Helping people and organizations thrive in increasingly disruptive times.
UK
Author and advisor on disruption, transformation, cognition and super-resilience
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“…Even by video conference, Ade kept the audience captive with lots of note taking and it also provoked a lot of discussion after the event. One of the most compelling keynote speakers that we have had in the MED region.”
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About Ade
Keynote
Video
Ade McCormack is the founder of the Intelligent Leadership Hub. He has been described as an ‘inspiring slap in the face’ and ‘delightfully bracing’.
If coping with disruption is a central theme to your event, then Ade would make an ideal opening keynoter. His presentations make the case for change in an increasingly disrupted world. His message is one of hope for both people and the planet. He weaves in disciplines, including evolutionary biology, neuroscience, anthropology and human performance science. He introduces new lenses through which to view the future, including, super resilience, cognitive athletes, synthetic certainty and the cognitive gymnasium.
Ade is the person to engage if you want to make the case for radical change and you want to achieve that by getting the best rather than the most from your people.
Speaker Ade McCormack is focused on helping people, businesses and societies thrive in increasingly disruptive times. He is a former technologist who today advises leaders on how to build super-resilient organizations. Ade McCormack combines deep insights into what is driving the need for personal, organizational and societal transformation with the ability to relate it in a manner that both leaders and their people can act upon.Speaker Ade McCormack’s work has taken him to 40 countries working with the world’s most recognized brands across many sectors. He is a former Financial Times columnist on digital leadership, has lectured at MIT Sloan School of Management on that theme and today works with the University of Cambridge at
the sharp end of executive education. Ade is also a strategic advisor in both the public and private sector.
Ade has written six books on digital matters and has a ‘bits to boardroom’ understanding of the issues, given his past life in IT and astrophysics. One of his books, ‘The e-Skills Manifesto: A Call to Arms’ was written for the European Commission.
See keynotes with Ade McCormackCentralized leadership and treating the workers as cogs in the machine are just two characteristics of the industrial era factory model. A model that many established organizations continue to embrace.
Consequently their response to threats and opportunities is somewhat arthritic and potentially fatal. Hence the urgent need for transformation.
Ironically, new technologies are stimulating the need for people as innovation cannot be elicited from an algorithm or robot. So the organization needs to be reengineered around the talent.
Audience takeaways:
The world is becoming increasingly uncertain and volatile. Organizations need to evolve from inert soulless factories to living, sensing, opportunistic organisms. Today it is less about winning and more
about ‘staying in the game’. But how can organizations transform given that many are optimized for less volatile times?
Audience takeaways:
Accelerating market uncertainty is making it increasingly difficult to achieve lasting success. For sustained performance going forward, leaders must press the reset button NOW to unlearn the old ways of thinking and learn how to navigate their organisation through what is an increasingly unknowable environment.
In this session, you will:
Centralised leadership and treating the workers as cogs in the machine are just two characteristics of the industrial era factory model. A model that many established organisations continue to embrace.
Consequently their response to threats and opportunities is somewhat arthritic and potentially fatal.
We need to harness the cognitive capacity of our people. This is a largely untapped asset. Cognition
lies at the heart of being human. We sense. We decide. We act. Organisations similarly need to
behave like living organisms.
Audience takeaways:
Industrial era leadership was straightforward. Build a factory around an idea and continuously refine the model by minimizing failure and improving efficiency. The problem is today that no amount of process refinement will offset the macro-environmental forces that are increasingly bearing down on the organization.
This requires a new type of leader. One that is comfortable with ambiguity and increasing uncertainty. Post-industrial era leaders know that innovation trumps process and they recognize
that failure is a critical part of the new model.
Audience takeaways:
In a world where dominance or competitive advantage are transient at best, businesses need to make innovation central to their model. Increasingly fickle customers, coupled with markets emerging and dying overnight, will force the pace of innovation.
Innovation cannot be extracted from an algorithm or a robot, people are key. Thus smart organizations are discarding the factory model of the industrial era, where the worker was simply a cog in the machine, to one that turns human cognition into market-pleasing innovation.
Audience takeaways:
Disruption is on the increase. There is no post-covid, new normal or next normal. Abnormal and
increasing disruption is the backdrop to our lives going forward. Simply throwing new technology at
your old business model will not prepare it for what is an unknowable future.
Audience takeaways:
Watch speaker Ade McCormack in action
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