Leadership Perspective on Navigating Crisis

Network Science April 26, 2022

In this edition of the co-create.ai series, Nahla Khaddage Boudiab, COO at AM Bank engages in an intriguing conversation with Robert Webb, Advisory Board Member , Network Science and Founder at TBM partners about leadership perspective on navigating crisis. Nahla is currently based in Beirut, Lebanon, and prior to working with Al-Mawarid Bank, she was also partnered with consulting firm, EY.

With the onset of a health crisis like the Coronavirus, coupled with the economic and political crises in Lebanon, stress levels in the country were mounting. As a dollarized economy, when Lebanon started facing a lack of availability of cash, citizens experienced its adverse effects strongly. Nahla outlines how the leaders in the banking industry navigated such difficult times and accusations by users who felt that the banks were to blame for this problem.

• Ensure that you are not adding to the existing pressures of your employees
• Leadership must be focused on keeping the organization and all its members healthy and pumped with good energy that allows achievement of objectives
• From an organizational perspective, culture is the immune system. Leadership skills must be honed to keep this culture healthy and thriving

Transformational Leadership Manifesto for Emerging Leaders
AM Bank has been awarded the title of the “Strongest Bank in Overcoming Crises” by the International Union of Arab Bankers. Nahla highlights that the key success factor for AM Bank has been its recognition that, “leadership can no longer be managing robots. Leadership can no longer be the solution providers…because there is no way one individual will have enough ideas or energy to actually provide solutions for all the risk doors…”

• It is important to break biases from people’s minds regarding what characteristics make up a “good leader”
• Leadership is less about power and control and more about trust, care and love
• The most important leadership skill today is building resilience. Leaders must harness the powers of team members and direct them toward the same organizational goals
• Don’t separate the ‘person’ from the ‘professional’. Address the one set of needs that a individual holds irrespective of the environment

If organizations focus more on things like discipline and rules, leaders will be able to draw out only around 50% of an employee’s full potential. On the other hand, if the focus is on human needs, compassion, trust and love, it can be possible to get even 150% from your employees. Innovation can only happen in a firm that practices love and compassion.
Spirituality in the Organization
“If you enable feelings of spirituality in the organization, you are going to improve drastically,” says Nahla. Here, the spirituality of the individual refers to their sense of belongingness—to the organization, to the world, to the universe, as one integrated life. To achieve this, there needs to be certain critical processes in place:

• The structure of the organization – In order to have technical excellence and optimization of resources along with compassion and care, as a leader, you need to ensure that you have visibility of what the organization looks like. A layered structure makes this difficult. A flat structure is conducive to achieving this objective.
• The recruiting strategy of the organization – While technically excellent people are abundant, the ability of an employee to contribute to the culture of the organization is what makes a difference. The leadership skill of recruiting the right people is extremely crucial, especially if these people have the ability to influence others. If mistakes are committed, the organization must attempt to fix them.
• The Evaluation – Leaders have to understand that systems and processes can often trigger certain human behaviour inside the organization. Before evaluating managers, leaders should assess whether any processes are leading to negative behaviours. Evaluations should be focused on triggering positive behaviours and encourage training, nurturing and collaboration in the organization.

In a love-compassion culture, transformational leadership involves having conversations with employees that are unhappy or feel dissatisfied. It is important to drive the message of teamwork and unity for such a culture to survive. If any negative behaviour is repeated, a more formal conversation should be undertaken to make the employee understand the repercussions of such continued action.

Advice for Young Leaders

• Any successful leader is one who has put their ego aside. Excessive pride can often become a primary cause of failure in medium or large organizations.
• Remove the mindset of “I don’t know how to do this” or “This is how we’ve been doing things” by being yourself. Leaders need to stop focusing on how to control others and instead become unafraid of doing new things.

Supply Chain Disruption in a Post-Pandemic World

Network Science
February 17, 2022
Written by Nicolas Weatherill

Disruption is inevitable.

