The fourth Future of Work (FoW) Research Consortium launched last Friday [28 September] in London.

Led by London Business Schools’ professor Lynda Gratton and bringing together around 200 executives from 36 global organisations, the consortium aims to look at how businesses need to evolve to face future global challenges by bridging the gap between academia and business practice.

At the event, attended by more than 70 executives from around the world, Gratton told the audience that the launch was “the beginning, not the end” and aimed to “give headline ideas of what we should be talking about”.

Building on research from previous years, Gratton told the consortium three themes would be studied in detail: future talent, organisational agility, and business & society.

Gratton highlighted the challenge of attracting talent from the emerging markets, as well as the emergence of talent ecosystems – clusters of skill development in one particular area – as just the beginning of a “global rebalancing”. “Where do companies have to go to find these areas of talent?” she asked. “We have found that in order to attract them, it’s vital that you have a global culture instead of ‘localising’ in your organisation.” 

With brand appeal becoming more global, she emphasised the importance of not being too sensitive to local cultures: “HR practices need to be globalised.”

Organisational agility was vital, Gratton said, as the role of leadership was changing particularly fast. She believed leadership needs to act “more as a collective activity, not as an individual”. She continued: “There is a glaring lack of experimentation in big organisations, and even when experiments are happening, the mobilisation and scaling generally aren’t well developed. This lack of agility is a risk to major organsiations.”

Finally, Gratton predicted that business & society would be the biggest issue and would hit the corporate agenda as soon as next year: “It will be the biggest topic on the corporate agenda because it makes business sense. Business has a major role to play in contributing to solving the three major global challenges: poverty, youth unemployment and climate change.”

Member organisations in FoW 4 include: Accenture, Arla Foods, Barclays, BT Group, Bupa, Cisco, Diageo, John Lewis, KCOM Group, KPMG, ManpowerGroup, Novartis, Novo Nordisk, O2 Telefónica, Oman Oil, Pepsico, PwC, Randstad, RBS, RSA Insurance Group, Save the Children, Shell, Standard Bank, Tata Consultancy Services, Unilever, Vodafone and Volvo.