Thought Leadership | Industrial

Discussion Highlights from Egon Zehnder’s 7th Annual CEO Breakfast at CERAWeek 2018.

As a steadily-growing trillion-dollar economy with a youthful, tech-savvy population, Indonesia is at once blessed with big-market opportunities and challenged by rapidly-changing customer expectations and the competitive global landscape.

With the job market heating up and the unemployment rate at a new low, there are millions of jobs waiting for the right people to fill them. This is great news for employees, but how can management retain top talent and keep high performers from jumping ship?

With the job market heating up and the unemployment rate at a new low, there are millions of jobs waiting for the right people to fill them. This is great news for employees, but how can management retain top talent and keep high performers from jumping ship?

The combination of 3G Capital’s ongoing acquisitions, margin pressure from discounters like Aldi and Lidl and the expectations of activist investors has thrown consumer packaged goods companies in the food space squarely on the defensive. Most have reacted by going into cost-cutting mode, slashing entire layers of marketing and R&D talent from their organizations.

Given the growing danger of being left behind and commoditized by advancing technology, we asked ten senior leaders in Construction, Agriculture and Mining Equipment how their strategies are adapting.

In 2013, Carol SingletonSlade, Steve Goodman, Trent Aulbaugh and Roger Aguirre of Egon Zehnder’s Global Energy Practice warned of the dire need for identifying and training a new generation of qualified and prepared executives who are ready and willing to lead oil and gas companies. Four years later, as Chevron’s chief executive John Watson is set to step down, his likely replacement is a representation of this “new leadership for a changing oil world.”

In recent years oil and gas companies have applied innovative technologies to make discoveries of vast new hydrocarbon resources. If only it were that easy for them to deal with a dire challenge above ground: identifying and training a new generation of qualified and prepared executives who are ready and willing to lead oil and gas companies at this pivotal time in the industry’s history.

Digital transformation is driving demand for business engineers, reports the German daily Main-Echo. “Business engineers are particularly relevant today because they straddle two worlds,” explains Thorsten Gerhard, Egon Zehnder’s Industrial Practice Leader.

For decades, search firms in India and around the world have built their businesses on C-suite placements. But with the industry being disrupted by social networks and a complex hiring environment, business models are changing and search firms and management consultancies are now offering more value-added services.

Technology is transforming the industrial sector, bringing dramatic change in everything from time to market to customization. Realizing these benefits, however, requires organizations to undergo transformational change. But who, exactly, is going to make that change happen?

In 2016, nearly 200 transactions, with a value of more than $90 billion, took place in the chemical industry, and 2017 may well surpass that pace. But what are the implications of having these transactions play such a large role in reshaping the industry?