Athens
November 25, 2009
Hilton Athens Hotel
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The event supports the SOS Children's Villages in Greece |
On November 25, KPMG’s 8th consecutive annual “Management Event” took place at the Hilton Athens Hotel. This year’s key-note speaker was London Business School professor and author of the best seller Why Good Companies Go Bad Donald Sull.
This one-day event with Professor Sull belongs to the very successful series of annual events with leading personalities that KPMG introduced in Greece in 2003. Since then, KPMG has organized the following events: Michael Porter on Strategy, Henry Mintzberg on Management, Philip Kotler on Marketing, Jack Welch on Leadership, Rosabeth Moss Kanter on Sustained Success, Ram Charan on Profitable Growth, and, finally, the 2008 Vijay Govindarajan on Innovation.
Donald Sull, described by Fortune Magazine as one of the “ten new gurus one should know”, presented a highly interactive program composed of four sessions dedicated to the various opportunities that companies often miss within the turbulence and unpredictability of financial markets. The interactivity of professor Sull’s presentations was enhanced by the involvement of participants in the discussion, and a new electronic live-voting system that KPMG implemented during the event. The results of the voting are indicative of the trends in the Greek market and give valuable information about the biggest challenges faced within companies in Greece.
Voting Results
During the day’s discussions and through the live-voting system, the following results appeared.
- The two “biggest obstacles to making sense in our organizations” are that our leaders dominate discussions rather than listening (27%) and that we often display a premature bias for action (25%).
- The two “biggest obstacles to making choices in our organizations” are that we proliferate priorities (27%) and that we agree on generalities but fail to discuss disagreements in detail (25%).
- The two “biggest obstacles to making it happen in our organizations” are that people are not held accountable for delivering on their commitments (27%) and that people keep busy with activity without understanding why it matters (24%). Another 21% “feel compelled to say yes to every request, even when they know they cannot deliver”.
- The three top “obstacles to making revisions in our organizations” are that we disregard, ignore, or undermine data that does not support our assumptions (23%), we make revisions infrequently, or not at all (23%), and discussions about what did not work degenerate into exercise of assigning blame (23%).
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Please click on the chart to the left to see all results from the vote. |
The above results converge with those of executives in Europe and the US.
Professor Sull during his presentation
From left to right: Peggy Velliotou, Partner, KPMG, Marios T. Kyriacou, Senior Partner, KPMG, Professor Donald Sull, and Vangelis Apostolakis, Partner in Charge of Advisory, KPMG.