Indeed, the last few years have been a challenging and highly disruptive time in the logistics industry. The COVID-19 pandemic quickly highlighted pre-existing vulnerabilities within international supply chains, with various national lockdowns and restrictions leading to a global shortage of raw materials and goods that significantly reduced manufacturing output, in turn putting increased pressure on supply chains as firms began to seek alternative suppliers (and subsequently) logistical solutions.

Companies operating in the life-sciences sector saw business boom (the largely essential status of their goods creating a market in which supply was largely able to keep up with demand due to an overall shift in national priority toward the delivery of those essential products), however business slowed in most other sectors – particularly in areas such as construction and retail, as workplaces shut down and people retreated into their homes.

The Perfect Storm

In the UK in particular, the stresses on supply chains brought by the pandemic were only further exacerbated by Brexit (an ongoing process predating the pandemic), particularly at a human/individual level, with companies already struggling to operate with reduced staffing as a result of the need for many to self-isolate. Prior even to the pandemic, the UK was estimated to be facing a shortfall of around 76,000 drivers (source: Logistics UK), however this specific workforce issue was largely negated due to access to pools of workers from the EU – which incidentally saw an increase in driving staff of 450% between 2010-2017.

Access to this pool of EU drivers subsequently became a vital lifeline in the UK, subsequently damaged irreparably by Brexit as many of these drivers chose not to pursue settlement in the UK in favour of higher wages in mainland Europe. One of the defining moments of this crisis came during the much-publicised fuel shortage in 2021, with the British Army being drafted in to assist with the distribution of petrol supplies from port to pump.

As well as the workforce shortages, Brexit also led to broad increase in workload across the UK logistics space as new customs procedures and requirements were suddenly enforced. The terms of our exit from the EU were at best vague as negotiations with Brussels wore on, and its last-minute ratification and publication resulted in a scramble for logistics companies to make sense of new export rules and regulations and put in place solutions to ensure continued cross-border operation.

This represented a huge challenge to the logistics sector, as companies of all sizes struggled to comply with complex import/export paperwork and regulation existing where there had previously been little-none – with many companies having to invest in teams of customs agents, and quickly creating often overwhelmingly manual processes in order to cope with the change.

The perfect storm created by both Brexit & the Covid-19 pandemic resulted in the Logistics Industry moving towards the forefront of public attention – with companies such as Amazon cutting their commitment to next-day deliveries, supermarkets displaying empty shelves, and demand far outstripping supply across almost all sectors.

While we should all be proud of how the Logistics Industry quickly adapted to help the national effort against Covid 19, it is however clear that the industry at large was unprepared for the significant problems faced in the last few years, and the consequences of an overall failure to negate the disruption have never been so apparent.

Disruption vs Disruption

More than anything else, the last few years have proven that technology and innovation are fundamental toward creating supply chains that are resilient and supple, rather than fragile and brittle.

There is far too much reliance on antiquated processes, often involving an unnecessary amount of manual/human input. Data streams are too often segregated from one another, with siloed systems working in isolation from one another, rather than in tandem. Paperwork existing only in physical form, despite our existence in an increasingly digitised world.

The combined disruption to business caused by the perfect storm of Brexit and the Covid 19 has however resulted in a surge in technology investment, with tech investment growing by 230% in the UK in 2021, with the UK also accounting for more than a third of all tech investment in Europe: which at least demonstrates that most businesses have realised that they would rather be proactive rather than reactive in the face of future challenges, whatever they may be.

Tech start-ups, leveraging the power of Deep Technology, will play a critical role in the innovation renaissance currently underway in the UK, and particularly in Supply Chain.

Advanced AI can be harnessed to provide intelligent and powerful data analytics, converting the quantifiable into qualitative, and vice versa. Machine learning can be used to steer systems, resulting in increasingly effective and smart IT infrastructure. Robotics implemented in warehousing and transportation, reducing the need to rely on human operators and in turn allowing you to better utilise your staff.

Deep Tech represents a new frontier in the innovation world, and the possible applications of these technologies stretch as far as the imagination. At its core, Deep Tech is disruptive – built to deliver meaningful and high impact change, rather than shallow innovation that can only produce incremental improvement without ever addressing the fundamental flaws in a traditional business process.

