Abu Dhabi - MENA Herald: Professor Gary Hamel, widely recognised as one of the world’s most influential and iconoclastic business gurus, will be delivering the keynote at the inaugural World Strategy Summit, which takes place in Abu Dhabi’s St. Regis Saadiyat Island Resort on 16-19 November 2015, as Middle East governments aim to become more competitive on the global stage.
Addressing delegates at the event, which is being held under the patronage of H.H. Sheikh Saif Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Deputy Prime Minister of UAE and Minister of Interior and in strategic partnership with the Association for Strategic Planning and The World Development Forum as the organising partner, the cornerstone of the London Business School professor’s presentation and master class will be creating the ultimate competitive advantage and how GCC businesses and government can achieve development objectives.
“Today, organisations face new problems that lie outside the “performance envelope” of their tradition-encrusted, bureaucracy-infused management systems. Accelerating change, digital disruptions, rapid commoditisation, and globalisation are revealing the limits of our legacy management structures and processes,” said Hamel.
To stay relevant in this hyper-kinetic environment, organisations must build an “evolutionary advantage”, a capacity to change as fast as change itself. An organisation with an evolutionary advantage never takes refuge in denial, captures more than its fair share of new opportunities, proactively redefines customer ex- expectations, avoids unexpected earnings shocks, is relentlessly optimistic, changes before it has to, and ultimately invents its future. To build organisations that are adaptable-at-scale, we need to embed a new set of principles in our management systems,” added Hamel
The summit comes at a crucial time for the GCC region as the challenge of oil price fluctuation which has yet again seen the price of oil drop below USD$ 50 a barrel from USD$ 110 a barrel in 2014 as well as the impact of globalisation, hyper competition, digital disruption and geopolitical instability is having on GCC economic growth.
The UAE is currently placed as the 17th most competitive county in the world – the macroeconomic environment, infrastructure are all highlighted as pillars of growth in the UAE. The summit will focus on the competencies of leaders and their organisations and the role strategy plays in creating competitive advantage.
“In a short period of time, the UAE government has developed a nation that is outperforming many countries in the developed world not least because of the way the government has harnessed human capabilities. Innovation is at the crux of what the UAE is doing with infrastructure, the economy, and government sector development all exhibiting the hallmarks of forward thinking and strategic know-how,” commented Hamel.
Focusing on the competencies of leaders and organisations, Hamel will outline the roadmap of developing organisations fit for the future.
Ranked as one of the world’s most influential business thinkers by the Wall Street Journal and “the world’s leading expert on business strategy” by Fortune magazine, Hamel has been instrumental in changing the practice of management in companies as diverse as General Electric, Time Warner, Nestle, IBM and Microsoft.
Hamel has also held integral government advisory positions providing insight to the roles of innovation policy, entrepreneurship and industrial competitiveness to a range of government leaders and as such a number of senior members of government and captains of industry are expected to attend the two-day keynote sessions.
The event is set to provide a platform for leaders in business and government to attain insights and learnings from the world renowned experts in order to develop competencies to fit for the future.
The summit will also feature Tom Peters, Renee Mauborgne and Rafael Ramirez, some of the world’s most renowned strategy, leadership and innovation gurus.