could you please use the reading lis provided as referrences as well as others
LPC EMTH6013 SUMMER 2019 COURSEWORK BRIEF EMTH6013 Emerging Themes Summer 2019 Coursework Brief First-sit Assignment Handout: [Time (am/pm), Date Month Year] Access via GSM Learn Deadline for Submission: 2pm, Thursday, 22nd August, 2019 Submit this coursework through the Student Portal with a Turn-it-in Report Word Limit: 3000 (Plus or minus 10%) Learning outcomes assessed: At the end of the module students will be expected to be able to: 1. Demonstrate a critical understanding of emerging themes as informed by research and the marketplace. 2. Critically analyse evolving trends in business management in order to provide robust strategic solutions to organisations. 3. Proactively source and apply research to inform operational and strategic decisions in different organisational contexts. 4. Critically evaluate a range of alternative courses of action in order to solve problems and implement decisions which result in achievable and appropriately viable outcomes for specific organisations. This Assignment is worth 100% of the total marks for this module. EMTH6013 SUMMER 2019 COURSEWORK BRIEF GSM LONDON Page 2 of 15 Assignment Instructions Please read carefully • Carefully read the module handbook, the marking criteria and the grade descriptors. Academic Misconduct You are responsible for ensuring you understand the policy and regulations about academic misconduct. You must: • Complete this work alone except where required or allowed by this assignment briefing paper and ensure it has not been written or composed by or with the assistance of any other person. • Make sure all sentences or passages quoted from other people’s work in this assignment (with or without trivial changes) are in quotation marks, and are specifically acknowledged by reference to the author, work and page. EMTH6013 SUMMER 2019 COURSEWORK BRIEF GSM LONDON Page 3 of 15 Blank EMTH6013 SUMMER 2019 COURSEWORK BRIEF GSM LONDON Page 4 of 15 ASSIGNMENT Background The business environment is under constant change - new economic and industrial policies; advancement in technology; shift in focus in political concerns; globalisation and; matters of equalities, inclusion and diversity - amongst others, are markedly shaping the ways in which organisations have to transform themselves in order to maintain competitive advantage and remain sustainable. Peter Schwartz is a renowned corporate futurist who pioneered the use of scenario planning at oil giant Shell in the 1980s. The article below presents a scenario of how our world has emerged to date and its possible future outlook. The Assignment Article: Scenario planning in Silicon Valley Peter Schwartz predicted the future for Shell - and the movie Minority By Adam Gale inShare Published: 04 Oct 2018 There’s a famous scene in the film Minority Report, where Tom Cruise goes shopping. The store scans his retinas as he enters, and the holographic sales assistants start calling him by name, offering personalised suggestions and advertisements. Parts of that scenario are already coming true. Down the road in central San Francisco, there’s a store, open to the public, called Standard Market that uses facial recognition technology to create a frictionless shopping experience – no cashier, no queues. Similar experiments have already been run by Amazon at its Seattle campus and Alibaba at its HQ in Huangzhou. javascript:void(0); EMTH6013 SUMMER 2019 COURSEWORK BRIEF GSM LONDON Page 5 of 15 ‘Our goal when we wrote Minority Report was that a decade from then, people would say "that’s just like in Minority Report!". They’re still saying it.' Peter Schwartz was approached to help create a plausible future setting for the film because of his long career as a corporate futurist – in the 1980s, he pioneered the use of scenario planning at oil giant Shell. Originally a military technique, scenario planning involves creating several plausible possibilities for the future based on assessing different combinations of known and unknown variables. For each, a plan is made; the business’s long term strategy will correspond to the most likely outcome, but with contingencies for the others and the flexibility to move between them as events unfold. It’s a way both of challenging false certainties and of avoiding being paralysed by uncertainty. This is the essence of scenario planning. The whole process, when done well, is designed to disconnect a company from the received wisdom about trends, which often tend to assume the future will be like the immediate past. Schwartz now works as senior vice president for strategic planning at the rapidly growing US software-as-a-service firm Salesforce where, he admits, the scenarios look rather different. ‘When I was at Shell, I was thinking 30, 40, even 50 years ahead. In the high tech industry, the time frame is radically shorter, but it doesn’t mean the uncertainty is less. I think of it as a radically changing landscape you’re trying to navigate. You want to make sure you see the features of that landscape before they come out of the fog.’ A GLIMPSE INTO THE FUTURE So what does Schwartz see coming out of the fog next? Fortunately, the Minority Report futurist doesn’t anticipate the rise of a Terminator-style artificial general intelligence – ‘that’s just bad science fiction’ – but he has high expectations of more mundane machine learning. ‘It’s highly consequential, very useful and it’s here and now. The example I like to use is a truck driver. Everyone’s worried they’ll lose their jobs – they won’t. First of all, we’ll need more truck driving in the Amazon world, but the truck driver of tomorrow won’t be like the truck driver of today,’ Schwartz explains. The future of truck drivers can already be seen in US Air Force drones. These fly on autopilot until they get close to their mission, when a pilot behind a computer screen http://www.managementtoday.co.uk/square-uncertainty-leader/leadership-lessons/article/1384604 http://www.managementtoday.co.uk/will-ai-us-redundant/future-business/article/1431951 http://www.managementtoday.co.uk/will-ai-us-redundant/future-business/article/1431951 EMTH6013 SUMMER 2019 COURSEWORK BRIEF GSM LONDON Page 6 of 15 half way across the world takes over. ‘The driver of tomorrow will do the hard part, getting the truck through the streets of London to the M4, then taking it over again when it gets to Bristol. They’ll be driving not one but five trucks. It’s hyper productive, automated when best for automation, then using human skills in the city.’ Another continuing trend is the rising importance of the personal data economy. The idea that data is the oil of the 21st century may sound daunting to previously analogue businesses, given who’ll be their competition (‘Amazon is the Saudi Arabia of data’), but there are big opportunities here too. Data doesn’t always have to be big, for a start. The most important data in many cases are the kind that support people, rather than train AI. Schwarz points to US retailer Target as one of the best examples of breaking the boundaries between digital and physical.