Spectrum Quarterly Update – Summer 2019

Welcome to the Summer 2019 issue of the Spectrum Quarterly. Stay up-to-date with Spectrum’s latest case studies, events and news here: Quarterly Update. If you would like to be added to our mailing list to receive…

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‘I did the right thing’: Richer Sounds boss has no regrets

“I’m doing the right thing because I sleep better at night,” says an exhausted-sounding Julian Richer, after a momentous week in which he won plaudits for handing control of his Richer Sounds business to staff.

For once though, the entrepreneur’s good deeds have cost him sleep. The 60-year-old has been up all night after being engulfed in a media storm after the Guardian revealed he had transferred 60% of his shares to a John Lewis-style trust.

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Non-White Quotas in the Boardroom

Should the Government think about an ambitious plan to bring more BAME minorities, (BAME – Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic, used to refer to members of non-white communities in the UK) into Britain’s boardrooms?

The aim could be for one in five directors of FTSE 100 companies to be from a BAME background. Lord Davies’ review into women in the boardroom, which began in 2011 and has had some success in increasing the numbers of women in senior business roles.

But is this a good thing and do we need quotas?

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Why You Should Create a “Shadow Board” of Younger Employees

A lot of companies struggle with two apparently unrelated problems: disengaged younger workers and a weak response to changing market conditions.

A few companies have tackled both problems at the same time by creating a “shadow board” — a group of non-executive employees that works with senior executives on strategic initiatives.

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Is Your Corporate Culture Cultish?

Each company has its own “culture” – the values and norms that define what is and isn’t appropriate behavior for the organization.  Culture guides how you work, and a healthy one enables companies to attract and retain highly motivated employees and unite them around a common goal, purpose, or cause in pursuit of sustainable performance.

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7 Ways to Set Up a New Hire for Success

No one has a bigger impact on new employees’ success than the managers who hired them. Why? Because more than anyone else the hiring manager understands what his or her people need to accomplish and what it will take — skills, resources, connections — for them to become fully effective.

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2019 TMT Value Creators Report

Strong value creation in the TMT sector benefits the overall economy, as technology and digitization pervade even the most basic industries. Digitization is creating the same sort of fundamental shift that occurred a century ago with electrification, only exponentially faster.

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Why Inclusive Leaders Are Good for Organisations, and How to Become One

Companies increasingly rely on diverse, multidisciplinary teams that combine the collective capabilities of women and men, people of different cultural heritage, and younger and older workers. But simply throwing a mix of people together doesn’t guarantee high performance; it requires inclusive leadership — leadership that assures that all team members feel they are treated respectfully and fairly, are valued and sense that they belong, and are confident and inspired.

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CEO Benchmarking Report

In January of 2019, The Predictive Index™ surveyed 156 CEOs, presidents, and chairpeople. They asked a slew of questions that cut to the heart of what drives them, what their challenges are, and what keeps them up at night. Their answers revealed the patterns of high-performing CEOs and allowed us to explore the executives’ inner thoughts and biggest weaknesses.

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Strong and Weak Technologies

Technologies – from smartphones to cloud to video to the internet – usually arrive in pairs: a “strong” form and a “weak” form. Strong technologies adapt the world to themselves, building from first principles; weak technologies, on the other hand, adapt to the world as it currently exists.

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Spectrum supports the Tech Talent Charter

The Tech Talent Charter (TTC) was founded by a number of organisations across the recruitment, tech and social enterprise fields and was supported in the government’s policy paper on the UK Digital Strategy in March 2017.
The initiative was established to encourage organisations to deliver greater parity amongst their technical staff. The TTC is for organisations of all sizes, from start-ups to large multinationals, spanning all industry sectors from entertainment to banking.

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