Why some investors care about culture, Zillow Group

The other day, two investors from a major shareholder of Zillow Group visited our head offices. Fresh off our Q1 earnings report, I was well-versed in our figures and prepared to answer their questions about our financial results, business metrics, product strategy, market size and most recent wins and opportunities.

They asked about none of that.

KDK Bulletin 27 July 2017 – 5 hot topics

See KDK Bulletin, 27 July 2017 for hiring strong digital leaders with Strategy&, the  Flight Centre on how to keep your frequent flyer status, Hall & Wilcox on landmark employment ruling and Deloitte on Australia’s fall in quality of life. This weeks matter of opinion is on 5 ways to resolve conflict more easily and quickly from Susan Berstein.

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5 ways to resolve conflict more easily and quickly

How do you feel about conflict? Too often, we see examples of conflicts that stall out or escalate, leaving the people involved feeling burned — like what we’re seeing in the United States, where political parties refuse to fully hear each other.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Why more companies are hiring strong digital leaders, Strategy&

Faced with organizational challenges, more and more companies are hiring an executive to manage their digital transformation. This year’s Strategy& report looks into the CDOs role given the company’s digital ambition and includes in-depth interviews with CDOs from leading industries.

Why robotic automation is stumbling, McKinsey & Company

Over the last several months, we have witnessed the increasing chatter around one of the hottest buzzwords in the digital space: robotics. Robots are a bit like macros in Excel. They execute tasks that are often repetitive.

KDK Bulletin 20 July 2017 – 5 hot topics

See KDK Bulletin 20 July 2017 for closing the employee-leadership gap, Hall & Wilcox on Crowdfunding Act, Govt updates enterprise agreement legislation, IoT platform wars from the Boston Consulting Group, why robotic automation is stumbling from McKinsey & Company. This week’s expert is Tony Nunes from Kelly & Partner.

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Digital transformation closing the employee-leadership gap, Capgemini

Is company culture a roadblock or a catalyst for digital transformation?

Does the big moment for an organisation arrive when they have embraced the fact that the prerequisite to digital transformation isn’t a technical issue, but a cultural change?

KDK Bulletin 13 July 2017 – 5 hot topics

See KDK Bulletin, 13 July 2017 for Deloitte on design thinking techniques, employment contract mistakes with Owen Hodge, Govt reforms to  make super fair, renewables now cheapest energy source, the pitfalls in measuring cybersecurity performance with McKinsey & Company. This week’s expert is Sarah Jones from Hicksons Lawyers.

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How to effectively measure cybersecurity performance, McKinsey & Company

The ability to measure performance has always been at the heart of effective management, underlying decisions about how to allocate resources, which practices to employ and whom to reward. Much more so than in the past, this is an age of granular and systematic performance management. Senior executives are exploiting massive amounts of data to understand which products generate profits, which salespeople sell effectively, and which operational teams execute with the highest degree of efficiency.

Expanding insights through design thinking techniques, Deloitte

Leading companies are integrating design thinking techniques into their innovation strategies to expand their insights and help executives envision a new range of possibilities.

Retirement village contracts are not real estate arrangements, but de facto insurance policies

Some years ago, I looked at various retirement villages with my mother. As a researcher who specialises in complex financial products, I didn’t expect that the contracts on offer would tax my ability to analyse. They did.

What is the CEO’s role in leading performance transformations?

In today’s business environment, companies cannot settle for incremental improvement; they must periodically undergo performance transformations to get, and stay, on top. But in the volumes of pages on how to go about implementing a transformation, surprisingly little addresses the role of one important person. What exactly should the CEO be doing, and how different is this role from that of the executive team or the initiative’s sponsors?