Structure often stifles innovation, yet organizations need both to thrive. How can business leaders foster radical innovation while maintaining operational excellence? Listen to this premier entry in our three-part series on innovation to discover how to design an organization that scales as fast as we scale technology.
Michael Arena, Ph.D | Chief Talent Officer
Michael Arena, Ph.D. is the Chief Talent Officer for GM and has played a critical role in the company’s transformation. He launched GM2020, a grassroots initiative designed to enable employees to positively disrupt the way they work, which was highlighted in Fast Company and Fortune Magazine. He is also the author of the groundbreaking research on adaptation that won the 2017 Walker Prize from People + Strategy. As a leading expert in organizational network analysis, his work has been cited in the Wall Street Journal, Chief Executive Magazine, Harvard Business Review, Business Insider and Sloan Management Review. Arena also teaches in Penn’s Masters in Organizational Dynamics program and acts as a design thinking coach within the Stanford School. Prior to GM, he also spent two years as a visiting scientist within MIT’s Media Lab and served as Senior Vice President of Leadership Development at Bank of America. To learn more about how you can foster connections among people, ideas, information, and resources check out Michael’s new book, Adaptive Space: How GM and Other Companies are Positively Disrupting Themselves and Transforming into Agile Organizations.
Safi Bachall
Safi Bahcall is a second-generation physicist (the son of two astrophysicists) and a biotech entrepreneur. He received his BA summa cum laude from Harvard and his PhD from Stanford. After working for three years as a consultant for McKinsey, he co-founded a biotechnology company developing new drugs for cancer (which led him to be profiled by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker). He led its IPO and served as its CEO for 13 years. In 2008, he was named E&Y New England Biotechnology Entrepreneur of the Year. In 2011, he worked with the president's council of science advisors (PCAST) on the future of national research. He lives with his wife and two children in Cambridge, MA. Loonshots is his first book.
Salim Ismail
Salim Ismail, co-author of Exponential Organizations, joins the Talent Angle to discuss the lessons that business leaders can learn from the new breed of companies that are scaling 10 times faster than established organizational structures. Exponential organizations leverage assets like community, big data, algorithms, and new technology to rethink the way traditional companies scale. Salim suggests ways by which established organizations built for scarcity can disrupt their company’s current null state and usher their business into an age of abundance.
Hosted by: Scott Engler
The Gartner Talent Angle podcast is a new and exciting approach to talent management. Every month, we’ll talk with those on the forefront of HR innovation — innovators, academics, HR professionals, economists, coaches — to explore the most interesting and cutting-edge ideas in the world of HR and people development. Join us as we reimagine talent.
Thank you for listening to Gartner Talent Angle. Please let us know how we did by giving us a review on our iTunes page.
Gartner is an impartial, independent analyst of the Information Technology industry. All content provided by other speakers is expressly the views of those speakers and their enterprises. The information should not be construed as a Gartner endorsement of said enterprise’s products or services.
