The CLF Roundtable on Creative Leadership in Times of Uncertainty

Facilitated by;
Ralph Kerle, Executive Chairman, the Creative Leadership Forum.

We are finding more than ever senior executives are uncertain of what the future holds and are seeking information, dialogue and conversation amongst their peers and stakeholders, customers and shareholders alike. Our Chairman has recently been involved in designing and running a series of highly successful Roundtables for Australia's leading executive education institution and one of Australia's leading IT companies and their clients with the purpose of surfacing an understanding of what is occurring now in their industry sector, what the emergent future might look like and how they might approach that emergent future creatively. The Roundtables consist of no more than 12 people, needs to be in a private dining room and run from 12noon to 2.00pm with the option of an extension when the conversations become interesting as they have - one lasting well into the afternnon. Guests must be senior decision makers only.

If you would like to know more about how these events operate, please contact Grant Crossley on gc@thecreativeleadershipforum.com

Right Brain Workout - Telephone Booth - Creativity Test

This is a creativity test. We're going back to the days when the phone booth was about the only alternative to the desk phone. You're the president of a company that makes phone booths. Recently your closest competitor has begun to whittle away at your market share. Desperate, you ask all of your employees for ideas. Not just run-of-the-mill ideas, but innovative, creative ideas.

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Brazil to lead the BRIC economies in 2009

Let me start 2009 with a prediction - Brazil will lead the global emerging markets out of the current doldrums to be the top performing emerging market in 2009. Firstly, let's not forget that Brazilians have known terrible times. Military dictatorship and economic stagnation are recent memories for even the most prosperous, and there are still tens of millions of Brazilians who live on less than $1 a day. The horrible handling of money affairs put Brazil under the microscope of the International Monetary Fund who, in order to ensure repayment of loans issued by the World Bank, sent experts to Brazil, imposed austerity in public spending, tackled inflation by limiting wage increases, and confronted labour unions and non-governmental organisations.

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The Future of Social Enterprise

This paper considers the confluence of forces that is shaping the field of social enterprise, changing the way that funders, practitioners, scholars, and organizations measure performance. The authors trace a growing pool of potential funding sources to solve social problems, much of it stemming from an intergenerational transfer of wealth and new wealth from financial and high-tech entrepreneurs. They further examine how these organizations can best access the untapped resources by demonstrating mission performance, and then propose three potential scenarios, outlined below, for how this sector might evolve.

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Allocating Marketing Resources

Deciding how to allocate marketing resources is particularly difficult because decisions need to be made at many different levels—across countries, products, marketing mix elements, and different vehicles within elements of the mix (e.g., television versus the Internet for advertising). With the increasing availability of data and sophistication in methods, it is now possible to more judiciously allocate marketing resources. In this paper, HBS professors Gupta and Steenburgh discuss a two-stage process where a model of demand is estimated in stage-one and its estimates are used as inputs in an optimization model in stage-two.

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