiveness of those decisions and critical to project success. Alignment between partners on pivotal decisions can significantly improve project delivery. The main results are practical guidelines for generating (a) decision framing, (b) strategies, (c) alternatives and potential consequences, and (d) logical analysis, partners’ alignment and commitment to action.

Exploring the key challenges facing company secretaries in a two-tier board context

Purpose This study aims to examine the core challenges facing company secretaries in a two-tier board context. This study focuses on the key factors contributing to these challenges and how company secretaries can effectively address them. Design/methodology/approach An analysis of the narratives provided by 291 Dutch company secretaries in response to a series of open-ended questionnaire questions led to insights into the key challenges company secretaries face in their day-to-day work. Findings Company secretaries perceive a myriad of factors contributing to pressures on their time, the need to work for multiple organizational bodies and the processing of information. They believe process interventions and social interventions are needed to alleviate these issues. Research limitations/implications The research highlights the need to deeply study boards from a holistic and systems point of view that recognizes the various actors, such as the company secretary, and their relationships in a boardroom context. Furthermore, the research shows how the two-tier board model may complicate these relational dynamics owing to the formal separation of decision management from decision control. Practical implications This study identifies various pragmatic ways to address the core challenges facing company secretaries so as to improve their contributions to decision-making at the apex of organizations. Originality/value This study sheds light on an important organizational actor (i.e. the company secretary) that hitherto has received scant attention in the governance literature.

Cognitive Science, Orientism Management (OM), and Intelligence Analysis

Intelligence analysts are a task force of experts in the field of politics, economics, technology, military, and terrorism analysis. They possess the knowledge, sufficient capacity for imagination, and creativity to relate data predict events. The intelligence approach (basically) tries to reduce the uncertainty of this analysis to forecast the future without being privy to alternatives in the minds of policy decision makers. This chapter intends to describe a new interpretative socio-cognitive paradigm, Orientism, to understand and manage the fluid nature of knowledge, but at the same time to seize and manage the unpredictability and risks of dynamics of risk decision management in relationships complex environment. The new elements are five key factors and criteria to direct and motivate people in the choosing process and following 10 different and key relationships between them.

An Event-Based Data Warehouse to Support Decisions in Multi-Channel, Multi-Service Contact Centers

Multi-channel contact centers are an increasingly important component of today's business world. They serve as a primary customer-facing channel for firms in many different industries, and employ millions of operators across the globe. During their operation, they generate vast amounts of data, ranging from automatically registered logs to handwritten notes and voice recordings. Unfortunately, in most firms, data of interest is unstructured, and stored in several databases, making their exploitation very hard. This article presents a decision support system for a multi-channel, multi-service contact center for front office business process outsourcing, along with its prospective extension to a decision management system. Its core is an enterprise-wide data warehouse, based on the general concept of an event. The proposed system supports a broad new set of advanced analysis tasks, ranging from operator performance assessment to call-flow simulation and data mining, providing operational and management staff the basis for taking effective operative and strategic decisions.