We need only look to the example of Biontech – pioneers of the ground-breaking MRNA vaccine – to see the value we can all gain from disruptive deep technology: it’s very likely to have saved either your own life or the lives of those around you.

With the benefit of hindsight, investment in technology and innovation has never been more critical to the future success of supply chains, and their ability to adapt to an ever-changing world. Logistics firms now need to choose between securing their place in the supple supply chains of the future or becoming ever helpless in the crisis of tomorrow.

Choose the right kind of disruption. Choose Deep Tech disruption.

With the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the entire cybersecurity industry has undergone massive challenges and changes. In a business space that used to be dominated by minor protections like firewalls and network security systems, the game has now changed. Companies have come to identify threats to data and the need for data protection from both external and internal parties of the organization.

In this installment of the Co-create.AI series, our guest @Jitender Arora, Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) for Deloitte UK, engages in an insightful discussion with @Robert Webb, Advisory Board Member @Network Science and Founder @TBM partners on the rising trends in the cybersecurity space. Prior to joining Deloitte, Jitender also worked with renowned names like Coventry Bank, GE Capital, and Deutsche Bank.

Cybersecurity during COVID-19

Regardless of the industry your organization belongs to, a threat to data is a constant. Every company in this age and time is a technology company, even if their primary focus might be elsewhere. “[Organizations] are always processing data one or the other way,” says Jitender, emphasizing the growing need to protect this information. GDPR regulations have made it imperative to secure data and increase transparency in how data security is handled on platforms.

Looking at security problems in a holistic manner has become important. Companies cannot simply spend money on cybersecurity solutions without a grasp on how to properly use them. The user interface should be simple yet effective, and personnel must be trained to bring out the maximum value of such systems.

When it comes to the changes brought on by COVID-19 and therefore, Work from Home (WFH) practices, Jitender highlights the following trends:

• The changing landscape as organizations adapted to a sudden shift in practices to the online mode has been a game-changer.
• Employees might be unwittingly connected to other IoT devices that could bring in threats to organization data since the network is no longer as secure as it was in an office setting. The concept of boundaries has diminished.
• The COVID-19 situation has created a lot of anxiety and stress due to isolation on employees. Social engineering and manipulation by hackers have increased the cases of phishing, smashing, and other cyber crimes as attackers play on the emotions of their targets.

Cybersecurity Advice for Stakeholders

There should be a fine balance between preventative capabilities (defence mechanisms) and good detective capabilities in place. Organizations need to be able to determine why certain machines or systems might be malfunctioning or performing ineffectively. Equally important is for them to be able to combat the issues identified in time.

“People are the best line of defence,” says Jitender, explaining how proper training and education can make employees aware, prevent external and internal threats both, decrease the number of phishing or smishing cases and set up a proper procedure for resolution.

When assessing which technological tools to use for fighting cyber threats, it often pays to take a step back and understand the use cases of each of these tools. Once the problem has been identified and studied, relevant technology can be applied. It is also beneficial to retire outdated methods and technologies when they no longer deliver results.

A common mistake that company executives make when it comes to information security practices is the excessive and obsessive implementation of too many technology systems without proper focus on the people aspect. It’s important to have a sense of “shared responsibility” in the organization. Under this mindset, each individual understands what’s happening and embeds the significance of information security into everyday practices to become “cyber savvy”.

Framework for Measuring InfoSec Risk & Compliance

Cybersecurity has become an important agenda for company meetings globally, especially since the onset of COVID-19. Under such circumstances, different organizations may undertake different measures to fight threats in their environment:

• Some companies have pre-determined a framework, procedure or matrix in place to deal with cybersecurity issues
• Other companies do not have such a clear-cut method, but rather prefer to handle challenges depending on the nature of the threat and what capabilities are required to neutralize it
• The most beneficial contributor to either form of combat is dialogue. Companies must have fruitful conversations with c-suite executives and board members about their concerns regarding infosec. Apart from just defensive capabilities, the organization must also ensure that they have a target in mind with respect to current vs future maturity level
• Models and capabilities should be developed by keeping in mind the risk appetite of the company and what that means in terms of dollar value (financial resources)