News Podcast: What business leaders should be doing in 2021 after COVID-19

Podcast: What business leaders should be doing in 2021 after COVID-19

Leadership Management Strategy Faculty

After the seismic shift of COVID-19, business leaders will need to embrace uncertainty and new ways of working to navigate the environment of 2021.

"There are some natural responses to the difficulties of 2020 that perhaps have us thinking about the future as being substantively different to the past, and while that may be true to a degree, there are some things that remain the same," says Vivek Chaudhri.

"Looking through the pandemic looking glass, we've perhaps magnified certain aspects of what leadership calls on but also distorted to some degree some of the natural tendencies that we've talked about for a long time around leadership.

"It's important to just situate 2021 in the context of leadership more generally, and I think one of the things that we need to be aware of is, even before this pandemic hit, that organisations and leaders have been challenged by having to deal with a volatile, uncertain and complex and ambiguous world."

Vivek is an Associate Professor of Strategy and the Academic Director of Executive MBA Programs at Melbourne Business School. He spoke with Yasmin Rupesinghe in the latest episode of the Melbourne Business School Podcast on what leadership will mean moving forward in a post-COVID world.

"The thing that we struggle with most individually and I would say at the level of our organisations is ambiguity – not knowing what is in front of us, not knowing what comes next," Professor Chaudhri says.

"To think about leadership in that realm, I think it's important to revert back to some fundamentals around strategy and the strategic landscape in which you are leading – what's going on in the environment, what's going on in the workplace, what's going on in the regulatory environment, what's changing around us and how do we lead in that space."

Listen to the full episode above, or visit our podcasts page for more.

Vivek Chaudhri holds continuing academic roles at Melbourne Business School, Monash University, Yale University, UCLA and a research position with the Australian Government's Productivity Commission. His research focuses on policy and strategy has been published in leading journals. He also teaches on our Executive and Senior Executive MBA programs. Visit his faculty profile for more information.

Yasmin is a Program Manager on our Executive MBA and Senior Executive MBA programs, and a radio presenter for PBS FM.

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