How to Scale Up | Who's Winning With Remote Work | Priorities for CxOs

Plus: CEO Tips for 2022

Hello everyone,

It’s an exciting start to the new year. Our 50 Over 50 list for Asia, featuring women who are shattering age and gender norms in business, politics, science and more across the region.   Thanks to Maggie McGrath and Rana Wehbe Watson. Our 50 Over 50 ist for EMEA will launch next week. I’m especially excited by our upcoming Forbes 30/50 Summit in Abu Dhabi this March that will bring together the legends and icons on our Over 50 list with young entrepreneurs and leaders from our global Forbes 30 Under 30 list – along with top speakers of all ages. I hope you can join us.

If you’re in the mood for a more virtual experience, join us for a series of conversations on how to scale up your business, your energy, your team, your brand, and yourself. Our incredible roster of speakers includes Reid Hoffman, Gary Vaynerchuk, ghSMART partner Elena Lytkina Botelho, Tony Schwartz and Sukhinder Singh Cassidy. It’s another way that we are adding value for our subscribers and I look forward to bringing you more in the months to come. Here’s a link with more information on the series.

With a new year comes an instinct to forge new habits. This year, many leaders will have no choice. The long-running pandemic has fundamentally changed attitudes towards how and where people work. More than 90% of U.S. employees doing some remote work say they want the ability to remain virtual after the pandemic, according to Gallup. As temporary accommodations become permanent, new best practices must emerge. For inspiration, check out the top 100 companies for remote jobs, which Jena McGregor wrote about this week.

Indeed, supporting remote and hybrid workers is one of CIOs’ most important priorities in 2022, reports Martin Giles. As Shankar Arumugavelu, the global CIO of Verizon, told Giles: “We have a high-level idea of what that hybrid model should really look like but there’s a lot to perfect in that still.” What's clear is that new models mean new priorities in how we do our jobs. Jena has five predictions for how your job will change – should you choose to keep it.

Best, Diane

What's Next

As group chief executive of Accenture’s strategy & consulting business, Annette Rippert sees firsthand the challenges and trends that are shaping her clients’ businesses. So I reached out recently to chat about what’s next. What caught my eye was Accenture’s Business Futures report, with its six signals for success. Along with exploring the possibilities in this new era, it points to the perils: that AI could spawn strategies the humans don’t understand, that decentralized supply chains could destabilize economies, and virtualization could enable dangerous and undetectable levels of deception. Such shifts challenge the nature of business strategy itself.

With the decentralization of technology decisions, Rippert says, “innovation can happen faster in the parts of the business where it needs to take place.” But that’s contingent on finding new ways to connect, collaborate, create teams and build culture. It will depend on knowing how to turn data into a competitive advantage and how to effectively govern that process to protect competition and consumer rights. A product’s success may increasingly be determined by the digital experience built around that product.  One area that her clients are watching closely: the metaverse. 

Expect to hear a lot more about that topic in the coming months and we will do more to track what it means for your business. One sign that it's serious? We're already talking about which avatar to wear to those metaverse business meetings.

By The Numbers

1,243%

Planning to travel soon? The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is notes that 3,694 employees, or roughly 7% of its screeners, are out with active Covid-19 infections. Between flight cancellations, surging infections in countries like Canada, and other issues, getting back on the road is proving to be tough.

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