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Strategy and Change

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Strategy and Change

Finding Opportunity in Disruption Through Insight, Choice, and Risk

Wiley,

15 min read
7 take-aways
Audio & text

What's inside?

With disruption and volatility as the norm, the world needs strategic leadership.

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Editorial Rating

8

getAbstract Rating

  • Comprehensive
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Recommendation

Because leaders face complicated global challenges – including “climate change, disease, fiscal meltdowns, and tech disruption” – they must have a strategic command of decision-making, systems thinking, and risk management. Aon EVP Aaron K. Olson and professor Ward Ching, writing with Aon risk management expert Richard Waterer and leadership consultant B. Keith Simerson, explain that leaders must be wise, forward looking, and alert in every area as they navigate from goal-setting to tactical action. In this volatile world, companies need savvy thinkers not only at the top, but throughout their organizations. To that end, the authors explain how leaders at “all levels can drive strategic change.”

Summary

Disruptive change shapes organizational decision-making.

The world is changing, sometimes dramatically, and technology is pivotal to many of those changes. When the United States dropped the first atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945, the world changed as a result of war, science, and technology. The world changed again in July 1969 when US astronaut Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, the culmination of multiple scientific and technological breakthroughs.

Today, most people are acutely aware of how technology is continually changing their work and their world. Such change is disruptive, but it also opens new opportunities – all accelerated by technology.

As the speed of disruptive change accelerates, business policymakers must adapt their decision-making to account for its potential future impact. Leaders can’t assume that the way they made decisions in the past will remain valid. Increasingly, they will come to rely on data-driven analysis and artificial intelligence (AI). Technological shifts – such as the development of powerful, fast mobile computing and the broad availability of generative AI – compound the speed and...

About the Authors

Aon Executive Vice President Aaron K. Olson and strategic leadership consultant B. Keith Simerson are adjunct faculty members at Northwestern University. Ward Ching is an adjunct professor of Risk Management at the University of Southern California Marshall Business School. Richard Waterer is Aon's Global Risk Consulting Leader. Olson and Simerson are also the co-authors of Leading with Strategic Thinking: Four Ways Effective Leaders Gain Insight, Drive Change, and Get Results

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