About this keynote
Firstly, thank you to Smaranda and Dragos, the CEO of Upgrade 100 and IQ Digital, for asking me to be this year’s keynote in Brasov, Romania, three years on since my last in person keynote with them before the pandemic.
With this year’s summit held in front of 300 or so local entrepreneurs and CEO’s from companies such as BCR and Vodafone we covered themes including digital transformation, startup nation, and of course the future. With these in mind I covered all the summit’s key themes in one keynote and showed the participants how they could “Win the Future” by helping them envision it, and then giving them the critical thinking and tools they need to understand it, develop world class business strategies and cultures, build, and lead it.
While I’m not normally as blatant with my messaging as I was during this keynote I felt that this was an appropriate time for me to share some of the insights and knowledge I normally share behind closed doors with the boards of organisations such as Coca Cola, PepsiCo, Samsung, Visa, and others, that they’ve used for years now to sharpen their own competitive saws and enter into new markets.
From giving the audience insights into multiple disruptive industry shifts, and how they can be used to undermine incumbents’ status quos, to giving them step by step instructions on how they explore the future, model it, and develop actionable strategies to lead it, I covered a lot in a short space of time. Then, once the session was over, I went straight to a panel session to discuss how organisations such as Vodafone can use these insights to disrupt their own businesses and industries in Romania and beyond.
