Costas Markides

Keynote by Speaker Costas Markides

From Strategy Formulation to Strategy Execution: Why Clever People Make Silly Mistakes

In this session, we will explore why bad things happen to good people during the execution stage of strategy. Factors to consider include:

• Time pressures (that shift our priorities).
• The incentives in the system that distort behaviors.
• Personal attitudes.
• Our (biased) thinking that is governed by assumptions and pre-conceived notions that we are not even aware of.
• Judgements that are clouded by reasoning and cognitive biases.
• Team dynamics that go terribly wrong!
• Employees that are not committed to what we aspire to achieve.
• Inter-dependencies in the company which means that doing the right thing for our unit or department does not mean it is the right thing for the whole organization.
• Time delays that prevent us from seeing that we are to blame for our mistakes.
• All kinds of non-rational and non-economic reasons such as politics, bad feelings, etc. that influence our decisions.

Keynote by Speaker Costas Markides

Strategic Innovation: How to Win by Breaking the Rules

• In recent years, there have been many calls for companies to break the rules and become industry revolutionaries.
• But what exactly is breaking the rules? And how can a company do it successfully, especially if it already has a successful business to run?
• Is it viable to play two games at the same time? How?
• Furthermore, does it always make sense for a company to break the rules or should other considerations come into play? And what if somebody else breaks the rules first in one’s industry?
• How then can a company respond to the innovator?
• These are all questions that I shall attempt to answer in this speech.

Keynote by Speaker Costas Markides

From Knowing to Doing: How to get the right behaviors out of people

• It is now well established in psychology that just because an individual knows something (and agrees with it) doesn’t mean that he/she will do it.
• This “knowing-doing” gap is one of the biggest “diseases” in organizations.
• This presentation will explore the main reasons for this “disease” and propose ways to overcome it.
• The emphasis will be on what information security professionals (as individuals) need to do to get everybody in their organization to behave in ways that enhances information security.

Keynote by Speaker Costas Markides

 Selling Ideas: Getting your Board to adopt your ideas

• People often complain that despite coming up with wonderful ideas, their organization is too bureaucratic or too slow to adopt them.
• It rarely crosses their mind that the reason for the lack of adoption may not be the organization but them!
• Often, ideas do not get implemented because the person with the idea failed to “sell” it to their superiors.
• Even the best of ideas will fail unless someone “pushes” them in the organization to get them properly implemented. But who should be doing the pushing? And how?
• There is a lot of academic evidence that suggests answers to these questions.
• This presentation will explore how ideas diffuse in organizations (and societies) and what that implies for managers.
• Real examples will be provided to highlight the points made.

Keynote by Speaker Costas Markides

Every Crisis Has An Opportunity

• The companies that survive in difficult times are not the ones that look at the crisis as a threat; and are not the ones that look at it as an opportunity.
• They are the ones that look at it as both a threat and an opportunity (I will explain what this means and why it is so important).

Keynote by Speaker Costas Markides

How to make your Organisations more Innovative

• In today’s hyper competitive world, innovation is the only source of competitive advantage.
• Organisations must continuously innovate to stay one step ahead of competition. But innovation is not just creativity; and it is not just the province of top management.
• For innovation to become a source of competitive advantage, it must be institutionalized so that it takes place anywhere and at anytime in the organisation.
• How to institutionalize innovation is a real challenge for companies and this presentation will provide insights on how to do it.
• Top management has a key role to play in this and we will also explore how the top people can set the right example in the organisation.
• Real life examples will be provided to support the generalisations made.