Agility Unleashed

Welcome to “Agility Unleashed”, brought to you by Sage – a series of podcasts which helps Britain’s businesses pick their way out of the pandemic. Each week we look from the past to the future through the eyes of a single business function; with advice from real businesses and technology experts. This week it’s the Chief Operating Officer or COO.

The COO isn’t just the Chief Executive’s right hand person – the COO’s job is to keep the train on the tracks. They turn ideas and strategies into a scaled up operation – and they make business-as-usual happen every day. So when a crisis comes along and business-as-usual doesn’t happen every day, it’s the COO who steps up. Remote working? Refactoring production lines? Changing business models or just dealing with complexity? Our chief Operating Officer deals with it all; and in this show, we’ll find out how and what’s next.

Even pre-pandemic, the role of the CFO was changing. As businesses discover a new BAU, it’s clear that the CFO is juggling more than ever before: they are curators of knowledge, managers of governance and compliance, data scientists and now realtime business strategists, too. Plus they need plenty of soft skills: negotiation, management and critical thinking, too. In this podcast we’ll look at the increasing range of skills which CFOs will need in order to help rebuild their businesses – and the dramatically more important role they typically play: as our guests agree, it’s an exciting time to be a CFO.

This is “Agility Unleashed”, brought to you by Sage – a series of podcasts to help Britain’s businesses pick their way out of the pandemic. Each week we take a look forward through the eyes of a single business function; and in this show, it’s the Chief Human Resources Officer or CHRO.

Furloughing staff, working from home, employee engagement in uncertain times and handling the HR implications of pivoting the business model – all these are challenges which fall squarely on the CHRO’s shoulders.

We’ll take a look at them in the company of a team of business and technology experts. I’m joined by Karen Morris-Lanz, HR Director of Digital and Systems Transformation at University of Warwick; David Kelly, EMEA General Manager at Workforce Management solution, Deputy, and Mark Robinson, co-founder and CEO of Kimble, the professional services software suite.

And because we like to be cutting edge, even in lockdown, we recorded this entire podcast in Virtual Reality – with all my guests mingling on a virtual sofa, even though they were stuck in their living rooms. You can see some clips of the VR experience in the accompanying video. One caveat: it does mean the sound quality is occasionally glitchy, but it’s no worse than a Zoom call – and let’s face it, every HR professional has done plenty of those recently!

Ensuring your investors are happy, looking after your staff and creating and leading the business strategy are all areas which fall squarely on the CEO’s shoulders. In this episode we are looking at these areas with a number of business and technology experts. We are joined by Cyril Journoux, CEO at PCL Ceramics, Sinead McHale, CEO at Satago, Richard Youngman, MD at Sicon and Sage’s own EVP and Managing Director UK&I, Paul Struthers gives his viewpoint on the challenges the CEO has faced this past year.