UAE offers platform to harness skills

The UAE is known to set trends and today the modern boardrooms offer a unique platform where the businesses offer the diversity mix of the youth and wise leadership from reputed business experts.
Focusing on 'Boardroom Leadership for an Agile and Innovative Corporate Strategy' at the IOD conference, Mohammed Al Hashemi, Chairman, UAE Financial Markets and Director- Global Market and Treasury Emirates NBD, UAE, said: "With the UAE being one of the leading countries in innovation, there will undoubtedly be a high amount of pressure on businesses, an excessive burden to achieve business sustainability and offering innovative solutions quite often. The increasing levels of competition amd technological advancement are the key factors which foster businesses to innovate more, achieve resilience and sustainability to successfully compete in the dynamic world."
The UAE offers today a paltform for the youth to harness their entreprenurial skills, said Anil Pant, managing director & ceo, Aptech Limited. "To see effective changes organisations have to invest in the youth and diversity. The firms need to redefine their competitors and instead of looking at competition from within, redefine your competition in a global perspective." 
The session also had presentation from Hisham Farouk, chief executive officer & board member, Grant Thornton International, UAE and Prof. Colin Coulson-Thomas, President, Institute of Management Services, UK. 
"Too many boards interpret building a resilient business as ensuring the survival of current activities rather than creating a more sustainable business model. They view certain technologies as disruptive of existing approaches rather than as enablers of new possibilities. They react rather than initiate and become victims rather than beneficiaries. They also lack a systems perspective and do not see the interconnectedness of events. Transformational leadership is more often mentioned than effectively practiced. It implies transformation from one state to another, during which requirements, situations and priorities can change. Restructuring, re-engineering and transformation can be lucrative for those who advocate them and are hired to pursue them, but as I have set out in a series of reports there are more affordable, quicker and less disruptive routes to high performance organisations," added Prof Coulson-Thomas. 
"Before restructuring, re-engineering or transformation can be completed, original goals may already be out of date. More flexible, imaginative and relevant strategies are required such as reinvention, intelligent adaptation or the adoption of a new model of organisation and operation such as the flexible network organisations."
In a separate session on Disruptive Technologies & Roadmap ahead: Artificial Intelligence (AI) , Blockchain, IoT and Robotics, Iqbal Khan, Programme Director, Blockchain and Innovations, IBM, said: "The UAE is at the forefront of adopting transformative technology and has already embarked on its journey to transform government and business processes as well as citizen services. From AI to blockchain and cloud solutions, the government has been leading by example, encouraging the public and private sector to adopt these disruptive technologies to keep pace with the ever chancing market demands. It is imperative for all organisations to start the testing phase of the technologies to learn how they will need to adapt and where they will face disruptions in their existing process. At IBM, we are already seeing organisations across various industries not only exploring but adopting AI, blockchain and hybrid cloud solutions and are working with a number of them to transform and reshape their digital strategies and roadmaps." - sandhya@khaleejtimes.com