Tag: 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR)

With the large-scale advent of the 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR), the world is in constant flux. This has been exacerbated by the fallout of COVID-19. To be relevant in the next few decades, any business that wants to develop their leadership cadres will have to embrace drastic transformations in their approach to every area of leadership formalisation, modelling, training and development.

As we navigate the turmoil and disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, all eyes are on keeping each other safe while preparing for a post-pandemic world. The custodians of this post-pandemic future are young people – and when one considers that the official unemployment rate for people under 35 in South Africa is 46.3%, the urgency of meaningful and sustained youth empowerment cannot be understated.

The processing of personal data has become increasingly valuable and lucrative for businesses. It offers opportunities for economic growth, social advancement, and research. However, it can also pose risks to the rights of individuals, their basic human rights.

Over the last few decades, technology has slowly shaped our world into one our grandparents wouldn’t recognise. Some of that change has been about the gadgets in our homes and in our pockets. Much else has been driven by researchers and scientists using powerful supercomputers to answer life‑changing questions and make ground-breaking discoveries in life sciences, physics, chemistry, and astronomy.

Failure to implement effective compliance and accountability systems is costing the public sector dearly and making supply chains fertile ground for corruption. If the South African government is serious about stopping the rot, strict measures need to be introduced in state departments and safeguards against cyberattacks significantly improved. 

If businesses have learned one thing during the pandemic it is that resilience, rather than being a tactic to respond to crisis, is a discipline cultivated over time. Today, to not have a digital strategy is to not have a strategy. To build resilience at work, organisations need to start thinking about virtual and remote models, provision of tools that enable collaboration from anywhere, and strategies to look after their peoples’ mental health and wellbeing.

The Protection of Personal Information Act (POPI) is a crucial statute for organisations to get right. Not only because the 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR) is all about data and information but also because a breach of the POPI Act could result in imprisonment and fines.

Broad-based Black Economic Empowerment (B-BBEE) is a prerequisite for doing business in South Africa, and training forms a significant portion of the B-BBEE scorecard. However, training is also critical to help address the skills shortage in the country that is only growing as we move into the 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR).

We began 2020 with the understanding that we were in the 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR). As we grappled with what that means for us as leaders, what changes we would need to make, and what training our employees would need, we were hit with the global pandemic that COVID-19 brought.

Although the rise of COVID-19 presented many challenges to our country in the year 2020, it stimulated the growth of technological innovations that we can build on to the effects on how we do business, how we trade, how we work, how we produce goods, how we learn, how we seek medical services and how we entertain ourselves in 2021.