CIICPD 2023

Critical Incidents in Corporate Leadership: A model event toward diversity, equity and inclusion Dagmar Sieglová, Jan Kotík, Miluše Löffelmannová, Vladimíra Soukupová, Lenka Stejskalová

1. Introduction Innovation is not an issue exclusive to the world of technology, especially as technological development has a direct impact on other areas of society. While technical inventions significantly change the way people communicate, cooperate and work, they also contribute to new knowledge and changing practices in the remaining sectors of society. Findings collected in the fields of sociology, psychology or behavioural economy, for example, show future trends in the area of business practices and the job market. This chapter, therefore, focuses on modern forms of management and leadership in an ever changing globalised world as illustrated in a case study from the practice of a Czech multinational company and places the research on CIs into a corporate context. 1.1 Globalisation and Diversity Globalisation is a phenomenon that affects every individual in their private, social and professional life. First prompted by the development of transportation and communication technologies deep into the 18 th century, the interaction of people, companies and governments at a global level was further accelerated with the introduction of the internet in the 1980s, only to intensify in the early 21 st century times with more advanced communication and mobility through social media and advanced technologies (Brynjolfsson and McAfee, 2014; OECD, 2019, p. 14; Schwab, 2018). Global environmental and health crises of the 2020s that hit societies across the whole planet, further exacerbated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, escalated the unprecedented speed of change. These conditions created international cooperation as a must, hand in hand with a need to seek new forms of management and leadership. The rapidly changing and unstable social environment during the past decades was first described in the 1980s as VUCA by prominent world leaders (Kraaijenbrink, 2018; www.vuca-world.org), meaning the world became volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. In response to today’s challenges, the BANI acronym was recently introduced (WU Executive Academy, 2022) to capture the brittle, anxious, non-linear and incomprehensible nature of the imminent era. It predicts the trends of the future, assuming that the ways in which people and institutions will respond to social change, and the extent to which nations will be able to communicate and cooperate, will also determine the degree of mutual understanding, and the quality of relationships. This is why they will have to learn to deal with the multifaceted diversity created not only by the geographical, national, ethnic, or sociocultural differences to name a few but also by the challenges of the fast-changing world.

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